The writing, of course, has been on the wall since January, when the European commission concluded that full Murdoch ownership of BSkyB "would not significantly impede effective competition in the European Economic Area or any substantial part of it". There was the Europe Rupert hates giving him a definitive nod on most of the arguments critics of the deal advance most passionately, leaving nothing but minor manoeuvrings over Sky News control for Jeremy Hunt and perhaps, now, judicial reviewers as midsummer turns to autumn.
Doom, gloom, the end of civilisation and "a loss of integrity and independence" that must be opposed because there is "already too much concentration of global media ownership" which Murdoch and his company "misuses for personal, political and business interests".
But those quotes from Jim Ottaway, the newspaperman whose family owned a chunk of Dow Jones and feared the worst if the Wall Street Journal fell into Murdoch hands, are four years old now. And what does Ottaway declare today? "I have to say that many of the things I said and feared Rupert Murdoch would do he has not," he told a Bloomberg TV special last week. His WSJ "is nowhere near as awful as I thought it might be".
So cross fingers, hope, and (perforce) beware awful warnings.
■ Think Didier Drogba and Fernando Torres. Then think Richard Littlejohn and Kelvin Mackenzie, the columnist who replaced him at the Sun in 2005. Now Kelvin is off to the Mail, where Littlejohn presides – and it's the former who gets the TV time that adds circulation clout. Two saloon bar strikers in the same forward line? Don't bank on it. One moment, as Drogba might say to Littlejohn, you're scoring goals: the next, you're on the bench of history.
