After every institutional debacle, the arguments are the same: it was just a few bad apples. Nobody at the top is to blame. Rogue employees just went off piste. That argument was wrong in Abu Ghraib, in Enron, WorldCom, Countrywide, HBOS and it's wrong today at News International.

Newspapers may be in decline but they're still big business. Under pressure, they've all been sucked into a race to the bottom

Perhaps now they've found the courage to challenge Murdoch, a few MPs might discover that in a democracy you can challenge anything and anyone.

Of course Murdoch wasn't the only one who was blind. But for someone who succeeded in the past by being uniquely in touch with popular sentiment, this latest debacle demonstrates yet another source of blindness: success.