Let’s get this straight. Rebekah Brooks admitted, in March 2003, that the News of the World paid police for information. See the YouTube clip here, which includes Andy Coulson trying to recover the situation with the laughable comment that they only pay police “within the law”.

Now, paying police for information is called corruption. It is a serious criminal offence.  And there are a fairly well-defined set of consequences that we would normally expect to apply, including jail.

The admission was made in a privileged forum, so perhaps that is why charges did not immediately follow. But imagine if any other senior executive had admitted such a thing to a parliamentary committee — a head of a retail chain or a mining company or a telco, for example. It would have been a race to see if they could resign before being sacked.

Yet eight years after she made the admission, Brooks not only holds her post, has not only been promoted during that time, but still has the support of the boss, Rupert Murdoch, who has now killed a title, yet hangs on to his lieutenant.

This gives the lie to all the pious statements from James Murdoch and others about determination to root out the problems at News of the World and co-operate with inquiries.

Give me a break. She admitted paying police.

And the very fact that Brooks made the admission so casually tells us that News International is used to getting away with things — that the normal rules do not apply.

The fact that Brooks’ admission and continued tenure have gone comparatively unremarked until the phone-hacking scandal went white hot in the past few days  is an example of how twisted the thinking and the power plays have become around the might of News International — something on which this article in The Independent by former BBC political correspondent Steve Richards depicts well. He writes:

“Senior figures in both the bigger parties are used to paying homage. As a BBC political correspondent, I was the only journalist who travelled with Tony Blair in July 1995 for his famous meeting with Rupert Murdoch at a conference in Australia. The investment of political and physical energy was staggering. Murdoch issued an invitation at relatively short notice to Blair, a summons that could not be ignored. Blair, Alastair Campbell and Anji Hunter dropped all plans, flew for 24 hours, taking sleeping pills to manage the jet lag, attended the conference and returned in time for Prime Minister’s Questions … Subsequently Campbell’s deputy in No.10, Lance Price, described Murdoch as the third most powerful figure in the Labour government after Blair and Gordon Brown. Murdoch’s editors were the equivalent of powerful apparatchiks in a dictatorship … Similarly, when in doubt, as Cameron and George Osborne often were in the early days of their leadership, they turned to News International. Their appointment of Andy Coulson showed the importance they attached to securing the endorsement of those who count.”

Now News International has announced that it will close the News of The World. Clearly this is an attempt to contain the damage to the organisation’s reputation — another attempt to, to quote James Murdoch, put the controversy in a box.

It is a dramatic move, but not unprecedented in its drama. Remember how Murdoch moved his titles to Wapping overnight to break the power of the unions, or the dubious management sell-outs of Australian titles in Adelaide and Brisbane when he wanted to buy Herald and Weekly Times without running foul of media concentration laws.

And we also know that on the same day that Rebekah Brooks wrote this email assuring her staff that she knew nothing of the hacking, and was determined that the company should  “face up to the mistakes and wrongdoing of the past and … do our utmost to see that justice is done and those culpable will be punished”, a new domain name — www.sunonsunday.co.uk — was registered.

There was talk of restructuring and merging days before that, as reported by Roy Greenslade here. The suspicion now is  that the News of the World will rise again as the Sunday Sun. In the corporate world, this is known as phoenixing — send a dead entity down, only to have it rise again, hopefully free of baggage, under a different name.

Surely it won’t work.

Some reports suggest that in announcing the closure to staff yesterday, Brooks told them to blame The Guardian.

If so, it takes the breath away. In fact The Guardian — its editor Alan Rusbridger and reporter Nick Davies — the author of that excoriating expose of awful journalism, Flat Earth News — deserve the highest accolades for their work. They were abandoned by the rest of the British press and belittled by the Murdoch titles.

They stuck with it.

They showed that the rot at the heart of the British system was not being exposed by journalists, but harboured by them.

Even as journalists feel depressed and besmirched by the News of the World, even as Brooks holds her position, we should remember that there is also Nick Davies.

He, too, is a journalist.