and he's been chanelling dear old Hedda :

"They have shoved their slavering snouts into the parlours of weeping widows, and by their outrageous lies they have driven the relatives of their victims to suicide. When you read Leveson in full, you are left to ponder the mystery of how people can behave like this. Are these journalists that much nastier and more cynical than the rest of the human race? Why do they seem to have got out of control? The answer is simple. The press are no nastier than anyone else; quite the reverse. On the whole, journalists are highly intelligent, amusing and frequently idealistic.

But these days they are afraid. They are like the crew of a plane whose port engine has failed. They can see the ridge of the mountain ahead, and they have been driven to start chucking their principles overboard in the hope of avoiding a crash. That is why they have been so hungrily hacking phones, bribing officials, and claiming that asylum seekers have eaten the donkeys of Greenwich Park. They can see the altimeter of their circulation figures spiralling downwards, and they need stories ever more exotic and titillating to keep the readers buying.

Newspapers have always chased exclusives - and quite right, too. But the pressure on circulation is now so great that some papers have abandoned their grip on ethics and on reality."