The circular firing squad takes aim

First the News of the World, now Piers Morgan. The phone hacking scandal looks set to claim another big scalp.

Forget the quotes which are being dredged up from years ago to try and definitively nail an admission that everyone's favourite former Fleet Street editor knew and/or encouraged phone hacking.

Instead, look at the end of the supposedly damning quote he gave to Kirsty Young on Desert Island Discs, of all places, in 2009 - relating not just to phone hacking but taking covert photographs and raking through bins.

A lot of it was done by third parties. That's not to defend it, because obviously you were running the results of their work. I'm quite happy to have to sit here defending all these things I used to get up to. I simply say the net of people doing it was very wide and certainly encompassed the high and low end of the newspaper market.

Love Piers or loathe him, that's surely exactly right. It also sums up the situation on Fleet Street as a whole. 

Just as we predicted back in January, and just like the MPs' expenses story did, the phone hacking story has spiralled out of all proportion.

Whether or not Piers Morgan was personally implicated in the practice - and on this his explicit denial that he has 'never hacked a phone, told anyone to hack a phone, nor to my knowledge published any story obtained from hacking a phone' leaves him little room for manouevre - the practice, as this Press Gazette story from 2006 shows so clearly, was extremely widespread throughout Fleet Street.

Now, in 2011, through a combination of dogged investigative journalism from Nick Davies, a desire to take down Rupert Murdoch from the Guardian, a thirst for revenge from MPs and silly season hysteria from the general public, we have collectively woken up and decided it is beyond the pale. Hacking the voicemail of poor Milly Dowler and 7/7 victims was of course an appalling and unjustifiable invasion of privacy - and it was such an appalling and unjustifiable invasion of privacy that all the journalistic 'dark arts', which a few years ago, rightly or wrongly, were commonplace on the wink and the nod, have been tainted by association.

Put bluntly, Piers Morgan is right. Hundreds if not thousands of journalists who have worked on Fleet Street, many of whom are still working on Fleet Street, knew about phone hacking and other underhand - and at the time standard - journalistic practices. Not everyone personally engaged in that kind of activity themselves, of course. But whether you work on a tabloid or a broadsheet, you knew about, or if you didn't your colleague knew about it, and your editor almost certainly knew about it. We need to decide now - journalists, MPs, the police and the public - if we really want to hound out everyone involved, and prosecute everyone to the full extent of the law.

Before he switched to gunning for Piers Morgan, the blogger Guido Fawkes took a philosophical view of phone hacking, arguing that in pursuing the story journalists were acting as a 'Circular Firing Squad'. If we keep pulling the trigger, we all go down...