Murdoch's only doing what comes naturally - it's our politicians that have failed.

There is no such thing as 'business ethics'. The essence of business is making money : that's all business is. We shouldn't complain too much if a business like News Corporation scours the gutters, abuses human rights and bribes policemen to beat its rivals in the marketplace. Like a cat with a bird, it's only doing what comes naturally. We're dealing here, not with human beings, but with what the Apostle Paul called the 'principalities and powers' (Ephesians 6:12) :

"We are not fighting against humans. We are fighting against forces and authorities and against rulers of darkness and powers in the spiritual world." (The 'rulers of darkness' are not humans like Rupert Murdoch; these are 'spiritual' forces, beyond any single human.)

Any ethics in business has to be supplied by human beings. Yes, we can hope that the human beings employed in the business have ethical standards and apply them. Realistically, though, that isn't going to happen unless ethical behaviour is rewarded. It has to be rewarded from within - the people at the top must define the ethical position. In News International that clearly doesn't happen and hasn't happened for a long time. Rebekah Brooks is absolutely implicated. Murdoch's (and her) ethics are 'do what is necessary to make money'. He and his underlings don't need to instruct junior journalists to hack voicemails. They don't even need to know they're doing it. As long as those journalists could be confident that they would be commended for anything that steals a march on rival newspapers, some of them were bound to do it - like the soldiers that torture prisoners because there is a top-down culture of impunity. Or like the famous assassins of Thomas à Becket, who overheard the king wishing his Archbishop dead, and murdered him on his own altar steps. The king - according to the story at least - had himself whipped through the streets of London as a public penance. I can't wait . . .

Of course, every purchaser of the Sun and the News of the World has also rewarded Murdoch's empire with their custom. The 'customer is always right' in business. As long as someone is prepared to buy gutter journalism, gutter journalism will exist. But it's not realistic to hope the market for gutter journalism will dry up, any more than it is realistic to hope that people like Coulson, Brooks and Murdoch suddenly see the light.

So if it's too much to hope that media moguls in a competitive world will behave ethically, because it's too much to hope that their market will dry up, who will supply the ethics?

Isn't that what we have politicians and judiciary for? In fact, isn't that almost their sole function?

What we have had for the past thirty years is a political culture of hand-washing and avoidance of responsibility.

The old Tory ideology is "You can't expect the common people to know how to run a country. The best people to do that are those who already know how to run a country estate, keep the peasants employed and all that." In the 80s that culture changed and went downmarket. Now it was big businessmen who were likely to be the best at running things (except, of course, they did that so well they shifted most of our manufacturing industry to the Far East because it was more profitable). That meant the only real big businessmen left in the country were the financiers. And how the Blair government feted them! Now of course we know that the financiers weren't terribly interested in running the country either - much more interested of getting as much of their tax liability offshore as they could.

In this whole sorry mess, then, the real culpability lies with our political leaders for failing to govern - for failing to do the job we put them there to do. For failing to supply the ethics to a fundamentally unethical world of business and finance - in fact, for doing the exact opposite and transferring responsibility for governance on to them. And alongside them - and this is a tawdry story yet to fully emerge - stand the police. It seems pretty clear that investigations into phone hacking were blocked at a very senior level in the Met. And unless it was just one rogue policeman passing on phone numbers (like it was 'just one rogue journalist' Mulcaire) I expect to see heads roll at top level in the Met - a police force that's shown itself stunningly short of ethics in recent years and tried to spit out the only Commissioner who showed signs of having any.

400 years ago, bloody civil war fuelled by religious bigotry led to a separation of the power of the Church (the Rupert Murdoch of its day) from politics. Well, theoretically. Now it is time for an enforced separation of powers between politics and big business and finance. Rebekah Brooks shouldn't be allowed anywhere near the gates of Downing Street - or Cameron's dining table. All MPs - or if not that, at least Cabinet members - should automatically be required to resign from their business interests.

And David Cameron, rather than Rebekah Brooks, should be the one 'considering his position'. We need a clean sweep and a culture change at the heart of British politics.