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We've had an eight-month judicial public inquiry into press ethics (the Leveson Inquiry), three separate police investigations costing £19.5million (Operations Elveden, Weeting and Tuleta), dozens of arrests, the closure of a 168-year-old newspaper (News of the World) and a newspaper industry assaulted by politicians of every party.

And there’s only one thing we can say with total certainty – the vast majority of the phone hacking in this country has never been done by journalists.

A leaked police report suggests that the Serious Organised Crime Agency – the British equivalent of the FBI – has known for years that the phone hacking by law firms, telephone companies and ­insurance providers makes the News of the World look like a rank amateur.

One phone hacker said that 80% of his clients were “blue chip” corporations – and nothing to do with the media.

Do you think David Cameron will be calling for an inquiry into the hacking culture inside big ­business?

Will Ed Miliband gleefully be discussing what should be done about the illegal activities of law firms over a takeaway pizza? No? Why the hell not?

I make no excuses for the wilder shores of journalism.

But subjecting just one industry to the full ­scrutiny of the law is grotesque discrimination. Why us?

Is it possibly because unlike, for example, insurance companies or law firms, newspapers exist to expose the foibles and failings of politicians?

Newspapers exist to tell you when a ­politician is caught with his fingers in the till or his trousers round his ankles Of course they want to shut us up!

Of course they want to shut us down – even if, in the course of its long campaigning history, the News of the World did far more good than harm.

But of course politicians don’t think quite so highly of free speech when it is personally embarrassing.

Whatever regulations are brought in to monitor, control or castrate our free press, it is worth noting that laws already exist to prosecute anyone who hacks a telephone.

Whatever their profession.

Lord Justice Leveson has been asked to appear before MPs to discuss the future of press regulations – and perhaps explain why he chose to ignore the vast majority of ­perpetrators who do not work for newspapers and who have never worked for newspapers.

Personally, I can understand why Leveson did not want his inquiry to address the claims about the phone hacking activities of big business.

M’Lud would have died of old age before getting to the end of it.

I make no special plea for the industry that I work in and love. If crimes have been committed by ­journalists then let them face the law.

But the institutionalised harassment of journalists has become excessive. And it has to end.

It is difficult to imagine politicians like Cameron and ­Miliband treating any other industry in the cavalier, negligent way they have treated the ­newspaper industry.

Who will stand up for the ­newspaper industry? Who will defend our free press?

Even now, the daily newspaper is part of the fabric of British life. Even now, newspapers entertain, inform and keep our democracy vibrantly alive.

Even now, we still have the greatest newspaper industry in the world.

There is nowhere else with such a wide range of voices, such a huge array of choices.

Personally, I care desperately if the parents of Milly Dowler and Madeleine McCann feel ill-used by the Press.

Every single journalist I know wanted them to recover their daughters. And if not that, then we wanted justice for their families.

We were on their side. We will always be on their side.

Newspapers do not exist to hurt the innocent, the vulnerable, the underdog. We exist to prick pomposity, to cut the powerful down to size, to expose hypocrisy.

If some of us have gone too far, then let us pay the price.

But if phone hacking is a crime then it is a crime when anyone does it. Law firms, insurance companies, ­telephone companies, big business.

Not just newspapers. Not just journalists.

And if that is not the case, then you never really had an inquiry into the Press, Prime Minister.

You only had a very expensive witch-hunt.

* More from Tony Parsons this week on Ian Brady.