✒Great job, guys! PR Week lists three "senior PR men" as key to News Corp's image-cleansing work during the brouhaha: News International spinner Simon Greenberg, often the company's public face; Matthew Anderson, James Murdoch's world-bestriding adviser as News Corp group director of strategy and corporate affairs in Europe and Asia; and top PR guru Matthew Freud, who has no official role but is Rupert's son-in-law. The triumphs of the past fortnight include: Greenberg's TV and radio interviews, not unfairly described as "car crash" by Alastair Campbell; Rupert's very visible presence since flying in, allowing regular reminders of the "Murdoch empire" to provide a link between phone hacking and the BSkyB bid; front page-friendly shots of him grinning as if completely untroubled by his employees' excesses, and going jogging (thereby making the Indy a present of its splash headline, Rupert on the run); and the no-yes farcical volte face over executives attending the Commons culture committee. Small wonder that Robert Peston's friend Will Lewis, NI general manager, called in Edelman as external comms consultants on Thursday.

✒During the crisis's early days, press photographers and TV crews were fixated on the old entrance to Wapping, apparently not noticing that no one significant was going in or out – the papers have decamped to a tower in nearby Thomas More Square, a glassy backdrop for more recent two-ways by reporters. What's little known is that the building serves as the facade for the offices of Reynholm Industries in The IT Crowd. And as for finding any possible parallels between Douglas, the company's boss in the sitcom – struggling to show himself worthy of inheriting his father's business empire, brash and bumptious, prone to grand gestures that can backfire, admirer of a redhead underling, possessor of a bionic hand – and any member of the Murdoch dynasty, Monkey is happy to leave that to you.

✒Thanks to the Spectator, and its choice of the News of the World's last political editor, Ian Kirby, as guest diarist, we know what Boris Johnson shouted to George Osborne – who is generally credited, rather than David Cameron, with the brilliant coup of snapping up not only a former redtop editor, but a disgraced one, as chief spinner – at the magazine's summer party. According to Kirby ("it's not clear he was joking"), the London mayor yelled: "I warned you about Coulson! But you wouldn't listen."

✒Despite his woeful tweets after the announcement of the News of the World's execution, initimating his last contribution had already appeared, the Speccie's editor, Fraser Nelson, was able to pen a valedictory column in the final issue – and what a splendid instance of (to quote Steve Coogan) "BS" it proved to be! Judge for yourself if his colleagues on the weekly – snooty types bound to be suspicious of his craving to write for a red-top – found it impossible to resist giggling on reading Nelson voicing gratitude for the privilege of succeeding such columnar "all-time giants" (in fact both notorious and obnoxious) as Alan Clark and Woodrow Wyatt, and signing off by sobbing that there was "no greater honour" than working "for this paper's readers".

✒His current issue also carries an illuminating anecdote by the columnist Toby Young, who recalled Lis Murdoch's hen night before her marriage to Freud, when she and Rebekah Wade (then editing the News of the World, and not yet Mrs Brooks) were in a party of "boozed-up ladies" being ferried around London in "a white stretch limo". Noticing they were being followed by a Ford Mondeo in a way that suggested a paparazzo pursuit, Wade "called her picture desk and rattled off the Mondeo's number plate. In less than a minute, she had the name and telephone number of the car's owner, a notorious paparazzo." She rang the number and, Young says, told him: "If you don't stop following us, I'll personally see to it that you never work in this town again." Cue an immediate U-turn by their pursuer.

✒Relations between Brooks and Lis Murdoch are no longer so warm, alas, and it was the Daily Telegraph that revealed that the queen of Shine had been heard to say her former limo-mate "f----- the company". Thank goodness the Torygraph wantonly ignored its former style supremo Simon Heffer's decree that no letters can be left as clues when swear words are replaced by dashes; as a Heffer-approved version ("------ the company") might just as easily have been deciphered as delight that she had helped it or regret that she had exited it.

✒You may have have missed, buried in profiles, that Neil "Wolfman" Wallis, the former News of the World deputy and executive editor arrested last week, sat on the Press Complaints Commission between 2000 and 2003 – during which period, embarrassingly, the PCC had to adjudicate on snatched photos of a naked Sara Cox published by the Sunday People (editor: N Wallis). "No tabloid editor would knowingly break the rules of the PCC," he declared movingly in a letter to the Guardian while this dispute raged, claiming the photographer had misled him. Apparently viewed as entirely unsoiled despite the apology agreed to Cox and later NoW eyebrow-raisers, he subsequently served on the separate editors' code of practice committee from 1998 until he left the NoW in 2009.

✒Wallis then joined the Outside Organisation, best known for handling all Channel 5's PR since Richard Desmond's arrival, and a tweet from the Guardian's Marina Hyde revealed how tenderly the firm reacted to his arrest: "Outside Organisation website 9am Neil Wallis 'Managing director'. Outside Organisation website 11.30am Neil Wallis 'Freelance consultant'."

✒Such has been the twisty plot that even City analysts have reached for parallels with screen drama: in a reference to a celebrated device in the US soap Dallas, Evo Securities' Steve Malcolm told his clients: "BSkyB's management must be hoping it has a 'Bobby Ewing' moment, with the last 13 months revealed as a dream."

✒And, similarly, some unlikely characters have suddenly turned frisky, or cheeky towards former patrons they once defended combatively: Kelvin MacKenzie's voicemail, many a reporter discovered, says "I am not here right now, but leave a message and Rebekah will get back to you"; while that of Tom Crone, the stern long-standing legal manager of News International who resigned on Wednesday, was said by the London Evening Standard to tell callers "this is Crone, not on the phone, please leave a message, after the tone".

• This article was amended on 18 July to remove a line in the first diary item that had been edited out of the print version of this column, but was included in the online version due to an error.