For those of you who don’t follow the UK news, Milly Dowler was a teenage girl who was murdered by some scumbag in 2002. Her body wasn’t discovered for six months.

The murderer was jailed for life last week when I was away on leave. But I’ve come back to one of the saddest revelations I’ve heard in years.

The police and Milly’s parents clung on to a glimmer of hope that she was still alive after she disappeared — because there was activity on her mobile phone. Text messages were being deleted, so they were obviously being read. Family and friends sent increasingly desperate pleas for her to contact them. She couldn’t. She was dead.

But these messages were being read, and when the mailbox got too full, old messages were being deleted to make room for new outpourings of grief and worry.

Who was doing this?

Someone working for Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World. He hacked into Milly’s phone on the instructions of the newspaper and took control of it.

Frankly, every normal person immediately knows that that was a genuinely shitty thing to do.It is indefensible under any circumstances, least of all for mere profit. They just did it for money.

My concern is that people working for Murdoch seem able to dispose of their humanity and common sense and act in ways that would repel and disgust any rational human being. How long before we hear the defence “I was only doing my job” or “I was just following orders”? Anyone who has read post-WWII history will have come across those phrases.

Callous? Heartless? Cynical? Manipulative? Cruel? Cheap? Nasty? Underhand? Despicable?

You may think so. I certainly do. And all for the sake of a few more sales, some more pence to line a billionaire’s pocket.

What a disgusting man, to employ people who would think and be prepared to act like that.