You know the liberating feeling when someone unpopular leaves the room and everyone breathes a sigh of relief before openly discussing how much they dislike them? I don't. What's it like? What do people say? I only ever catch the odd whisper as the door shuts behind me. I'd love to hear the full conversation. Fortunately, watching Britain's politicians queue up to denounce Rupert Murdoch has given me a taste of how such talk might play out.
A few weeks ago, Murdoch, or rather the more savage tendencies of the press as a whole, represented God. Fear of God isn't always a bad thing in itself, if it keeps you on the straight and narrow – but politicians behaved like medieval villagers who didn't just believe in Him, but quaked at the mere suggestion of a glimmer of a whisper of His name. You must never anger God. God wields immense power. God can hear everything you say. You must worship God, and please Him, or He will destroy you. For God controls the sun, which may shine upon you, or singe you to a Kinnock. Soon he will control the entire sky.
Furthermore, like all mere humans, you are weak. And God knows you have sinned. Chances are he even has long-lens photographs to prove it. But even as he chooses to smite you, God is merciful. You can do this the easy way or the hard way. Confess your sins in an exclusive double-page interview, or face the torments of hell. Have you seen what happens in hell? It isn't pretty. Rows of the damned having buckets of molten shit poured over their heads by someone who looks a bit like Kelvin MacKenzie, for eternity.
But then suddenly everything changed. The revelations over the hacking of grieving relatives' voicemails were the equivalent of a tornado ripping through an orphanage. "What kind of God would allow such a thing?" asked the villagers, wading through the aftermath. And they started to suspect He didn't exist.
They thought about the hours and days they'd spent in church, saying their prayers, rocking on their knees, whipping themselves with knotted rope, or flying round the world to address one of God's conferences, and they grew angry.
One by one they stood up to decry God. "He's a sod," said one. "No he's not, he's a monster," said another. Eventually they formed the consensus view that he was a sodmonster.
These protests grew so loud, God abandoned his bid to command the sky, issued personal apologies, and even seemed to wither – to physically wither before our very eyes, a bit like Gollum. (Although Gollum was never snapped in the back of a car in a baseball cap and running shorts, cocking his leg slightly in an apparent bid to stop one of his nuts dangling free, which is a crying shame.)
The danger now is that the villagers, shorn of their belief in God, might abandon their fear of divine retribution altogether, muzzle the churches, and grow hopelessly decadent. I realise as I type this that I don't fully understand my own metaphor any more. So here's a new one: the ceaseless parade of MPs openly disparaging everything they used to slavishly revere has left recent news coverage resembling the finale of the science-fiction movie They Live, in which a perception-altering alien transmitter is destroyed and humankind suddenly awakens from a decades-long trance. (Mind you, that's nothing: one day a politician will launch an open and sustained assault on the Daily Mail, which will probably culminate in scenes identical to the opening of the ark of the covenant at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.)
Likening the saga to an existing movie seems fitting, given the online speculation regarding who'll play who when it inevitably becomes a 180-minute Bafta-winning motion picture – Nicole Kidman as Rebekah Brooks, Nick Frost as Tom Watson, Hugh Grant as himself, Steve Coogan as both himself and Paul McMullan etc, etc.
The trickiest role to cast is surely Andy Hayman, the former Metropolitan police assistant commissioner whose appalling delivery of a key line managed to turn the select committee hearing into an unconvincing TV movie version of itself while it was actually happening. "Good God! Absolutely not! I can't believe you asked me that!" he spluttered, like a man hell-bent on failing an Emmerdale audition. It was excruciating enough on television. Imagine having to sit there and watching it live. Keith Vaz probably clenched his buttcheeks so hard they tore the fabric off his chair seat.
How, precisely, is the actor who eventually plays Hayman supposed to convey the "Good God! Absolutely not!" moment with any degree of authenticity without destroying their career in the process? Emulate it perfectly and the entire audience will assume you're useless.
Perhaps it'd be better to discard the movie idea altogether and instead turn the saga into a video game, with Brooks as one of the end-of-level bosses. After all, the phone-hacking pile-on is the equivalent of the moment where the player discovers the conspicuous glowing nodule just under its tail and concentrates his fire on that weak spot. As its life gauge starts to fall, the embattled monster desperately sheds blameless News of the World staff in an attempt to draw fire away from itself, but to no avail. Two-thirds of the way through, the weakened beast flashes red and starts tossing fizzing bombs in your direction – the day the Sun printed the pugilistic BROWN WRONG front page roughly equates to that bit. Finally, it explodes in a shower of scarlet locks. Or resigns and leaves Wapping in a car.
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