We live in a blame culture, where everyone instinctively looks for someone to pillory for disasters, real or imagined. So today's press provide a vintage crop of opportunities for witch-hunting.
No, not just David Cameron, George Osborne or Nick Clegg (take your pick) for screwing up the EU summit negotiations, there's also blame to be apportioned today for the collapse of the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) and the News of the World.
Let's talk the big money first. The Financial Services Authority (FSA) had to be bullied by MPs and the media into investigating the collapse of RBS as global liquidity dried up in the summer of 2008, leaving the over-ambitious and badly managed bank exposed to its cruel debt burden. It cost the taxpayer a £45bn bailout, half of which we may not get back.
Who was to blame? Labour ministers, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and Ed Balls, who all favoured "light-touch" regulation of the City must "take their share", says the Guardian summary of the 450-page FSA report. That seems fair enough, though in his Commons statement yesterday, Cameron sounded keen to blame it all on Labour.
That doesn't seem fair enough. For one thing the decisions which bust the bank – notably the purchase of the worthless Dutch bank ABN Ambro in 2007 – were taken by Sir Fred "the shred" Goodwin and his zombie board, not by Gordon Brown and co, as Nils Pratley points out. Most of the silly sods didn't understand the risks they were taking.
Second, the Tory opposition was urging even lighter-touch regulation at the time and persistently made a complete mess of its own response to the economic collapse, adds me.
If they'd been in power and let those banks go under – as the Bush administration did with Lehman Brothers – we might all have been in even bigger trouble.
As for light-touch regulations, the US Federal Reserve Bank – chaired by Alan Greenspan, disciple of the whacky free market guru Ayn Rand – made identical mistakes to Brown's – but more so.
In fact, as the Guardian's account makes clear, the FSA was challenging RBS as early as 2003, but was fought off by the aggressive Goodwin – and only had six supervisors monitoring what was briefly one of the world's largest banks.
The FSA was looking more at solvency than liquidity, and under the Brown-devised tripartite structure was cut off from the Bank of England's market knowledge. Not that the Bank was doing brilliantly either.
What enrages the Daily Mail, Britain's Top Blamer, today is the report's failure to nail Goodwin and his cohorts, most of whom have escaped scot-free.
My wise old friend Alex Brummer, the paper's City editor (as he was once the Guardian's), has a long article (he doesn't write the headlines) explaining why spineless regulation was seen off by "arrogance, excess, greed and sheer stupidity" – the bankers – for which we will all be paying. Goodwin – knighted by Labour – keeps most of his pension – £342,500.
George Monbiot, with whom I would like to agree more often than I do, has a feisty Guardian column today, not about the Durban climate change conference, as you would expect (he may sensibly be awaiting the small print), but about the media's habit of defending Britain's elite interests – the interests of those who own most of the press – diverting reader anger away from the real culprits and towards benefit cheats and other small fry.
It's more complex than Monbiot imagines; it usually is. The Mail, for example, aggressively reports the villainy of retail banks towards their customers. Benefit cheats annoy people living in the same street more than shifty investment bankers – or overpaid footballers – usually do, because they see their neighbours drawn curtains as they trundle off to work, knowing that the neighbour might also be doing a bit of black economy window cleaning.
But Monbiot is surely right to complain that rich owners buy the kind of news they want to read for much of the time.
Nick Clegg's absence from the PM's EU statement in the Commons on Monday is a classic bit of diversionary trivia.
"The big sulk," shouts the Mail's page-one headline. I thought Clegg got it wrong, but it's a detail. When that idiot threw a custard pie at Rupert Murdoch in July and his wife leapt to the old boy's defence it provided a perfect distraction of the same kind. I happened to be in the US at the time, and Murdoch's Fox TV channel went into overdrive with ingratiating excitement.
Talking of blame, pies and Murdoch, have you been following the latest twist in the Milly Dowler saga? The Mail is again at the forefront of the stone-throwing today – and they are coming the Guardian's way. Surprise, surprise! I've been expecting the counterattack for months.
On Saturday Nick Davies, the journalist who drove the original Guardian investigation into rampant phone hacking at the News of the World, reported with David Leigh in the paper that his 5 July report that the abducted schoolgirl's messages had been hacked and deleted on the NoW's orders may not have been entirely correct, the police have now decided.
Davies sets out a further explanation here as the ramifications of Saturday's report prompted Lord Justice Leveson to promise an investigation at his inquiry yesterday. Here's the BBC's online version. The Dowler family's statement – and much more – is here.
As Davies says, most of what he has reported over many months has been confirmed by both Surrey and Met police forces: the NoW did hire private eye Glenn Mulcaire, to hack Milly Dowler's phone; he did it, and Surrey police officers investigating the abduction/murder knew at the time.
What changed was that they are no longer sure how the messages in Milly's phone – the ones that gave her parents false hope – came to be so deleted.
They still don't know. Davies has duly reported this new twist, and noted – a touch prematurely, I thought – that the Leveson inquiry is already doing some good because "not one newspaper ran a twisted news story" to try and whitewash the hacking saga,
Well, it's early days. The Mail's account of Davies's revelation today asserts that the Yard is saying it has "no evidence" that the NoW deleted Milly's messages, and goes on to suggest that the whole Leveson edifice rests on false assumptions.
Behind its paywall, the Murdoch-owned Times is even more explicit.
"The question the 180 journalists who lost their jobs when the NoW closed would like answered is whether the paper would still exist if the Guardian had not erroneously blamed it for the Dowlers' false hope," its news report notes – on a page opposite the day's colourful evidence from the inquiry, which you can read for free here.
There's a lot packed into that sentence and I think I can help. It's true that the Dowler shocker galvanised public opinion over phone hacking in a way that the misfortunes of film stars, footballers and Formula 1 chiefs with odd sexual habits had not triggered.
But the core facts remain: the NoW did organise phone hacking on an industrial scale, as alleged. The Dowlers suspect their own phones were hacked. Remember, the paper got photos of Milly's grieving parents re-walking her last walk.
It did have an unhealthy relationship with all sorts of coppers – and intimidated or squared politicians who should have told them – and the boss – where to get off. They were too scared. And no wonder.
What's more the Guardian's expose was followed up with belated rigour by its rivals who realised they had better get on the right side of public opinion on this one.
The Mail and Times did so, though the Mail's distaste for the story – it fears a neutered press and has some cause – was obvious.
The Times was rightly keen to defend its reputation and prove its independence of the Murdochs. I assume they checked the Guardian's account – that would be only right and proper – and got confirmation from the obvious sources: the police, the lawyers and disgruntled staff, past and present, at the NoW and elsewhere.
And the closure of the NoW? I realised at the time that, sooner or later, the pack would try to blame it on the Guardian instead of the Murdoch family.
Remember, the strategy was to sacrifice the red-top Sunday paper to save the other red-top in the story, Rebekah Brooks, NI chief executive and a Murdoch favourite who had been editor of the NoW, as had David Cameron's man, Andy Coulson.
It didn't work, since Brooks went too (Coulson was already out) and NoW execs have been fighting among themselves and with the Murdochs ever since.
I was horrified that the NoW was being closed because it had done many good things over the years, including exposing the Pakistani match-fixing racket, for which it got posthumous vindication at the Old Bailey.
It was a cynical corporate move – the NoW was just 1% of global turnover – which cost readers a paper they loved, one which had gone wrong badly, but could have been put right instead of culled.
I'm sorry – and said so on BSkyB and the BBC on the day, as well as many times since. In the event, Murdoch's bid for 100% of BSkyB tanked too.
As with RBS, this was a case of bad practices within a commercial organisation which were badly supervised by senior managers and inadequately regulated by the industry regulators – the FSA for banks, the Press Complaints Commission (PCC) in the case of the media.
The fundamental facts aren't changed by confusion over how Milly Dowler's messages disappeared and the fortuitous way they brought the simmering scandal of illegal phone hacking to a head. The questions raised still need to be answered and weaknesses addressed by Leveson.
Good luck m'Lord; you'll need it.
