I’VE just spent my holiday with Rupert Murdoch. It wasn’t planned that way, but the media mogul tagged along, uninvited. He was there for what seemed like every minute of every day.

Some might blame my addiction to watching the news, but I had no idea Murdoch would take over in such a way. But from the sinking of the News Of The World onwards, he became an inescapable presence.

A growing mountain of verbiage is being dedicated to News International and the phone-hacking scandal. Think of these few words as another stone or two on the pile, put there by someone who cares.

This column has been going for a while now, 21 years if my maths is correct, which often it is not, and in that time Mr Murdoch has generally been seen as a thoroughly bad thing.

Perhaps this has been down to ideological reflex, much in the way that mere mention of the words ‘Margaret’ and ‘Thatcher’ used to bring me out in a furious rash.

So, yes, my ancient antipathy may not be entirely rational, but it has been there for a long time. Now, in a dizzyingly strange turn of seemingly unstoppable events, everybody is at it. Everywhere you look, politicians and commentators are attacking this wily 80-year-old media mogul.

Where once criticising Murdoch felt like a lonely occupation, equivalent perhaps to standing on a soapbox and shouting until one fell hoarse, now it is the sport of the moment – culminating in yesterday’s ritual humiliation before the Commons culture select committee, complete with custard-pie moment.

There are many reasons for distrusting Murdoch and his massive empire – from the promulgation of conservative views at the expense of all others to the morally shabby goings-on at the News Of The World; and then there is Sky Television’s habit of snaffling up dramas made popular on other networks and thus making them unavailable to the Murdoch-phobic.

The present scandal continues to burp out lava like a volcano with dodgy insides. Every day brings a new victim or departure, from New International boss and onetime editor Rebekah Brooks to two top Metropolitan police bosses, Commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson and anti-terrorism officer John Yates.

And all the while, the once-mighty Murdoch looks shaken. This, it is almost tempting to say, is how empires begin to crumble.

Still, that remains unlikely – and probably wouldn’t be for the general good. To see every single thing Murdoch and his cohorts do as bad or evil is just plain silly, even if it is a tempting inclination.

What matters most, however, and has always mattered most, is that Murdoch became too powerful. To allow such media power, across television, newsprint, publishing and the internet, to be controlled by one company is not safe or sensible.

Labour leader Ed Miliband, who is generally having a good “phone-hacking war”, believes that Mr Murdoch has “too much power over British public life”. This is true and has been for all the time that our main politicians, both Labour and Conservative, have felt it necessary to crawl to the Murdoch clan.

It is heartening to see Mr Miliband say such things, even if a passing whiff of opportunism hangs over his sudden conversion to abusing News International.

At this stage, it is worth saying that the drubbing of Murdoch, while deserved on many fronts, will come to nothing if it doesn’t lead to our national life being cleaned up a bit.

So far, we have endured the banking crisis and the calamity of MPs expenses and now the Murdoch catastrophe, with its attendant potential harm to taint other media.

The phone-hacking story seems to have generated more coverage than the other two scandals put together, almost like a mass media obsession.

In a sense, Murdoch has become a victim of the sort of firestorm witch-hunt his own newspapers have enjoyed turning on others in the past.

The hunter is now hunted, and I bet he doesn’t much like the turnaround.