ONE OF the first rules of journalism: take any time off and you just know something dramatic is going to happen.

What I couldn't have imagined, as I sat on a windy campsite in Cornwall, was that this week's big news was the news itself. The News of The World has been axed after a series of increasingly outrageous allegations of phone hacking. David Cameron's former press chief has been arrested. Media pundits, as my colleague David Raven has already pointed out, are putting the smart money on a Sun on Sunday being launched to fill the gap. All this while I was trying not to be sick on the Isles of Scilly ferry.

But what bothers me most is where the blame's now being pointed by the politicians; the Press Complaints Commission, which all three of the main party leaders are now saying should be scrapped. Labour leader Ed Milliband - a man who, judging by a certain interview he gave last week, isn't all that media-savvy anyway - has called it "a toothless poodle", while the PCC itself has put its foot in it and used the NOTW scandal as a catchall for slating the entire newspaper industry, calling it "a terrible time for British journalism".

I agree partly; it is a terrible time for British journalism, but not because of what News International are doing. It's a terrible time because all three of the major political parties have clearly gone mad, using the (alleged) failings of one national tabloid as an excuse to call for the PCC to be scrapped, on the basis that journalists sit on its board, and journalists are all nasty people who'd sell their own mothers for a good story. A new body, free of those pesky journalist types, should be set up to take its place.

This, I honestly reckon, is giving the entire class detention because one boy kicked a football through the school window, and it's not fair on the thousands of journalists - journalists like me, incidentally - who can do their jobs without resorting to hacking people's phone lines. Any kneejerk reactions to "the press" because of what happened at News of the World will have a knock-on effect for every newspaper, including The Champion. Scrapping the PCC will affect every title, regional or national, up and down the land.

I'll leave the last line to Society of Editors chief Bob Satchwell, a lone voice of media sanity in these troubled times.

"The idea that this is a total failure of ethics across the press and of the PCC is absolute nonsense."

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