Meanwhile, back in the real world....

Once again, the week concludes with phone-hacking back at the top of the political agenda, as MPs discuss a possible fresh grilling for News International's James Murdoch amid more conflicting tales about who knew what and when.

Sure, it's all very entertaining, especially for those of us who have spent years longing to see the Murdoch Empire cut down to size, and in view of his long-standing links with the NI crowd, it remains a potentially toxic story for Prime Minister David Cameron.

But sometimes the inevitable media firestorm around stories such as these can detract from the really big issues facing the country, the ones that affect peoples' lives on a day-to-day level.

And for most people, not least in the North-East, the really big issue remains the fragile state of the economy and its impact on jobs.

The publication of the three-monthly GDP figures on Tuesday saw a brief, almost evanescent shift in the news agenda away from phone-hacking and onto the bigger economic picture.

The revelation that the economy grew by just 0.2pc in the last quarter will have come as no great surprise to anyone who has been attempting to run a business over the course of that period.

If the previous set of GDP figures in April, showing 0.5pc growth, were seen at the time as disappointing, then this week's were truly dismal.

The country may have avoided a double-dip recession – but it has done so only by the skin of its teeth, and there seems no great reason to suggest we are anywhere near being out of the woods yet.

It was tempting to see George Osborne's attempts to pin the blame for the economy's continued sluggish performance on the Royal Wedding as part of a worrying pattern of behaviour on the part of the Chancellor.

After all, this is the man who found himself compared to a rail announcer of yore by blaming April's figures on the winter snows.

But maybe Mr Osborne had a point this time round. The confluence of the late Easter, the wedding, and the May Day Bank Holiday, though no fault of the government's, was scarcely helpful at a time when the economy is struggling to get into gear.

With the two four-day Bank Holiday weekends in succession, the country essentially took a 12-day holiday – helped by a patch of unseasonally warm weather.

For Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls, of course, all this is hogwash. The cause of the problem is neither the Royal nuptials nor the weather, but the government's austerity measures which he believes are continuing to choke-off any chance of a recovery.

If Mr Balls is still some way from winning the argument on this, I sense that his calls for a shift of focus from deficit reduction to growth is at least starting to be given a fairer hearing by the public.

And of course, the overall GDP figures serve to disguise the very real regional disparities in growth that exist within the UK – as Institute for Public Policy Research director Nick Pearce pointed out on Tuesday.

"Outside of London, in particular, the recession continues to be felt and the UK economy might as well still be in recession, even if technically it isn't," he said.

But it is not just Mr Balls who is keen to see more measures to stimulate growth. Tory succession-watchers will have been intrigued to see London Mayor Boris Johnson setting out his own alternative economic strategy this week, with tax cuts top of his agenda.

Much as Gordon Brown once did, Mr Osborne is keen to create an air of inevitability around himself as the Prime Minister's eventual successor, but as the man who recommended Andy Coulson, he has been damaged by phone-hacking and his handling of the economy is also coming in for increasing criticism.

Meanwhile Mr Johnson, whose own ambitions to lead the Conservative Party one day remain undimmed, is playing a blinder on both issues, with the countdown to the Olympics only likely to increase his profile still further.

BoJo is on the move. Watch this space.

Why Cameron is not out of the woods yet

Ever since the start of the crisis over phone hacking that has engulfed the worlds of politics, journalism and the police over the past three weeks, Prime Minister David Cameron had appeared to be stuck on the back foot.

Much as he himself once managed to make Gordon Brown seem leaden-footed in his response to the MPs' expenses crisis two years ago, Labour leader Ed Miliband had seemed to be making the political weather as the public backlash against News International intensified.

Fortunately for Mr Cameron, he is far too skilled a politician for it to have lasted forever and sure enough, this week saw him finally come out fighting.

Prime Ministers always have an inbuilt advantage in the game of politics in that, while opposition leaders can just talk, they can actually do – and this week it was an advantage Mr Cameron exploited to the full.

Cutting short his trip to Africa, he postponed the parliamentary recess by 24 hours, enabling an extra session of Prime Minister's Questions and an emergency statement on phone hacking to be squeezed in before the MPs' summer break.

But besides raising the morale of the Tory Party by showing a bit of grit and determination in the face of his Labour tormentors, did it actually do him any good?

Well, his admission that he should not have hired the former News of the World editor Andy Coulson as his press secretary will go part of the way towards defusing the issue which has dogged him since well before the start of the current media firestorm.

But as Mr Miliband was swift to point out, having regrets about the appointment does not get away from the fact that it was, as he put it "a catastrophic error of judgment."

Mr Cameron has still yet to satisfactorily explain why he chose to ignore so many warnings about the dangers of making Mr Coulson Downing Street communications director.

The suspicion persists that he adopted something of a wise monkey stance in relation to his trusted press adviser - 'see no evil, hear no evil, think no evil.'

The disclosure that his chief of staff Ed Llewellyn had refused a detailed briefing on phone-hacking from the police could be interpreted as wanting to protect the Prime Minister from any suggestion that he could influence the investigation.

But it could equally be the case that aides like Mr Llewellyn simply did not want to tell the Prime Minister what they knew he did not want to hear.

Wednesday's debate also provided a convenient platform for Labour MPs to raise some additional issues which have further muddied the waters in relation to Mr Coulson.

First, Labour MP Chris Bryant claimed that the Royal Family had raised concerns with Downing Street about Mr Coulson's appointment – which would be hardly surprising since most of them had had their phones hacked.

Then the highly-respected former local government minister Nick Raynsford suggested that Mr Coulson might actually have practised phone-hacking while in the role of Downing Street press secretary, with a senior government official as the victim.

The Cabinet Secretary denied it, but if this allegation were to turn out to be true, the situation would look very grave indeed for Mr Cameron.

But the biggest reason why the Prime Minister is not out of the woods yet on phone hacking is because the question of his longer-term political survival is not really about that.

It is, rather, about his relationship with his Liberal Democrat coalition partners.

Nick Clegg and his party had no option but to go into the coalition in May 2011. The arithmetic of going with Labour didn't stack up, and standing on the sidelines and inflicting another election on the public would not have been forgiven.

But having entered it, they have found over the past 14 months just what a rock and a hard place they were put in as a result of the inconclusive election outcome.

As I wrote at the start of this year, a team is only as strong as its weakest member, and such has been the slump in the Lib Dems' political fortunes since joining the coalition that they currently constitute a pretty broken reed.

It remains my view that, in order to stand a chance of holding onto its Southern power base in which the Tories are its main challengers, the party has to find a way to break up the coalition at a point of maximum advantage to itself and maximum disadvantage to Mr Cameron.

As the political season draws to a close, that essential dynamic that makes this such a potentially unstable alliance between the two partners remains unaltered.

Mr Cameron may think he is safe for now. But as Lloyd George found, in a coalition, you are only ever as safe as your partners allow you to be.

Murdoch's power has been broken. Could Cameron's be next?

For the past thirty years, the British political establishment has been in thrall to Rupert Murdoch - the 24th member of Tony Blair's Cabinet as he was once dubbed.

In the course of that period, his media empire has variously decided the outcome of elections, dictated the membership of Cabinets, shaped policies on a wide range of issues and even influenced whether or not the country went to war.

But this Wednesday, the worm finally turned as the Australian media tycoon's bid to buy 100pc of BSkyB was swept away in the storm that has engulfed him in the wake of the phone-hacking scandal.

It was as if three decades of pent-up resentment had suddenly been unleashed in a torrent , as the politicians who have been forced to kow-tow to Murdoch all that time finally broke free of his yoke.

There is a certain historical irony in the fact that it was the dear old House of Commons which finally delivered the coup-de-grace to Murdoch's dreams of further media expansion.

For those of us with long memories, it seemed a fitting reward for the way in which he conned Parliament into agreeing to his takeover of The Times and the Sunday Times in 1981 by giving 'editorial guarantees' he had no intention of keeping.

These undertakings enabled the then Trade and Industry Secretary John Biffen to sidestep a reference to the then Monopolies Commission.

Within a year, Murdoch had broken every single one of them, including sacking the Times' editor and transferring the two titles into a different part of his business.

I will give two small examples from the recent past of how the influence of his empire has distorted the political life of the nation.

In 2009, the now former News International chief executive Rebekah Brooks let it be known that David Cameron's Tories would not get their support at the ensuing general election unless Dominic Grieve was replaced as Shadow Home Secretary. He duly was.

Then, last year, James Murdoch made it clear he wanted the Labour government's plans for regional news consortia scrapped. When the Coalition came in, they duly were.

These, however, are relatively trivial examples compared with, for instance, his papers' routine character assassination of certain party leaders and consultations with Tony Blair in the days prior to the invasion of Iraq.

But if Murdoch was undoubtedly the biggest loser of the week, it's not been a great seven days for Mr Cameron either.

Because it was not the Prime Minister who finally led the fightback against the Murdoch empire, but the man who wants his job - Labour leader Ed Miliband.

Mr Miliband undoubtedly took a gamble by calling a vote on the BSKyB bid – but within 48 hours every other party had followed his lead.

His reading of the public mood in this crisis has been consistently ahead of the curve and, for now at any rate, he has drawn a line under the troubles that had beset his leadership earlier in the summer.

Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, too, ends the week with his position enhanced, again at Mr Cameron's expense.

It was his threat to vote with Labour on Wednesday that forced the Prime Minister into his U-turn on the BSkyB deal, potentially altering the balance of power within the Coalition in the process.

Mr Clegg has also pointedly disassociated himself with the shadow of Andy Coulson's appointment as Downing Street's director of communications that continues to hang over Mr Cameron.

"It was his appointment and his appointment alone. We did discuss it... it was something that we didn’t see eye to eye on," he said.

This is where the phone-hacking scandal starts to play into the much bigger and wider issue of the Coalition's ultimate survival.

Some Lib Dems have started to speculate that Mr Cameron may emerge from the scandal so badly damaged that they could actually bring him down.

I have argued from the start of this Coalition that the Lib Dems somehow have to find a way of getting out of it alive, and this might just be their best opportunity.

We would then not just be looking at the downfall of a media empire, but the downfall of a government.