There is much for the Commons select committee on the media to ask Rupert Murdoch about in relation to the tape recording of him that was published last week by the investigative journalists of Exaro.What with alleged corruption of officials, threatening revenge against the police and the grievances of his own staff at the Sun, there may not be time to probe the media mogul’s odder remarks.

This will be a pity, because they were certainly odd. For example, he told Sun staff that News International had panicked when the hacking scandal finally blew open in 2011 because ‘all the press were screaming and yelling’. Yes, he said the publishers of the Sun and the News of the World were unable to cope with a press frenzy.

Then there was this:‘ . . . we’re being picked on. I think that it was the old right-wing establishment, Puttnam, or worse, the left-wing get-even crowd of Gordon Brown. . . We got caught with dirty hands, I guess, with the News of the World, and everybody piled in. It was get-even time for things that were done with the Sun over 40 years.’

So it was the right wing, and the left, and Lord Puttnam for good measure, plus everybody the Sun had attacked over 40 years. And if this seems a little paranoid, there was more, because he soon added:‘I know what you’re saying. Where would I, or the Sun, be most unpopular? It would be with the judges.’

While Murdoch was quick to blame others for the plight of his employees, this man who pleaded humility before the Commons media select committee once before was remarkably slow to take responsibility of his own, or accept it on behalf of his son James.

Challenged about the police treatment of employees who insisted they had been loyally doing their jobs, he said: ‘I’m just as annoyed as you are at the police, but you’re taking it out on me instead.’

Whan another Sun journalist said his colleagues felt the company was using them as scapegoats, Murdoch replied: ‘Yeah. And one of those high-priced lawyers would say it’s our fault.’

This lawyer gripe came up several times. ‘And the lawyers just got rich going through millions of emails’, he complained at one point.

When reference was made to James Murdoch, the lawyers got it again. A letter from the wife of a reporter was read out, and it noted that ‘while the master of this drama [James] has been sent to America to do some fancy new job, he’s left behind a huge mess’. Murdoch failed to respond to this, instead saying of the letter: ‘That’s very moving . . I’ll go and shove it down the throat of the company lawyers.’

Brian Cathcart is Executive Director of Hacked Off