After nearly two and a half hours of dry technical questioning by those MPs, there was a moment of drama. A man lunging towards Rupert Murdoch and his wife Wendi, who was sitting behind him leaping up and appearing to wallop the assailant with her right arm. So what do we learn from the committee hearing? The question I put to Fraser Nelson, the political editor of the UK's Spectator magazine.

" Well, not so much actually, other than the fact that Rupert Murdoch's wife has got a very good left punch. We didn't hear very much more about the hacking scandal than we did know already. There were little bits revolve. Rebekah Brooks, for example, claims that George Osborne was the one who hired Andy Coulson to be David Cameron's spin doctor. - relatively small parts of the on-going soap opera, which we've been treated to in Britain over the last couple of years. "

If we didn't learn very much, whose fault was that? Was that because of a certain evasiveness on the part of the Murdochs and Rebekah Brooks, or was it because of an inadequate, if you'd like, line of questioning from the MPs?

" I was pretty unimpressed by the calibre of questioning from the MPs on that committee. A lot of them didn't seem to know the brief very well. They seem to be asking questions to try to get some dramatic advantage out of, I think, Rupert Murdoch there, rather than asking him relative straight questions that, for example, a lawyer might have asked him. I suspect that even Rupert Murdoch left there thinking he'd had a relatively easy ride. "

--

--