Andrew Vine: Shameful, callous and revolting... the scandal that debases press and police

But as the hours ebb away, and the faces of the police officers become grimmer, it is ever harder to hang on to hope, to push away the growing realisation that something is very wrong.

This is what the parents of Milly Dowler went through. This, too, is the torture the parents of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman had to endure. There were no happy endings for these three families as the knock on the door dashed all hope, finally, irrevocably, and in doing so brought down the worst horror that any parent can suffer – the loss of a child, made yet more unbearable by the knowledge that their daughter had been murdered.

If the mind instinctively struggles to understand the depth of pain that these people just like the rest of us suffered, so too it struggles to understand the mindset behind the furtive, squalid and morally repugnant intrusions into these ruined lives in the name of journalism.

Until now, the phone-hacking scandal has, by and large, not made much impact on the public at large, even though it has rumbled on for some five years as it wound through a botched Metropolitan Police inquiry, a probe by MPs that failed to get to the heart of the matter, and above all, the shifty evasiveness of News International, the immensely powerful media conglomerate that owns the News of the World.

All that has changed. This is no longer about tittle-tattle in the London media village, nor even about celebrities who put their private lives on public show for gain when it suits them. Even those who are most shameless about playing the publicity game are entitled to a private life and should expect to be able to leave and receive phone messages without them being intercepted.

Suddenly, though, this is altogether more serious. This is about intrusion into, and the possible impeding of, the investigation of crimes of the utmost seriousness for the sake of headlines in a red-top newspaper.

Worse, viewed from the standpoint of the sort of basic human decency that appears not to exist within elements of News International, in the case of Milly Dowler it very possibly misled both her parents and the police into believing she was still alive because messages on her phone were being deleted.

How base. How callous. How revolting. How heartbreaking for Mr and Mrs Dowler, who surely will now recall with pain, and possibly entirely justified bitterness, moments when their hopes that Milly was still alive were revived by the knowledge that her phone was being accessed.

They are the unwitting victims of a tangled, stinking web of unholy alliances and unaccountable influence that raise profound and disturbing questions about judgment at the heart of government, the impartiality of sections of the police, and the plurality of a media relied upon by the people of Britain for its news.

Two organisations have been central to these questions since this dirty affair first crept out from under the stone where it had been so carefully hidden. One is Rupert Murdoch’s News International. The other is the Metropolitan Police.

The two have been linked not only by the failure of the Met to properly investigate hacking allegations, but also by the revelation that officers within it accepted backhanders in exchange for information – possibly that enabled the hacking to take place, and possibly a factor in the lackadaisical nature of its investigation.

What a neat and grubby vicious circle that creates. So far, so bad. It does, though, get worse. Politicians of both major parties have long sucked up to Mr Murdoch and his acolytes in the hope that his mass-market titles will bestow their benedictions upon them come election time.

The Prime Minister is no exception. Indeed, it is a matter of record that he has socialised with Rebekah Brooks, editor of the News of the World when the hacking of Milly’s phone took place and now the head of Mr Murdoch’s British operation. What does this say about David Cameron’s judgment when it comes to News International? Let us not forget that he has form in this area, his ex-spin doctor being Andy Coulson, who resigned as editor of the News of the World when one of its reporters was convicted of hacking Prince William’s mobile phone.

All of which would be unsettling enough were it not also to fall to Mr Cameron’s Government to decide if News International should be allowed to take over BSkyB, a decision that now, whichever way it goes, is inevitably tainted with the stench of the phone-hacking scandal and gives new urgency to the concerns that Mr Murdoch’s organisation simply wields too much power in Britain’s broadcast and print media.

What a muddy and shameful affair this all is, debasing as it has both the British press and the police force that is supposed to set standards for the rest to follow.

The answers are clear – a rigorous, impartial police investigation, prosecutions of those who have broken the law, the sweeping away of backroom influence and the expunging from public life of those who would wield it. The memories of Milly, Holly and Jessica demand no less.