Well, what a party! An all-spectrum political gang-up on Rupert Murdoch, a festival of pious hypocrisy over a man the establishment loves to hate.

Leading the fun are former British Labour PM Gordon Brown and the incumbent, David Cameron, two long-time photo-op cronies of Mr. Murdoch and his editors, who have turned against the media magnate and joined the leftist journalistic/political free-for-all to undermine if not destroy his News Corp. empire.

In condensed form, here’s what we have so far, a massive, self-serving political assault on freedom of the press, marked by the closure of a newspaper read by millions and culminating Wednesday with a News Corp. decision to withdraw its bid to purchase the BskyB satellite television network.

Whatever Mr. Murdoch and/or his minions did in hacking voicemail and deploying other possibly criminal news-gathering techniques — and we don’t know much yet — may well deserve punishment.

But this chain reaction has nothing to do with hacking, and everything to do with bringing down News Corp. as an ideological force in Britain, the United States and everywhere else.

We have Mr. Brown, who now appears to be running his own personal tabloid operation, presenting his alleged victimhood at the hands of hackers at the Murdoch-controlled Sun. He said he was left “in tears” when the newspaper disclosed his infant son’s cystic fibrosis in 2006. He called it a shocking breach of his personal privacy, possibly by hacking into his personal affairs — a version of events The Sun demolished Wednesday as total bollocks.

The Sun says it got the story from a friend of the Brown family who also had a child suffering from the same disease. The Sun, whose editor contacted the Browns to confirm the story and solicit tasteful quotes before running it, has an extended audio interview with the family friend on its website. So much for Mr. Brown’s sensational bit of emotional Murdoch-bashing.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Cameron’s coalition government, and other party leaders, are threatening limits/regulations/laws to control what he now suddenly sees as an immoral and wayward media. My God, was that a hooker in my bed? What an outrageous breach of political ethics. Do these hookers have no shame? We need laws, proper procedures, restrictions.

In the United States, Democratic Senator Jay Rockefeller — an anti-free press advocate who in the past has called on the U.S. government to shut down News Corp.’s Fox News and other media outlets he doesn’t like — wants an inquiry into whether any of News Corp.’s media subsidiaries had ever, among other things, hacked into the lives of Americans, especially victims of 9/11.

Whether the hacked 9/11 victims story is true — reported by The Daily Mirror, another British tabloid, but not confirmed by any other media — did not prevent the story from having long fast legs. Others in Congress jumped, and a leftist media watchdog, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, called for a Congressional investigation: “The idea that News Corp. may have sought to exploit victims of the darkest days in U.S. history for financial gain is grotesque,” said a spokesman for the watchdog group.

And we have The Guardian, revered organ of the British left, leading the charge against News of the World, reviled organ of the Murdochian right, for breach of journalistic ethics — the same Guardian that became the British home of WikiLeaks’ illegal dump of U.S. diplomatic communications. Clearly a large double-standard reigns at The Guardian. It is good and just for the media to engage in illegal activity to wage ideological war on causes and political powers those same media have determined in their wisdom to be wrong or immoral, but it is reprehensible and immoral to engage in illegal activity to probe the private affairs of celebrities, royalty or common people.

Christopher Hitchens put it better in a column the other day. The News of the World specialized in “relentless nullity: when cruel things happen to unimportant people, or when sordid things happen to famous people.” The Guardian, on the other hand, believes it is reporting on higher-order matters of real importance. As a result of The Guardian’s portrayal of News of the World as something akin to a criminal organization feeding off human weakness, The Guardian can claim a dubious victory — the closure of a newspaper read by some seven million, few of whom, it is safe to say, ever read The Guardian.

Journalists around the world, from the CBC in Canada to the MSNBC crowd in the United States, are now portraying the closure of a newspaper as something of a victory for media freedom. Along with politicians, they are now moving on to fry other principles. Mostly, though, the aim is to demolish the business and credibility of the News Corp. empire, including Fox News, and all that it seems to represent.

In the British Parliament, politicians are effectively determining who will own television networks via mob votes in the House of Commons and threats of Inquisitional hearings. News Corp. withdrew its bid for BSkyB because company executives faced a hostile kangaroo process in Parliament. Britain’s competition overseers have also been politicized to a greater extent than in the past.

Media executives, owners and editors are also being called to testify before a political inquiry that will look for what has been called “a better way of regulating the press.” The head of the inquiry, Lord Justice Leveson, issued the usual mealy-mouthed endorsements of press freedom before laying the groundwork for less freedom. The inquiry, he said, “must balance the desire for a robustly free press with the rights of the individual while, at the same time, ensuring that critical relationships between the press, Parliament, the government and the police are maintained.”

Prime Minister Cameron has also cited the need for better government oversight of the media. That control, whatever its form, is likely to become the dubious — and only — long-term political achievement of the assault on Mr. Murdoch’s media empire.