Greatest political thriller of the day

More than a decade ago, the American writer Neal Gabler published Life: the Movie, arguing that events of the greatest moment from news to high politics had come to be experienced as mass entertainment, that we followed moments of real life as if they were merely a story played out before us, complying with an unseen script.

Even before Rupert and James Murdoch appeared before a Commons committee, the hacking saga had acquired that same quality. People admit to being hooked on the story, watching the nightly news as if it were another episode on a DVD boxed set of the latest acclaimed TV drama.

If anything, the phone-hacking story has suffered from being a tad over the top, cramming too much action, and too many eye-popping characters, into too little time. Most dramatists would be happy with a plot that unmasked skulduggery inside the world's most powerful media organisation. That would be plenty. But this one has taken in the Metropolitan police, felling the commissioner and one of his most senior lieutenants, and seems to be getting ever closer to Downing Street.

Tuesday saw a climax of sorts, albeit with a set-piece scene that seemed to have been written for the stage, rather than TV. Facing an inquisitorial panel of MPs was a media mogul once deemed omnipotent.

So yes, we had a global corporate titan forced to explain himself. But we also had a young wife in a bright pink jacket, nervously watchful and protective of her much older husband. The video of her right hook on the foam-pie assassin was played for laughs in some TV coverage, but it looked like an eruption of tension that had been bottled up for nearly three hours.

Wendi Deng won plaudits, even from her husband's most dogged accusers: she was the Tiger Mother, defending her man.

Sympathy vote

More epic still, almost Shakespearean, was the dynamic between father and son: Rupert placing his hand on his son's arm, as he sought to interrupt; James, anxiously watching his father floundering, desperately trying to intervene and take over.

The effect of all this was, incredibly, to make Murdoch, for decades the villain of left-leaning nightmares, a figure of vulnerability, even pity. By the end, the MPs were praising the old man's guts for turning up. But that may not cut much ice with News Corp investors: indeed, what we may have witnessed in the cramped Wilson room of Portcullis House was the last hurrah of the senior Murdoch and the de facto transition to his son, James.

If Murdoch lost his power to scare, then what remained of the reputation of the Metropolitan police was pushed further into the mire. Each one of the Met trio who appeared sought to shove the blame onto the desk of a colleague claiming that they had barely done anything wrong.

The revelation that 10 of the Met's 45 press officers were ex-employees of News International, coupled with the utterly casual way in which Neil Wallis, the former deputy editor of the News of the World, was hired, only confirmed that Scotland Yard and the newspaper group had become so intertwined, the force had come to resemble News International's security wing.

As for the politicians, it was a good day for parliament feeling its strength as if for the first time. Now that British MPs have grilled the powerful before the gaze of the world's media as their US congressional counterparts have done for years, they might develop a taste for it. If they do, they will need to sharpen up their interrogation skills.

Victory for parliament

Tom Watson delivered a masterclass, asking short, precise questions that bamboozled Murdoch utterly. But too many of the rest were vague and general, allowing James to regurgitate the Harvard Business School textbook and run out the clock.

Which brings us to the man not there but whose fate may depend on these events. The most excitable commentators and interestingly — these have been Conservative bloggers rather than Guardian types — have wondered if this crisis could end with the toppling of British Prime Minister David Cameron.

My own view remains sceptical: what we know so far certainly damages Cameron, making him guilty of extremely poor judgment in hiring a man who had to quit the News of the World over hacking, but it does not yet threaten his survival.

That said, two developments could hurt him very badly. The first was the revelation that Wallis had acted as an informal adviser to Andy Coulson even once Coulson was installed at Cameron's side. That means that the News of the World was not in Coulson's past, as Cameron has always insisted, but that the connection lingered.

Now everyone will want to know what advice Wallis gave: did he pass on valuable information on Labour that had been acquired illegally? If he did, that would surely be terminal for Cameron. Nor does the e-mail exchange between his chief of staff and the Met, help. It suggests a degree of collusion between the Met and Downing Street that, even if designed to keep the premier safely out of the loop, looks suspect.

The Camerons spent a recent holiday watching DVDs of the Danish political drama, The Killing. The prime minister won't feel like watching it now: he'll feel he's living it instead.