Culture Secretary Karen Bradley has passed the buck over the Murdoch family's Sky takeover

OfCom's report gave the Government the cover it needed to leave the competition watchdog on the horns of a nasty dilemma

Rupert Murdoch's bid for Sky will be delayed for six months while the CMA investigates (Getty)

Whether to allow Rupert Murdoch’s Fox to proceed with its planned takeover of Sky represents perhaps the most important decision of Culture Secretary Karen Bradley’s career.

So, of course, she’s passed the buck. So much easier to leave it to the Competition & Markets Authority.

Communications regulator OfCom provided her with all the cover she needed to do that, opining that 21 Century Fox’s £11.7bn deal to take full control of the satellite broadcaster raised “serious questions” about the concentration of media power in Britain.

This it does. The Murdoch family’s publishing interests have been hived off from its broadcasting interests. It has forcefully argued that the two separate companies (News Corp being the other) have their own shareholder bases and their own independent directors. Move along, nothing to see here.

But, as critics have pointed out, Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch somehow manage to share the chairmanships of both. James Murdoch runs Fox as CEO, while also sitting on the board of News Corp. The Murdoch Family Trust is the biggest single shareholder in the two, and rules the roost.

So, despite the offer of remedies, such as a pledge to maintain the funding for Sky News and to secure its editorial independence, OfCom had ample grounds to raise concerns, quite apart from the old fit and proper test which seems to have got lost in all this.

The publishing business’s problems with phone hacking may be receding in the rearview mirror, but the sexual harassment scandals at the aggressively partisan Fox News, the string of settlements, and the fallout from them? Very much in the headlights.

“Ofcom’s report is unambiguous. It concludes ‘the transaction raises public interest concerns as a result of the risk of increased influence by members of the Murdoch Family Trust over the UK news agenda and the political process, with its unique presence on radio, television, in print and online,” Ms Bradley said.

So over to the CMA, whose staff will no doubt now be calling their GPs in search of migraine pills to keep them going for the next six months.

It will be all the more galling for them as Ms Bradley will be able to get back to doing what Culture Secretaries do: going to the theatre, waving a scarf at the footie, cheering along the athletes at London 2017.

As for the Murdochs? They’ll have every reason to be very supportive of the Conservative Government now, however weak and regardless of what it does over Brexit.

If the current Government fails, as it still might very well do despite the Faustian pact signed with the Democratic Unionist Party, there is no way a Government led by Jeremy Corbyn would allow the deal to proceed.

That would, in effect, rescue the CMA from the horns of a nasty dilemma. The Labour leader might just have acquired a few new fans for himself at CMA Towers. All together now: “Ooooh, Jeremy Corbyn.”