Who’d have expected Richard Desmond to say the most interesting, the most fundamental thing so far at the Leveson Inquiry?

What he said was utterly simple: big stories do nothing for circulation and circulation does nothing for the bottom line.

Strip away the sound and fury of everything that has gone before, the despair of the Dowlers, the comic book Paul McMullan, the idea of Hugh Grant as moral crusader and you are left with the question: What is it all for?

The horrors of some tabloid journalism have been defended as the noble pursuit of ‘the story’ even when the contentious line between ‘public interest’ and ‘prurient interest’ is not so much crossed as being where the reporter takes his marks and waits for the starting pistol.

Even major stories like the MPs expenses scandal have only a small and temporary effect on circulations.

So if muck-raking is not making money for the publisher and it’s not in the public interest and it’s clearly not in the subject’s interest, then who benefits?

The only ones left at the table are the journalist and his or her editor.

Can it really be all about an inverted vanity to win a race to the bottom (sometimes literally so)?

If there is no relationship between the front page splash and the circulation then the newspapers’ fears over regulation are considerably less valid than some of them make out (because regulation doesn’t threaten sales) and the assymetry between a regulated press and an unregulated internet less pronounced.

Put another way, if muck-raking doesn’t prompt sales it follows that the appetite for this material, even when it’s free on Twitter, cannot be infinite and is in any case fuelled by the headline in the first case. The crystal clear example of that is Ryan Giggs.  Would his name have been tweeted a million times if the story hadn’t already been running in the papers?

Twitter breaks real news but does it break tittle tattle? No, how can it? If I see a married footballer with his arm round someone I believe to be a coked-up hooker then it’s going to take a lot of luck for that to go truly viral unless it’s picked up early on by a newspaper and then we’re back to square one.

Leveson has got a tough job on his hands because whatever form of regulation comes out of it will be howled down by a press which seems to be in that most dangerous place, of believing its own PR that this stuff (the content likely to be regulated) matters to anyone outside the newsroom and it must be protected.

Good luck to Leveson and good luck to all the journalists doing good work that is actually valued and appreciated by their readers as worth coming back for more. That is what keeps the advertisers happy and everyone in jobs.  I hope you are not drowned out by some of the prima donnas we have seen take the stand, who it is now obvious, are living in the past.