Wendi Deng shows MPs how it's done

The biggest day in the history of Westminster’s select committees ended with a pie, flimsily constructed, largely missing its target. It was, perhaps, a fitting lack of accuracy; Parliament is yet to catch its breath from the overpowering collective anticipation which gripped the estate from the first hours of Tuesday morning, but a sense of missed opportunity was spreading long before the pie-wielding protestor made his clumsy move on Rupert Murdoch. Perhaps the committee should take lessons from Wendi Deng, the Chinese-born wife of Rupert who leapt to her husband's protection and returned the pie with ferocious speed and accuracy into its creator’s baffled face. Because by this point, two-and-a-half hours into the most anticipated select committee hearing in Parliamentary history, momentum was decreasing faster than the career prospects of the hastily evicted pie-man. A few hours previously, the arrival of the Murdochs, Rupert and his son James, had turned select committee corridor into a more popular destination than any time in its history: as one colleague wistfully noted, getting into the committee room in question felt rather like trying to watch a band who he had followed from its earliest unheralded days suddenly develop a vast crowd of eager fans. Outside, the entrance to Parliament was lined with untouched copies of the Socialist Worker, megaphone-wielding protestors offering a limited rotation of anti-Murdoch chants – an attempted take on Queen's 'Another One Bites the Dust" fell after half a chorus – and primitive placards, and a crowd of excitable cameramen filming the queue of increasingly unexcited would be gallows-watchers. Amongst them, the Parliamentary press pack lined up with the public, taking it in turns to head off for sandwich-runs while rumours of an ever-decreasing guest-list were passed on. This was worse than the one-in/on-out stamina test of a provincial nightclub; for hours the rule was no-one in, full stop. And by now the megaphone was draining the will to persist. Eventually, however, the doors were opened to the bizarre setting of Parliament's Portcullis House. There was John Yates, the recently ex-assistant commissioner of the Met, sitting alone, waiting for his own select committee appearance elsewhere; researchers loitered on corners for a glimpse of the star witness; one-time Lib Dem and Hello aficionado Lembit Opik wandered the corridors, undisturbed; Jemima Khan could only find space in an overflow TV room; doorkeepers turned people away from a slightly smaller room than the one initially promised. Then a crack team of News International lawyers, Wendi, and executives marched into the committee room, clearing the way for Rupert himself, flanked by policemen, grinning sheepishly, and staring at the hacks who watched on slightly desperately – this correspondent included – with camera phones in handed. The door shut, a morning spent queuing ended where it began – at the desk, watching the television, and waiting for something to happen. It didn’t begin with a statement from Rupert. He wanted to tell everyone that this was the "most humble day of his life", craftily securing tomorrow's headlines before the committee could write them. But chairman John Whittingdale wouldn't let him, and instead the committee went straight to the questioning. First up, the hero of the hour, News International tormentor-in-chief, Tom Watson. He soon revealed something rather unexpected. Rupert Murdoch, the man who successive governments and prime ministers had courted so obsessively, looked lost. He couldn’t hear the questions. He paused at length to gather his thoughts. He didn’t know the answers. "I'm not aware" or "I wasn't aware at the time" or "I didn't know of it" were stock answers when the words “yes” or “no” didn’t suffice, his more rambling offerings accompanied by a bizarrely rhythmic thumping of the table in front him. Oh, and he'd never even heard of Neville Thurlbeck, the scoop-making NotW reporter arrested for alleged involvement in phone hacking. More than once he suggested that his son James was better-placed to answer, and each time Watson refused. "I'll come to your son in a minute" Watson replied, later telling an anxious and interrupting James: "Your father is responsible for corporate governance – it's revealing what he doesn’t know." But no-one, it seems, had felt like briefing the older Murdoch, or perhaps they were too scared too. James, on the other hand, appeared to be the master in the lengthy answer, his strangely robotic mid-Atlantic drawl throwing out words like "paragon" and "quantum" in a vocabulary stunted by a lifetime’s education in the corporate classroom. "I don't want to be a legalistic; I'm not a lawyer" insisted James Murdoch over and over again as MPs strayed into territory too easily dismissed, although his reliance on corporatese was rather more effective as he made his case. His father used more human terms, admitting to being "ashamed at what had happened", and "absolutely shocked, appalled, and ashamed" when he heard about the phone-hacking of the murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler. It may have been well-rehearsed, but that was pretty much as good as it got for the committee when it came to seeking blame. For once Watson tagged out of the ring, his colleagues headed off on a range of solo adventures, all of which eased pressure off the Murdochs.The father may have looked too old to know the answers, and the son too inexperienced to address the questions, but their double act grew in confidence as the session dragged on. Philip Davies got lost in the workings of the News of the World: "Perhaps I lost sight of" the paper said Murdoch Snr, adding, dismissively, that maybe that was because "it was too small." Therese Coffey asked if the paper had been closed down due to commercial reasons. "Far from it" was the reply. Alan Keen, when not addressing, butler-esque, “Mr Rupert”, went for the killer question of asking James to summarise his career to date. Murdoch Snr also told Jim Sheridan he entered Downing Street throw the back door because that's what he had been told to do. "I just did what I was told" and David Cameron, he added, wanted to thank him for his support. If they weren’t already set in a permanent grimace, Cameron’s features will have grimaced at that. Finally Louise Mensch, whose shrill shriek accompanied the pie-man's attack, closed by asking Murdoch senior if he had ever thought about resigning. "No" came the blunt reply. "The people I trusted have let us down and behaved disgracefully and betrayed me. And I'm the best person to clear this up." And with that the 80-year-old, whose day began by being smuggled past the protestors outside Parliament, was given the chance to make his humble statement, a lengthy and decisive apology for all that had gone wrong at the News of the World. Now in shirtsleeves after the pie run-in, Murdoch looked rather old, rather harmless, rather vulnerable, but indisputably remaining at the top of News Corps. And Mensch praised his courage, John Whittingdale, the committee chairman, apologised for the "common assault" he had suffered, while Tom Watson even contemplated Wendi for her "left hook". The biggest day in select committee history had produced the most unlikely of endings: Rupert Murdoch left with dignity intact, determinedly in charge, and perhaps with some degree of public sympathy. The committee and the pie-thrower, on the other hand, can reflect on a target, which at long last had sat before them, frustratingly missed.