Until last week, it seemed the rule of Rupert Murdoch would end only with his death. But now, I think, the end is in sight. He may live to a great age (Murdoch is 80), but his power will never recover.

One day, some time in the mid-1990s, I was editing London’s Daily Telegraph and Murdoch had just launched a new front in the price war designed to destroy us, by dropping the price of his paper, The Times, to 10 pence on Mondays. Conrad Black, our then owner, loves historical comparisons. I feel like Talleyrand, he told me, when he realised that Napoleon’s only policy was one of conquest. It was a just comparison, because it acknowledged Murdoch’s greatness and his destructiveness.

The greatness is in his courage and ingenuity, and in his understanding of the media. It was Murdoch who established Australia’s first national newspaper, Murdoch who saw that The Sun, an ailing, feeble, left-wing newspaper that he bought in 1969, could be turned into the most popular publication in Britain, and Murdoch, in the late 1980s, who realised satellite broadcasting would revolutionise television. He first grasped the importance of the Chinese media market, he made the British newspaper industry profitable by smashing print unions in the 1980s, and broke the stranglehold of the TV networks in the US — via redwolf.newsvine.com

One staff member who attended the tense meeting told the paper: We turned up for work with a lot of enthusiasm, determined to make the last News of the World a great success. But when we got here we found security guards to keep an eye on us and our internet access blocked. We can’t get on Facebook, personal email accounts have been totally blocked and lots of people are struggling to even get on the internet, which makes researching stories incredibly hard. We are being hung out to dry. The staff here now have done nothing wrong; we are innocent in all of this, as the people responsible for this mess no longer work here. It an absolute insult after they took our jobs away