Rebekah should have gone ages ago

Rebekah Brooks succumbed finally to the pressure. She has gone – and not before time.
It was the right decision but it came far too late. Rupert Murdoch should have requested her resignation on the day that he discovered she was editor of the News of the World when Milly Dowler's phone was hacked.
That revelation was so shocking in and by itself to have warranted her red head on a platter.
The subsequent reports about the likely hacking of the relatives of other murder victims, 7/7 bombing casualties and of soldiers should have left Murdoch in no doubt about the need to fire his News International chief executive.
Instead, he placed her in initial charge of the investigation into the very matters for which she had, by virtue of her editorship, been responsible for.
It was a truly calamitous decision, making him and his hapless son, James, look decidedly foolish and weak-willed.
Her clinging to her job contrasted poorly with the fact that her successor as News of the World editor, Andy Coulson, had seen fit to resign when two of his staff were jailed for hacking. Why should she be treated differently?
Murdoch's loyalty to Brooks appeared impossibly misplaced. She was regarded as his fifth daughter, but business is business, and even in a company run by a family dynasty, he should have realised that she was the lightning conductor for criticism of the hacking scandal.
There were suggestions that she was a "human shield" for James Murdoch, but the unravelling of events made a nonsense of that ploy (if it was a ploy). She became part of the problem, not the solution. What a tawdry business it has been.