The televised inquisition conducted by a select committee of Britain’s parliament, starring the Murdochs and their star employee, Rebekah Brooks, was riveting political theatre. This public grilling has come at the end of an eventful fortnight. The country’s largest selling Sunday tabloid has been shut down, the world’s greatest media tycoon is in the dock, his bid to buy the British satellite television platform, BSkyB, has been withdrawn, his son’s claim to succeed him as head of News Corp has been fatally damaged and the British prime minister has hurried back from a visit to South Africa attended by wild rumours that he, like Britain’s top policemen, might be forced to resign. Someone from Mars (or an uninformed desi) watching from the sidelines might wonder how many died and what part this all-star cast had had in killing them.

A death did, in fact, trigger this chain of events, but it occurred nearly 10 years ago. In 2002, an English schoolgirl, Amanda ‘Milly’ Dowler, was kidnapped and later murdered. A fortnight ago, the Guardian reported that her voicemail had been illegally hacked into by a private investigator working for the News of the World. He had deleted messages from the voicemail inbox so that he could eavesdrop on any new messages that might come in. When Milly’s family discovered that her voicemail inbox had been emptied, they assumed she was still alive. The Guardian’s revelation that a tabloid had tampered with a dead girl’s phone messages for the sake of lurid headlines provoked the public revulsion that led to this sequence of mea culpas, resignations and corporate and political disasters.

Historians will understand this scandal in a variety of ways. If it leads to stricter press self-regulation, it will be seen as a tipping point when the predatory, lawless journalism practiced by Britain’s tabloids was finally reined in. The phone-hacking affair will certainly be seen as a landmark when the history of the nexus between the press, politicians and the police in Britain is written. The unwillingness of Scotland Yard to investigate credible reports that phone hacking was endemic in Murdoch’s newspapers and the willingness of David Cameron, the British prime minister, to appoint the former editor of the News of the World as his media advisor (despite the fact that Andy Coulson had been forced to resign as editor of the NoW by early reports of phone hacking on his watch) tell us something significant about the extent to which politicians and policemen had been corrupted by the political clout of Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers.

Policemen were paid by News International for information; a former deputy editor of the NoW was hired as a part-time media advisor to the Metropolitan Police; senior policemen were given lucrative newspaper columns in Murdoch’s papers after they retired, and the Guardian was repeatedly told by the police that its investigation of phone hacking was overstated and unnecessary. The everyday, almost casual corruption of the British police by a powerful media corporation is perhaps the most interesting by-product of the phone-hacking scandal.

Historically, its most significant impact on British public life might well be the liberation of Britain’s political leaders from the felt need to ingratiate themselves with Murdoch’s newspapers. Cameron, in a speech, made the remarkable admission that Britain’s politicians had been too intimate with the owners and editors of tabloids for electoral reasons. Over the past two decades we were treated to the stomach-churning sight of the Labour Party under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown suck up to the most rightwing press baron in the world, hoping for his political endorsement.

Before the Conservatives came to power, Cameron employed Coulson, the former editor of the NoW, to be the Tory press guru because he felt it was essential to have someone intimately connected with Murdoch’s tabloids on board. Politically it was a good decision: Murdoch’s papers endorsed the Conservatives before the last general election. Already friendly with the chief executive of News International, Rebekah Brooks, Cameron allowed her to persuade him to re-employ Coulson as the government’s media advisor once he became prime minister. He did this despite the warnings his office received about Coulson’s complicity in the phone-hacking affair; one of these warnings was delivered by the Guardian’s editor, Alan Rusbridger.

It’s unlikely that Cameron’s appalling decision to ignore these cautions and bring into the heart of government a man tainted by tabloid scandal will cost him his prime ministership. Unless new evidence demonstrates that he knew of Coulson’s complicity in phone hacking before he appointed him, he is guilty of no more than very bad judgment. He has been politically damaged by the scandal but not disabled.

For bystanders on the liberal Left, the great bonus of the phone-hacking affair is that it unfolds like some progressive fable. The humiliated arch-villain is that old right-winger, Rupert Murdoch. Amongst its main casualties are his son, James, and his favourite employee, the shaggy redhead, Rebekah Brooks, who lost her job at News International despite Murdoch’s strenuous attempts to protect her. A plausible, high-flying Conservative prime minister has been abruptly brought down to earth. The ripples of this earthquake have been felt in America where Murdoch presides over both the top end and the low end of rightwing discourse through his ownership of the Wall Street Journal and Fox News respectively. There’s some talk that federal agencies might investigate News Corp, the parent organization, on charges of bribery and corruption.

Even if this doesn’t come to pass, the good thing from a non-Neanderthal perspective is that a rightwing behemoth’s serial shenanigans have been satisfactorily exposed and it has been put on notice. Better still, the hero of this story is every liberal’s favourite paper, the Guardian. Rebekah Brooks is alleged to have said in the course of the Guardian’s investigation of phone hacking that her dream was to see its editor, Alan Rusbridger, on his knees begging for mercy. As it turned out, it was the Guardian’s patient reportage that precipitated Brooks’s resignation from the News International, the closure of the NoW and the summoning of the Murdochs, father and son, to a public inquisition.

In a world that lives in the shadow of America’s interminable ‘war against terror’ (for which Murdoch beat the drum) it isn’t often that liberals find a story in real life that neatly follows a progressive script. So when we do stumble across such a story, especially one where the villains get their comeuppance, we are allowed to gloat. The shuttering of a feral tabloid, the sacking of an arch-priestess of scandal and the goring of a malignant media warlord is a good time for a little schadenfreude. Liberals must never become so high-minded that they forget how to savour an enemy’s defeat. In the wise words of that great liberal gadfly, Gore Vidal: “To succeed is not enough; others must fail.”