Phone hacking: James Murdoch's 'raspberry defence'

Fragments from phone hacking and other hearings: when James Murdoch invokes what lawyers now call the BlackBerry defence – ie, I was told something vital on my mobile one busy Saturday and replied to it, but didn't really absorb it then, or indeed at a subsequent meeting when I signed away £350,000 of my dad's hard-earned money to keep something I couldn't be bothered to read about quiet – there's another way of characterising this uniquely inventive digital argument. Call it the Raspberry defence. When Lord Justice Leveson tells Neville Thurlbeck that Nev was an important person – "you weren't just a reporter, you were a chief reporter who had been news editor" – he betrays a complete misunderstanding of journalism's non-hierarchical (ie, often chaotic) structure. Maybe barristers go on to be QCs then judges – but news editor to chief reporter is code for a giant bump down. What does a chief reporter do except report, like other reporters, and do what editors tell him? When Rebekah Brooks, as Wapping chief executive, told an angry journalists' meeting five months ago that "worse revelations" beyond hacking were to come, and that in a year's time they would understand why the News of the World had to be closed, what was she talking about? Not the possibility, lately revealed, that her boys might not have deleted Milly Dowler's messages, to be sure. Then what?