Tom Watson and Martin Hickman and his other inveterate critics on the Left will rejoice but I shall not. For all his faults Rupert Murdoch has cared for his newspapers. I did not mention in my earlier rehearsal of his pros and cons his salvation of the British newspaper industry when he broke the rapacious printing unions in Wapping. This industry is now threatened by endless circulation decline and the dearth of online advertising — as well as by the possibility that Lord Justice Leveson may further strangle it with statutory regulation. His lordship seems not to understand that he may be regulating a corpse. 

Will the pornographer Richard Desmond get the Sun? Or a Chinese billionaire The Times? Will anyone fight to keep Rupert Murdoch's newspapers alive and thriving as he has done? Of course he has had too much power — but blame successive governments for giving it to him. Anyone who values the press, and is not a score-settling politician, should regard the prospect of his retreat from Britain with regret.