I spoke a couple of days ago to a senior executive in the United States from within Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. As I told him the tale of Rebekah Brooks and the police horse his eyes grew wider and wider. But when he thought about it he didn’t appear that surprised. Nothing coming out of the tabloid world of Wapping surprises anybody any more. The fun and games are well and truly over.

So now James Murdoch has been stripped of the Chairmanship of News International and is being run out of town. My guess would be that he’ll be out of his chair at Sky as well by the end of the year. With the talk of rehabilitating his brother Lachlan, it appears to be a humiliating end for James. With Rupert now aged 81 his succession planning is in tatters.

Many rejoice at this. The depth of vitriol directed towards the Murdochs defies belief. It is fuelled by many on the Left who will never forgive him for what he did to Neil Kinnock. Now we have the grim, leaden spectacle of the Leveson Inquiry, the outcome of which is likely to be negative for those decent, honest, hard-working journalists – yes, we do exist – who keep you the Great British Public and our politicians honest.

What happened at the Sun and the News of the World was pretty awful. Low, shameful and never to be excused. The law will run its course and if people broke it they may well go to prison. The scale of the police inquiry into phone hacking is quite ludicrous but maybe not surprising (as nobody knows better than the Met, the extent to which its behaviour over the years – when it comes to tabloid hacks – was very dodgy indeed).

The phone hacking scandal is appalling but nobody died. Marie Colvin of the Sunday Times,  an employee of Murdoch’s, did die in Homs last week. She was an outstanding, brave reporter who gave up her life so that the truth about vile regimes and brutal armies all over the world could be exposed. Murdoch also loses one million pounds a week on the Times. I feel this country would be a far lesser place if the Times were owned by Richard Desmond or a Russian oligarch. I would also rather it was owned by Murdoch than by Rothermere because I believe the Daily Mail is one of the British institutions, like our weather and Abu Quatd, with which I would happily dispose.

I also strongly approve of the way in which Murdoch appears to be one of the last media barons left to stand up for content. His Tweets, and the fact he’s doing them, are admirable. And, while we’re on the subject of new media….

It’s also striking that, whilst a great deal of sound and fury is being generated by the Leveson enquiry, fuelled as already suggested largely by those with old scores to settle, many a blind eye has been turned to other egregious invasions of privacy. Only last week we heard how companies including Apple and Facebook are apparently rifling through the swathes of personal info on our phones and reporting back to HQ on everything from our shopping habits to what we like to email and text about.  The source? Mobile phone apps with sneaky T&C’s which no-one, of course, ever bothers to read.

The Chinese government is, if rumours are to be believed, busily compiling vast virtual dossiers on just about everyone with access to the internet. No doubt US and even our own security services – amongst others – are doing the same. Such automated snooping has the potential to affect millions of us, compared to tens or perhaps hundreds whose phones have been hacked by those misguided hacks. And yet I suspect we’ll be waiting a long time for a public enquiry into that one.

The last thing we were expecting here at MT towers was to be dragged into the hackgate saga. But yesterday it came to pass. During the cross examination of James Murdoch  Tory MP Damian Collins said to the 39 year old sweating  in the dock that his approach to running his business  “may not be the Mafia, but it is not exactly Management Today, not out of a management textbook”. I’ve offered Mr Collins a life subscription to the magazine and I’m sure he’ll put it on his expenses. It will do him far more good than a duck house.

We were naturally very flattered by all this. Our motto may be “Not Just Business As usual” but we rarely endorse the “make him an offer he can’t refuse” school of getting things done. Neither do we believe a discreet horse’s head placed in a bed is a way of gaining friends or influencing people.

I know James a bit but mainly through his time at BSky B where he was CEO and is – for the time being – Chairman. He is well liked and respected there. The organization still hopes he can continue because he brings value, despite the recently disastrously-acquired Wapping baggage. Funnily enough, as you can read in my recent profile of Jeremy Darroch here    he turned a rather nasty, aggressive and back-biting culture into something more enlightened. James was critical in making it a wildly successful, billion a year profit outfit. It won MT’s Most Admired Company Award a couple of years back and this is a peer review – its enemies in the UK media acknowledge ruefully how good it is.

So, James may be a forceful guy in a hurry but he’s never struck me as a Sonny Corleone – I don’t know what he got up to at his sister’s wedding –  although he has been prone to outbursts of passion in public when it may have been wiser to keep his mouth shut. His venomous attacks on the BBC were OTT and his wild barging into the Independent’s office during the last election are actions he should regret.

I received an email this morning from an old friend in New York who works for the Murdoch empire. “James as Sonny?” he writes. “Listen as long as he isn’t Fredo, we’re all going to be fine.’ I hope he’s correct because  if News Corp’s publishing business is brought down there are going to be an awful lot of hacks heading for the mattresses.

This whole thing has genuinely tragic, Faustian overtones. (And in writing that I am by no means disregarding the hurt done to Milly Dowler’s family and all the others whose privacy has been violated by the Screws mob.) What’s fascinating is that James isn’t a newspaper man at all. He had little time for the inky world of Wapping, although he was quite happy to count the gold that came into his organization through the News of the World. The Times loses a million pounds a week. So its an old fashioned industry in its twilight years rather than the sunrise world of pay TV and telephony that has proved his undoing. The management lesson here might be stick with what you know, except he was being groomed to run the whole business by his dad.

What was wrong with the tabloid business in Wapping was its culture. It didn’t matter how badly you behaved as long as you got the story first  (and sometimes right) it didn’t matter. Even if James didn’t know this before he arrived it wouldn’t have taken many conversations with those satyrs and orcs down there to pick this up fast. Maybe he didn’t get “back to the floor” fast enough. Perhaps it simply didn’t interest him sufficiently for him to pay it much attention. He’s an American into baseball to whom Gordon Taylor was worse than a nobody, albeit a half million pound nobody.  You could claim there’s an unreasonable expectation of CEOs of complex organizations these days to be on top of every last detail. But if your business is breaking the law you need to know and know fast.

James’s career now hangs on a knife edge. Not only are the Lefties out  for his skin – eager to avenge years of hurt at the hands of The Sun King – but even his own sister Elizabeth is said to be very disappointed with his performance. The Murdochs have been in family therapy. The problem  now is that if he’s telling the truth about the way he was running the show after his arrival in Wapping, he appears pretty negligent. One of the first rules of management and being the boss is an acceptance of responsibility. The buck stops with you. Even when things go very badly wrong and you are “let down” by poor behaviour in the ranks, it looks very bad indeed when you crap so openly in public on your employees. Even if they live in Mordor.