I was on a train when I heard the news. The woman behind me was skipping across the Internet on her phone. "They're closing the News of the World", she said to her friend. She said it like it they were closing a village shop in the Hebrides. No big deal.
I had my head in a book - One Day by David Nicholls, buy, enjoy - but my ears pricked up. I couldn't help but turn around and ask her to repeat what she'd just said. She read from her screen, this Sunday's edition would be the last.
My jaw hit the folding plastic table in front of me. My mind reeled. Two things immediately sprang to mind, the first, bizarrely, was the news of the assassination of Bobby Kennedy, June 5th 1968. I was on a bus with my mother, it was raining outside and crowded inside. Someone got on with an evening newspaper - I can remember seeing the front page photograph - it had been touched up, badly, presumably to aid definition. Speculation that it was a fake was rife amongst the passengers.
Was this news of the NOTW also a fake? Hadn't someone hacked Fox News just days before claiming that President Obama was dead? What can you believe in this world here we know everything as it happens - in some cases before ("In his speech this afternoon the PM will say...)
The next thing I thought about was a scene for "NOTW the Movie - The Screws Screwed". And there will be a NOTW The Movie or TV mini series. You wait and see.
What struck me was a moment.
Movies - stories - are about moments.
After several days of ever more unbelievable revelations about phone hacking, police corruption, who knew what and when, who was about to be arrested, and which vulnerable section of society would next feature in the Screws endeavours to scoop a story, things have come to a head.
Int. Boardroom. News Corp - Day
Rupert Murdoch, craggy in that Australian way, walks into the room. Before him a legion of lawyers, executives and Editors all answer phones, all talk over each other and argue. But through the cacophony of sounds we hear snippets:
"...Shred it"
"...Take a sledgehammer to the hard drive"
"...Burnt the fucking lot"
Murdoch's eyes narrow, he takes a bite from his Kangaroo testicles sandwich. Suddenly the assembled executives realise he's there in person. One nudges another and on it goes. Conversations end, silence falls.
Their hearts beat faster.
He looks at each and every one of them. Into their very souls.
He wipes the back of his hand across his mouth.
MURDOCH: "Close it".
He turns and exits.
No-one can believe what they just heard - they look at each other in stunned silence - and then the noise explodes again.
Cut to.....
With Rebekah Brooks telling the NOTW staff that she knows that there is much worse to come (dear God how can it get any worse?) this is heading toward a scandal of Watergate proportions. What is more The New York Times reports on how the phone hacking crisis has become a make or break test of James Murdoch's role in his father's media empire. The paper says he could emerge from the scandal "as the company's decisive new leader, or as the tainted son who mismanaged one of the greatest crises the family business has faced".
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