The game is up for Rupert Murdoch. The head of News Corp has held sway over Britain’s media industry for a generation. Prime ministers have feared and feted him. He has outwitted regulators and outgunned rivals. Now, suddenly, it is all unravelling. The media mogul has lost his touch. These things happen.

News International, Mr Murdoch’s London-based company, is under criminal investigation for alleged telephone hacking and illegal payments to police officers. Scotland Yard has 50 officers on the case. Executives have been accused, under the protection of parliamentary privilege, of perverting the course of justice. The allegations about the activities at the tabloid News of the World have stirred a wave of public revulsion. With advertisers threatening a boycott and the prime minister endorsing calls for a public inquiry, the company has announced the closure of the best-selling 168-year-old Sunday title. It will probably re-emerge as the Sunday Sun.

Yet from his jet-set swirl of media conferences and cocktail parties in the US, the News Corp chief has inexplicably expressed personal confidence in Rebekah Brooks, the News International chief executive at the epicentre of the controversy. He has offered a few anodyne words about “deplorable” and “unacceptable” behaviour. There was a time when the businessman who built News Corp would have gripped such a crisis at the outset.