The respectable Victorian tradesman sneaked a glance at the parlour maid’s copy on returning from church, the Edwardian earl nipped below stairs for a peek at his footman’s, and even now the provincial solicitor is supposed to slip it between the capacious pages of his Sunday broadsheet as if it were something off the top shelf. But if, for many, reading it came with a frisson of shame, what is a guilty pleasure if not a pleasure doubled?  So what Rupert Murdoch has killed is a venerable national institution. This Australian-American has binned a slice of our heritage – hardly the most nutritious slice, but a reliably delicious one all the same – and that act of cultural vandalism should alone disqualify him from owning that fledgling national institution BSkyB.  Why he has done so is harder to penetrate, and the theories abound. Was it purest commercial cynicism, whereby he can pass off the execution of an existing plan to cut costs as an act of repentance?  Or was it done in the cause of safeguarding the status of his son James, so compromised by his cack-handed stewardship of the crisis, as imperial heir presumptive?  Perhaps this is no more than me craving one final News of the World story of the kind I will miss, but I can’t help wondering whether this is a quasi sex scandal in itself. There certainly seems something sado-masochistic about Rupert’s relationship with that flame-haired temptress Rebekah Brooks. She has done barely imaginable damage to his company and reputation, causing him the most intense pain. And all he seems to want is more of the same.  The most ruthless operator this industry has known had the easy option of limiting this catastrophe by sacking an employee palpably guilty of either criminality or negligence so grotesque as to be a corporate crime.  Instead, he chose to sacrifice an important revenue stream and several hundred careers to protect her. Doesn’t that tug the heartstrings until they squeal for the defibrillator paddles?  What a sensational irony it would be if the paper’s downfall is sourced to such classic News of the World fodder as the old man who fell head over heels for a minxy, hyper-ambitious young woman, and destroyed himself in the process. Although he looked like a disgraced cabinet minister caught with a hooker while being pursued by American reporters on Wednesday, no one doubts this is purely Platonic. Apparently he loves her like a daughter. But as Plato put it, love is a serious mental disease.  Something has warped Rupert Murdoch’s faculties. Only a madman would destroy a highly profitable, mass circulation piece of the national tapestry in defence of the rogue executive who brought it low. Perhaps embittered staff could make something of that when they put together their swansong front page tonight. A sex scandal without the sex would be a poignantly useful omen of what Sundays will be like in a drabber, less hilarious Britain deprived of the News of the World.
The News of the World was a gloriously vulgar and grubby part of the nation&rsquo;s    cultural heritage.