The Commons found its voice? Not impressed

One of the outcomes of the News International story so far is to show how stupid many MPs are.

Before the Milly Dowler revelation, the campaign had been driven by Chris Bryant and Tom Watson, both from the camp of Gordon Brown, who were voicing his hugely simmering resentment built up since the Murdoch press had turned away from him.

The media fed on a diet of revelations about the voicemails of politicians and slebs being hacked, but the public was giggling rather than concerned. Brown's former lieutenants weren't succeeding.

But then came the Milly Dowler revelation. MPs were deluged with public indignation. As Charles Kennedy said, there are some times when MPs have to act as lightning conductors. This was one.

Most MPs then followed the trail which Watson and Bryant had already laid. Bercow revelled in the chance to put the Commons in the spotlight with an emergency debate and allowed Brown to go on and on. This should have been a key point in his revenge campaign, but we all know he blew that too.

No word that the Information Commissioner had written two reports several years ago highlighting the possible scale of offending by journalists, and that the Labour government had done - precisely nothing.

Nonetheless, the hounds were now baying, and the oleaginous Vaz and his unselect committee questioned police and ex-police. Some of the police made idiots of themselves, but many of the MPs' questions were embarrassingly stupid.

Evidently few of them have worked in a large organisation. They didn't understand there will always be questions of priorities, because resources aren't infinite. In the Commons, one backbencher even asked Cameron if he would consider telling the police to increase the resources allocated to the new investigations!

The unselect committee didn't seem to like Peter Clarke, because he explained succinctly why the original hacking investigation hadn't seemed top priority at the time, and was brief with MPs whose questions showed they hadn't grasped when he'd retired. None of the MPs would have been capable of holding down his job, but boy are they great at hindsight.

They did like Sue Akers. She massaged them with her answers, and fairly subtly made them feel jolly important. They nodded at her decision that her team would visit everyone who might have been hacked, even though this will add years to her investigation. She said a judicial enquiry could start now and read itself in (they liked the idea of an immediate start) but would then have to wait until anyone charged had been through the courts. One MP then even asked if this delay would be weeks? months? years? Commendably, Sue Akers kept a straight face.

She seems a good choice to do a slow, thorough job, while not upsetting any politicians. There was no sense that she would be a good choice for something fast-moving, or even seriously important.

So far the laborious process seems only to be looking at News International. But as Guido points out, the figures on suspected blagging suggest that News International may not have been the chief offenders.

David Leigh suggested on The World at One that tabloids' malpractices were perpetrated just to satisfy sleazy curiosity, whereas the serious press only stooped to those levels reluctantly and in the public interest, so the serious press wasn't an issue. This would be serious papers like The Guardian, whose journalists have breakfast with Gordon Brown, copy out his allegations on to the front page, and then have to retract a few days later - on the back page.

No MP is coming out of this well, and there is plenty more to emerge. Most backbenchers think they understand the outlines of the issues, but they don't. They think events are a sign of backbench power, but they're not. MPs have been led by the nose by Brown's team, and then forced forward by public disgust. And it's not just backbenchers. Cameron has adopted it as an article of faith that the first investigation was flawed. Given that a judge had considered another case not worth the cost of a long trial, and given the competing resource pressures on the Met, this is beyond glib. Cameron's method of operation becomes transparent, making it easier to despise him. Miliband meanwhile has to guard against not going overboard on this issue. There are far greater scandals.

If MPs can't even get their heads round this issue, there's no hope of them understanding why the EU is a bad thing, or why ruinous AGW legislation is also bound to fail.

Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.