The Last Ditch by Tom Paine

Cameron backs phone hacking probe | Reuters.

As m'learned friend Wiggy (aka @_millymoo) explains, there are numerous offences to be investigated in the context of unauthorised access to another's mobile phone account. Those should now be investigated by the police and prosecuted vigorously by the Crown Prosecution Service.

A 'public inquiry' or even (God help us) 'inquiries', as mooted by the Prime Minister, will just provide opportunities for politicians to score points off each other. It will further infantilise a debate that is already being conducted, not least by Milliband Minor at PMQs today, at the level of an afternoon TV chat show.

Worst of all, the distinguished member of 'the Great and the Good" who chairs the inquiry will feel the need to immortalise him/herself by coming up with "deliverables" to be implemented by government. The most likely deliverables are bad laws that will interfere with press freedom.

Pace Mr Milliband it's no mere 'technicality' that a political inquiry can do nothing useful (to the extent any of them ever do) until police investigations – and any court cases resulting from them – are over. But as Wiggy points out;

The Met obviously cannot investigate itself, and any inquiry has to question why the [previous] investigations were so poor; whether (as has been alleged) officers were being paid for information by News of the World, and whether there is any nexus between the two.

So rather than launch a pointless, expensive public inquiry, why doesn't the PM suggest to the Home Secretary that the Chief Constable of another force, unsullied by these suspicions of bribery, takes over the criminal investigation? That could then lead promptly to the only 'public inquiry' that really matters; a criminal trial or trials.

It is time for justice, not political circus. All the names being bandied about are innocent until they are proven guilty. However, it seems clear that a largeish group of individuals, including some journalists, at least one editor, a private investigator and an unknown number of policemen are long overdue in the dock to account for their behaviours. There is more at stake here now than journalistic ethics.