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.

Just got back from India – my first trip after a 20-year absence. There was a Rolls Royce dealership close to my hotel where they proudly told me they have sold 35 cars in the last year, for up to $500,000 US dollars each. Indira Gandhi-style import duties and tariffs at outrageous levels on luxury goods don’t deter the Indian super-rich, of which there are now many. Down at the other end of the social scale the deprivation one encounters remains disturbing. Around a fifth of Indians continue to live in what their own government describes as ‘absolute poverty’ and half of Indian women are illiterate. (China’s literacy rate is 90%, by comparison.) Corruption afflicts the country from top to bottom and seriously holds back its economic and social development.

But it remains the most wonderful country – maddening and delightful in equal measure. The energy and optimism there should be bottled and imported to Blighty along with a few Tata Nanos. I cannot think for a second why it has taken me two decades to go back. You can read more about my adventures – including attending the final of the Diageo World Class International Bar Tender competition – in the October edition of the magazine.

The talk of le tout Delhi, however, was Rupert and the phone hacking. The extra significance which is lost on many Indians is that newspapers are a dying industry in the UK. By contrast all over India they are thriving. The average circulation of daily paid-for papers in India went up by 39.7 % from 2005 to 2009. Indian newspapers are terrific: beautifully written in precise English, shot-through with energy and vigorous opinion to suit all comers. Most media owners there are raking it in.

I returned at dawn to one of the most ugly, vengeful feeding frenzies I’ve ever witnessed here. Rupert is going to require a phalanx of bodyguards for his appearance before MPs next Tuesday if he is to avoid being torn limb from limb. So, a few quick thoughts:

1) The News of the World is and has always been a pretty vile publication feeding on misery and frailty, bringing out the worst in its producers, owners and readers. It made me ashamed to be British, I do not mourn its passing and dread the advent of the Sun on Sunday.

2) In seeking to bring the whole newspaper edifice down, the public should be careful what it wishes wish for. The Times loses a million pounds a week and Richard Desmond won’t stand for that if he takes it over. A free press is vital to our democracy and what makes this country thrive. MPs and the government have waited patiently for their revenge following the expenses scandal and if we’re not careful they will neuter those who seek to expose corruption, idiocy and wrong-doing completely. Including the saintly members of the Guardian and the BBC.

3) What in God’s name they think they are up to in the Metropolitan Police is anyone’s guess. Who advises them? Max Clifford, Bruce Forsyth and Robert Mugabe? Do they get ethics lessons from John Gotti? A proper cleansing of this filthy stable is now long overdue.

4) Gordon Brown’ s ignoble speech in the House of Commons was enough to make me gag. It’s not as if Brown was a great man or even a passing Prime Minister. He made Alec Douglas-Home look like Gladstone. Brown was a ghastly failure and we are still paying the price for his gross errors of judgement. And he attended the now ex-News International chief executive Rebekah Brook’s wedding, presumably without being taken there under duress in a Black Mariah. Perhaps he can offer her a job now she’s collected her p45.