Sally, Gemma and Bob Dowler after meeting Rupert Murdoch in London

London, July 16: Rupert Murdoch held his head in his hands and repeatedly offered his deepest apologies to the family of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler at a private meeting at the One Aldwych Hotel in London yesterday.

After the meeting with Milly’s parents Sally and Bob and her 25-year-old sister Gemma, Murdoch, the 80-year-old chairperson of News Corporation and possibly the most powerful newspaper baron in the world, emerged from the hotel to shouts of “shame on you” from protesters.

A private investigator, Glenn Mulcaire, hired by the News of the World hacked into Milly’s phone after she went missing in 2002. What was worse was he deleted some messages to make room for more, raising her family’s hopes she was alive — when, in fact, the 13-year-old had by then been murdered and her body dumped by her abductor.

Milly’s story represents every parent’s nightmare — a happy schoolgirl saying goodbye to her friends after lessons, walking home along a deserted stretch of wood and pounced upon by a man lying in wait. This happened to Milly just after 3.47pm on March 21, 2002, in Walton-on-Thames, Surrey. Her decomposed body was discovered in forests many miles away in Hampshire on September 18, 2002.

On June 23, 2011, after a long police investigation during which even Milly’s father was suspected, Levi Bellfield, a former nightclub bouncer and a serial killer, was sentenced to life for her murder.

It is this revelation — not primarily the hacking of phones of footballers, TV celebrities, actors and politicians — that has caused universal disgust in Britain and triggered the crisis in Murdoch’s media empire.

“As founder of the company I was appalled to find out what had happened and I apologised,” Murdoch emphasised yesterday.

Flanked by the Dowlers, the family lawyer Mark Lewis said: “It was a private meeting that had been called for by Rupert Murdoch. He was humbled to give a full and sincere apology to the Dowler family. The Dowler family told him that his papers should lead the way to set the standards of honesty and decency in the field, and not what had gone on before.

“At the end of the day, actions are going to speak louder than words.”

Murdoch after the meeting. (Reuters)

He added: “He apologised many times. I don’t think anybody could have held their head in their hands so many times.”

Murdoch said the News of the World’s actions were “not the standard set by his father, a respected journalist, not the standard set by his mother”.

“He said the words, ‘Sorry, this should not have happened’,” Lewis recounted.

The question of compensation was not discussed, although the family is pursuing a claim for damages against the News of the World.

Rupert was born on March 11, 1931, in Melbourne, the only son of Sir Keith Murdoch and Elisabeth Joy (ée Greene). His father was a regional newspaper magnate who sent his son to read philosophy, politics and economics at Worcester College, Oxford.

When Rupert was 22, his father died, bequeathing his money and, more important, his values and his ambitions to his son.

Therefore, the crucial point that Murdoch now feels he has let down his father will certainly be understood in India.

It is the height of humiliation for a proud man like Murdoch actually to have to pay to take out (undiscounted) advertisements today in rival newspapers to apologise for the misdemeanours of his News International staff.

“We are sorry” is the headline on the ad, signed “Sincerely, Rupert Murdoch”.

It says: “The News of the World was in the business of holding others to account. It failed when it came to itself. We are sorry for the serious wrongdoing that occurred. We are deeply sorry for the hurt suffered by the individuals affected.

“We regret not acting faster to sort things out.”

It goes on: “I realise that simply apologising is not enough. Our business was founded on the idea that a free and open press should be a positive force in society.

“We need to live up to this. In the coming days, as we take further concrete steps to resolve these issues and make amends for the damage they have caused, you will hear more from us.”

The Milly Dowler phone hacking has forced Prime Minister David Cameron — he, too met the Dowler family at 10 Downing Street — to order an inquiry presided over by a judge, make recommendations on how to curb the excesses of the press and reduce corruption in the police, and suggest guidelines on the behaviour of politicians.

Some fear that in the future, politicians will have to enter every lunch or dinner with a journalist into a register of interests.

Partly as a result of the crisis caused by the Milly Dowler affair, the News of the World has been shut down after 168 years with 200 journalists losing their jobs.

Yesterday’s resignation of Rebekah Brooks, the News International chief executive who was editor of the News of the World when Milly’s phone was hacked in 2002, was followed by that of one of Murdoch’s closest allies.

Les Hinton, 67, who had worked with Murdoch for 57 years, resigned as chief executive of The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones, a news wire service, the first senior casualty in America.

Hinton, who was executive chairperson of News International in the UK from 1995 to 2007 — the period when the mobile phones of 4,000 people, none of them Indian, are said to have been hacked — apologised in his resignation letter for the “pain caused to innocent people”.

Yesterday, another of Murdoch’s best-selling newspapers, The Sun, was threatened with legal action by actor Jude Law who claimed four stories about him published in the daily tabloid in 2005 and 2006 were based on hacked intercepted voicemails.

Now that the Americans seem poised to start their own separate inquiries into whether there was also hacking of mobile phones of 9/11 victims and their relatives, no one is able to predict where this will end for Murdoch’s once invincible empire.