Who Will Rupert Murdoch Destroy Today? (Himself?)

The Internet will explode quite soon, as Rupert Murdoch, James Murdoch and Rebekah Brooks all go before a Parliament committee’s inquiry this morning, circa 9:30 a.m. east coast time. It’s a hearing almost two years in the making! (“So, yeah, this is gonna be a pretty big story,” we wrote in July of 2009!) That being said, the committee is not as toothsome as an American congressional hearing would be, which isn’t even all that toothsome anyway. Still, people expect Murdoch to come in hot, throwing anyone to the wolves that he can. Perhaps he might resign as CEO! Meanwhile, while we wait, let’s look at some potential upsides from this debacle!

• One minor good outcome of this ludicrous story could be America getting rid of “Top Gear” host Jeremy Clarkson’s punching bag, the despicable Piers Morgan, who, if you don’t really “do” TV, is CNN’s new Larry King and also a former News of the World editor, who may or may not know plenty about phone hacking but definitely knows there’s a “huge witch hunt going on” to bring down Rupert Murdoch. He’s pretty much the worst thing that’s been brought to America since smallpox.

• And have you not been in hysterics for the last 12 hours over this one?

So Charlie Brooks, Rebekah’s husband — and the pair met at Jeremy Clarkson’s house — has a remarkable bio: He is: “a former amateur jockey and trainer who once ran a sex-toy mail-order company, now writes about racing for the Daily Telegraph and is the author of a couple of racing thrillers.”

He’s also apparently not very… organized. Recently he left a bag with a laptop and a phone and “some papers” with a friend. This friend returned this bag to an underground parking garage under a shopping center, “yards” from the Brooks’ “gated apartment block,” because that’s what friends do when they return laptops, they leave them in nearby car parks, but this friend was apparently not very bright, and left the bag in the wrong part of the garage, and so it ended up in the rubbish. “The suggestion is that a cleaner thought it was rubbish and put it in the bin,” is what Charlie’s spokesperson said. Ha ha!

Then security found it and turned it over to the police, and Charlie’s very mad, because certainly no one was trying to dispose of this laptop, and its contents certainly have nothing to do with the inquiry into his now-arrested and unemployed spouse. These are some rank amateur shenanigans.