Tom A. Watson

You know, fate intervened. I went on to the DCMS committee to have a quieter life before the phone hacking scandal broke, and then ended up investigating the company that had libelled me previously when I was a minister.

And obviously, with hindsight now, now knowing what went on in the company, it would have been absolutely appropriate back then for us to have the chief executive of the company, most senior person in the United Kingdom, come and answer for the policy they were pursuing. And we ducked that, and frankly that's a failure of Parliament.

I have to say obviously it is not illegal for people to go to dinner and to socialise and take hospitality off members of the media organisations, but it was the scale and the timing and the frequency of contact that I thought was shocking.

You look at the pillars of the state: politics, the media, police, lawyers - they've all got their formal role, and then nestling above that is that power elite who are networked in through soft, social links, that are actually running the show. Why didn't I know that 10 years ago, and why didn't I rail against it? Why did I become part of it?