At one point, he says, a senior editor at the Sun made a point of sending him a message via another Labour MP: “Tell that fat bastard Watson we know about his little planning matter.” This, he says, was a reference to his application to put a conservatory on his family home in the Midlands: a typical “non-newsy, low-level thing” that played its part in making him “start to think like a conspiracy theorist”.

In police inquiries, the most sensitive moment is generally considered to be when those involved start to turn on one another. James Murdoch and the then News International chief executive Rebekah Brooks had turned on Crone and Myler – particularly the long-serving Crone – in their testimony.

As James Murdoch closed the most successful newspaper in the western world rather than sack a devious harpie, experts said that harpie must have some weapons-grade shit up her sleeve.

Professor Henry Brubaker, of the Institute for Studies, said: “Jesus fucking Christ, they must have killed a tramp.”

As one of his former top executives-once a close aide-told me, “This scandal and all its implications could not have happened anywhere else. Only in Murdoch’s orbit. The hacking at News of the World was done on an industrial scale. More than anyone, Murdoch invented and established this culture in the newsroom, where you do whatever it takes to get the story, take no prisoners, destroy the competition, and the end will justify the means.”

Then – in 1995 – Murdoch begins to change. He decides he likes Tony Blair and tells [Woodrow] Wyatt he may support him at the coming election. Wyatt can’t believe it. He had thought that Murdoch would always support the Conservatives.

And then Murdoch does something worse. He tells the editor of the News of the World to cut back on the column that he had allowed Wyatt to write every week.

Wyatt is in despair. There is a wonderful moment in the diaries when Wyatt sleeps all night on the floor of his study next to the phone waiting for Murdoch to ring.

He never does.

Media pundits say the News of the World’s seven million-strong readership will now divide into those who will spend the rest of their lives washing their hands 300 times a day and those who will continue to enjoy stories about fucking.

Wayne Hayes, media analyst at Donnelly-McPartlin, said: “At this stage it’s anyone’s guess, though one does have to question the commercial impact of Guardian readers boycotting the News of the World.

“Nevertheless I am sure those Guardian readers will cancel their Sky subscriptions the very moment the second series of Boardwalk Empire finishes sometime next year.”

“Good Lord, it’s my past,” Morris says as he leafs through a box filled with folders labeled “Manson Girls” and “Lobotomy.” Many of the boxes are cardboard coffins for movies he pursued for years but couldn’t fund.