Was the phone-hacking scandal all just a dream?

How could we have forgotten the first rule of our national life: nothing every really changes?

Rupert Murdoch leaving his home in London last year (AFP/Getty)

In happier days not so long ago, no Season was complete without an elegant, swelegant Park Lane party. Amid the summer highlights, alongside Henley and Wimbledon, was the night The Sun took a hotel ballroom to thank our coppers for doing their jobs.

Sad to report, the Police Bravery Awards fell victim to the phone-hacking scandal that swallowed the News of the World. Eventually, after years of bravely dodging its duty, the Met was forced to prosecute illegal activities within the Murdoch empire as if they were crimes. This time, The Sun couldn’t celebrate the police for doing their job, and abandoned the event.

Perhaps last week’s announcement by the Crown Prosecution Service that the book on phone hacking has been closed will thaw relations. If The Sun thinks it too soon to reprise that event, it could show its proprietor’s gratitude by booking the Grosvenor House for the inaugural Police Cowardice Awards.

What attention was paid to that CPS decision has centred on the Mirror Group, none of whose employees will be charged despite the firm’s admission in a civil case that they intercepted phone messages. I suppose one should feign a little shock about this disinclination to prosecute further to actual admissions, but experience of London’s finest makes it hard. Ten years ago, Met officers apprehended two men in the car they had stolen from outside my house. No charges were brought.

While I never entirely grasped that, we can all understand why the CPS and police are throwing in the towel. The law has no stomach for the fight after various acquittals, most notably Rebekah Brooks’, and the torrent of abuse heaped on it by former friends in the popular prints.

But this is an older, deeper story than the novelty of the police being battered by red-tops whose self-righteousness survives the exposure of their grubby misdemeanours. This is a classic establishment fix.

In this immorality tale, the police and the Mirror belong to the supporting cast, while the headline acts are the Government and Rupert Murdoch. The significant CPS announcement is not about individuals being off the hook, but that there will be no corporate prosecutions. This absolves not only Trinity Mirror, but Murdoch’s empire. He may, if he chooses, now revive his bid for a 100 per cent stake in BSkyB that the Millie Dowler scandal waylaid.

Then again, he knew a while ago the storm had passed and that the status quo ante was restored. He knew it on election night, when the exit poll showed that Cameron would return to power. And if he didn’t know it then, he certainly knew it when John Whittingdale was made Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport. If that was Cameron’s sweet way of repaying the entire right-wing press for its tireless demonisation of Ed Miliband, above all it was a gift to Rupert Murdoch.

He and Whittingdale go back. Whitters was Thatcher’s political secretary in the 1980s, when her relationship with Rupert was so beguilingly symbiotic. In 1990, when it was rumoured that the Sunday Times would back Michael Heseltine to remove her, Whittingdale threatened through an intermediary to go above the head of its editor, Andrew Neil, and complain directly to Murdoch. Asked once in a questionnaire which media figure he most admired, Whittingdale named Murdoch.

With Whittingdale installed as media overseer, Murdoch was emboldened to restore Rebekah Brooks to the post of chief executive officer, the position she held when the company was brought to its knees. In this surreal fairy tale, Brooks is Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. A tornado of public outrage picked her up and deposited her in a strange and menacing world. But after enduring various trials – not least the one in Southwark Crown Court from which she emerged without a stain on her character – she clicked the ruby slippers thrice and awoke back in Kansas as if it had been no more than a bad dream. There’s no place like home, is there? Especially when you can keep your £16m pay-off intact.

As for the mighty judicial Oz whose impotence was cruelly exposed by the pulling back of a curtain, Lord Leveson will wonder what possible point to his work there has been. Not only were the recommendations he made, on which David Cameron promised to act, duly ignored. He was scheduled to hold a second enquiry concentrating on hacking. Whether this examination of what Tom Watson called “a mafia family” would have been as compelling as the original, we will never know. Leveson 2 will now be quietly forgotten.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is that. For a few weeks in 2011, when people such as Boris Johnson lined up to sound horrified, it seemed that Murdoch’s tenure as an axis power was over. For 30 years, he had ruled with government and police in the tripartite alliance forged at Wapping. When he fell out with one PM, as with John Major, he crushed him and renewed the alliance with the next. But when one of his titles fell out with the law, it fleetingly looked like the end of him.

How could we have forgotten the first rule of national life: nothing ever really changes? The News of the World went, Andy Coulson did his porridge as a fall guy must, and the company changed its name in an subtle piece of rebranding. But after all the sound and fury, we find Boris as relaxed about Murdoch as the next wannabe PM, while the police wave us along with a breezy “Show’s over, folks, nothing to see here”.

Here in the plus ça change capital of the world we are, just like Mrs Brooks, back where we were before we knew that Murdoch’s munchkins listened to a murdered schoolgirl’s messages. It may not be too long before the Sun Police Bravery Awards return to Park Lane after all.