September and October have seen the UK jolted from a reverie whose mist appeared from what we considered to be a true version of facts. But, of course, fact is manufactured as much as a tabloid newspaper is on its printing press.
The Hillsborough Independent Panel report turned a public discourse inside out. Perhaps the largest fruits plucked from the Leveson Inquiry have had a heavy burden in the hands of those who thought themselves impenetrable. The police - guardians of our safety and justice - have seen another domino blow over in what now seems to be an inescapable collapse. The social institution breathing down its neck - the press industry - have shown us that what they are capable of writing isn't necessarily tomorrow's chip wrapper paper, but a stain that takes a generation for someone to come along and erase.
It is no coincidence that the same inquiry has helped cast its light on a very dark secret to prey on the collective minds of what was once a closed-door, cosy showbiz world. In that now dusty and decomposing world, public figures close to the nation's dear, old, unassuming heart have been shown to be close for a specific reason.
A year on from his death, Jimmy Savile was the proud million dollar medallion garishly swinging on the neck of the BBC. But when such an illustrious book is slammed shut by natural causes, a plume of unnatural dust is left with us long after the wake.
The details contained in the recent ITV documentary on Savile's insatiable acts of paedophilia aren't new: as we are now sickened to realise, the BBC's Newsnight programme was ready to run with this revolting story two month's after Savile's death. In not airing this piece, they failed in their remit to the nation that funds it, presumably for the reason that his legacy was still fresh in its creation.
We therefore have a lot to thank the careless phone hackers at the News of the World.
Worringly, however, we see the same institutions - the press and the police - crawl back into their seige mentality worlds. These are the same worlds that employed extra protection when truths were yet not ripe for discovery. A fresh IPCC inquiry here, an internal review there: it will take Aunties' special broom to clear up so much dust from the murky ground they themselves have exclusively created. They'd rather that we were looking the other way.
This is not too dissimilar to the role the Press Complaints Commission when it comes to issuing "corrections". The self-regulatory interests of the PCC comes from it being an interest lobby for print editors. Contrition is an inverse reaction to the brazen headlines they create in order to damage lives and reputations - often before the grief hasn't yet truly taken hold of the headline's victim.
Hillsborough is, of course, an indigestible textbook in itself. The mainstay of the UK's press didn't come out and completely rubbish the reputation of The Sun or its editor-in-grief, the right veneral Kelvin MacKenzie. Instead of "drinking at the last chance saloon", MacKenzie has instead sought more prosperous drinking holes at other media oulets. He also managed to throw about his usual chutzpah towards the still grief-stricken of Liverpool. Similarly, The Sun, apart from those rightfully mortified in Merseyside, rose and rose until it could scorch us no longer.
We see now what so much sex and scandal can do to our constitutions as we have greedily torn through the tabloids during our Sunday breakfast and beyond. Firstly, what can sex do? Well, if you're a much-loved bastion of charitible organisations and light entertainment, you can take girls as young as twelve into your BBC dressing room; or into your "quirky" mobile home; or you can entrap them in failed schools because their lives haven't turned out the way Abigail's from Middlesex has. Or you can take them and then you can leave them, because they certainly won't have the stomach to want to appear same time, next week on the regular prime-time slot.
Secondly, what does a good scandal give you? Well, it can, in one silent swoop of a black claw, falsify the statements of police officers; it can engineer a show trial of a public inquest; it can, some would argue, unlawfully kill 41 once innocent lives; it can take at face value the word of one local Tory MP; it can tell you "The Truth".
Again, it is with thanks we give to the inept phone hackers at the News of the World. For it was their not telling its readers of these two exclusives, and instead going for the salacious and whispy stories that were to eventually destroy them, that we now have reached a satisfactory - albeit a grimly posthumous - paradoxical conclusion.
