What broadsheet journalists think about the phone hacking scandal is clear enough. Read my newspaper, the Observer, the Guardian or the New York Times and you will see that we believe that the News of the World has been engaged in widespread criminality, which a scared Scotland Yard has failed to investigate properly. (For an explanation of why it is criminal read this piece by the campaigning solicitor David Allen Green, who to my mind is one of the best bloggers in Britain.) The conviction of Clive Goodman, the News of the World's Royal Correspondent, and Glen Mulcaire, the private investigator, who hacked messages for him, ought to be the start of a longer criminal process. Thousands of people's phones were hacked, we suspect, and Andy Coulson, the News of the World's editor, and now aide to that nice David Cameron, knew what was going on.

   Now, Coulson must have known what Goodman was doing because he signed off the expenses. (If he did not, then he was a remarkably stupid editor.) But finding out what his former colleagues think of him is a hard task.

In the Observer today I look at the media's hatred of Tony Blair, which is building up in the advance of the release of his autobiography. The most distasteful manifestation of the mania is the conspiracy theory that Blair covered up the "murder" of David Kelly and maybe...

To my mind it is obvious that Labour is in a great deal of trouble, and that the only candidate who can get them out of it is David Miliband. More than half of the electorate voted for the Conservatives and Liberals in the 2010 election. To win some of them back Labour is going to have to start winning arguments in those swathes of southern and central England where supporting Labour is now a minority interest on a par with water divining or train spotting. David Miliband strikes me as an intelligent politician who can appeal to moderates. Moreover, he is the only candidate who you could imagine as prime minister. Choosing him seems so obvious a step to take as to be no choice at all.

Reporters do not always treat subs well. On occasion, when pushed beyond endurance by the cutting of our best lines, or a puritan purge of all our gags, we tell the old joke about the plane carrying a sub and a reporter crashing in the Sahara. For three days they walk through the burning heat until finally they collapse, skin burning, throats parched, at the base of a huge sand dune. 'Let us just climb to the top of the dune,' croaks the reporter.

Jews get the blame in every great crisis, and it was inevitable that conspiracy theorists would blame them for the foreign policy crisis of the early 21^st century.

What distinguishes our time, however, is that elements within western liberalism now adopt the position once associated with European reaction. I noticed that there was much grumbling in Standpoint's letters column after the editor pointed out that the supposedly leftist and supposedly serious London Review of Books had been promoting anti-Semitism rather than say the Spectator or Mail as one would have expected in the 1930s. However loudly readers complained, they could not deny that the LRB had been the first to offer its "enlightened" readers the conspiracy theory of John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt that the "Israel Lobby" had taken America into the second Iraq War. "For the past several decades, and especially since the Six-Day War in 1967, the centrepiece of US Middle Eastern policy has been its relationship with Israel," the authors intoned. "Pressure from Israel and the Lobby was not the only factor behind the decision to attack Iraq in March 2003, but it was critical."

The leaked Afghan war documents show that the trouble with the Net is that every liberating feature its boosters claim as a virtue is also a vice. In the pre-computer age, a mole could not have got 90,000 documents out of a military base and to a journalist without being arrested. Nor for that matter could a disaffected worker in Parliament copy all the receipts of all the expense claims of 650 MPs and deliver them to the Telegraph. He would need to spend the best part of a morning loading them into a removal van, rather than slipping a couple of computer discs into his pocket, and the odds are the security guards would have realised a crime was going down long before he had heaved in the last box.