Rupert Murdoch was attending a gathering of elite types at the Sun Valley Inn in Idaho when he realised that the phone-hacking scandal unfolding in a far-flung outpost of his global media empire had ceased to be a little local difficulty. He must fly immediately to Britain, he decided, and stamp his authority on the situation behind closed doors while displaying only humility in public.

But humble, how to do humble? The old operator had an idea: he would “fly commercial” to London to make himself look like a man of the people. Not in economy, obviously, but up front at the pointy end. A lieutenant plucked up the courage to point out that things were a bit more serious than that, and he might as well get there as quickly as possible by Gulfstream executive jet.