Punctured arrogance

The Prime Minister insists that he has done nothing wrong, adding sniffily that the hacking row is not the only matter on his desk.

Yet his continued failure to admit that his judgement was flawed in selecting former News of the World editor Andy Coulson as his communications director leaves an unremitting stench of complicity surrounding Downing Street.

Paul Stephenson is surely not alone in drawing comparisons between his own hiring of Coulson's deputy Neil Wallis and Cameron's appointment of Coulson himself.

Wallis had not been forced to resign from the NotW, yet the Metropolitan police chief understood the impossibility of his being able to ride out the storm associated with this appointment.

On the other hand, Cameron put his own judgement on the line by, as he put it, offering Coulson a second chance.

Having done so and his judgement proving to be faulty in the extreme, the PM ought to be honour bound to emulate Stephenson and fall on his sword.

He won't do so because he is as shameless as Rupert Murdoch, prepared to see others pay the price but determined to obscure any personal responsibility for the gathering odour of corruption.

Journalists and politicians do not rank highly in public consciousness when personal honesty is an issue.

That has not generally been the case with police officers, but the toxic mix of News International and the Metropolitan Police with new Labour and Tory party leaders has undermined that public conception.

At the heart of that toxicity has been News International's vast wealth and power, which have been spread around to ensure Murdoch's extended influence.

The willingness of Establishment politicians to comply with News International requests not to stand in the way of the company's increasingly monopolistic position have been matched by police failure to investigate adequately allegations of wrongdoing by company employees.

Cameron's decision to employ Coulson in the first place was probably as much due to his provenance and his ongoing relationship with News International as to his personal attributes.

As to why the Met chief felt obliged to sup from the same toxic pool, the jury is still out, which makes Ed Miliband's call to "get to the bottom of the relationships between the press and the police" essential.

To have heard senior police officers explain that they had not felt the need to investigate crimes by News International staff because they had been assured by company representatives that no crimes had been committed must be humiliating to rank-and-file police officers.

It conjures up unflattering images of police top brass basking in the cosy embrace of wealth and privilege.

Miliband was correct to bracket this police-politicians-press affair with the bankers' crisis and MPs' abuse of their expenses claims, since they share a common basis in the powerful and wealthy showing their contempt for working people by choosing to act as though they are fireproof.

The single-minded dedication of a small number of MPs and journalists, exemplified by Tom Watson and Nick Davies, together with the Dowler family and its lawyer Mark Lewis, has punctured that arrogance.

It is time for Cameron to come clean on his own role in this affair and to resign as PM.