UNTIL last week, it seemed the rule of Rupert Murdoch would end only with his death. But now, I think, the end is in sight. He may live to a great age (Murdoch is 80), but his power will never recover.

One day, some time in the mid-1990s, I was editing London's Daily Telegraph and Murdoch had just launched a new front in the price war designed to destroy us, by dropping the price of his paper, The Times, to 10 pence on Mondays. Conrad Black, our then owner, loves historical comparisons. ''I feel like Talleyrand,'' he told me, ''when he realised that Napoleon's only policy was one of conquest.'' It was a just comparison, because it acknowledged Murdoch's greatness and his destructiveness.

Britain's Prime Minister David Cameron admitted that political parties turn a blind eye to press wrongdoing. Credit:Reuters

The greatness is in his courage and ingenuity, and in his understanding of the media. It was Murdoch who established Australia's first national newspaper, Murdoch who saw that The Sun, an ailing, feeble, left-wing newspaper that he bought in 1969, could be turned into the most popular publication in Britain, and Murdoch, in the late 1980s, who realised satellite broadcasting would revolutionise television. He first grasped the importance of the Chinese media market, he made the British newspaper industry profitable by smashing print unions in the 1980s, and broke the stranglehold of the TV networks in the US.

His career has straddled every time zone and every medium. Murdoch is an Australian who has a love/hate relationship with Britain, and became a US citizen to advance his ambitions, so his story is part of the great imperial history of the Anglosphere. It is the most remarkable in the history of newspapers.