(The following article originally ran in today's Guardian. It has been re-posted here in full, with permission.)

Well, well, well. There's some crisis management for you.

The second most remarkable development in a remarkable week of revelation, revulsion and late-onset outrage was the shuttering of the News of the World. Even when the advertisers began to bail, I'm pretty sure no sentient being imagined Rupert Murdoch would close a profitable business. The conventional wisdom over the voicemail-hacking scandal was to expect a lot of apologising, some surgical scapegoating and a tissue of Nixonian lies.

But, no, the surgery turns out to be an amputation of a limb as financially healthy as it was morally moribund. Could this have been an act of conscience? Expiation? Self-sacrifice?