THE full extent of the online hacking scandal was exposed last night as millions of perfectly normal people found themselves on the same side of an argument as the Guardian.

As the News of the World fired a salvo of 27 cruise missiles through the bottom of the barrel, for the first time in living memory the Guardian was backed by people who are not pathetically self-conscious about every single fucking thing they say or do.

Helen Archer, a housewife from Stevenage, said: “If I start being wrong about everything all the time then I vow to you, as God is my witness, someone is going to pay for this.

“One can only hope that Holloway’s least seductive bull-dykes are now running their eye over Rebekah Brooks and oiling their steam-powered love truncheons.”

And with Britain at once both surprised and yet not surprised at all, attention has turned to how other national newspapers are reacting to the thing they would totally have done if their private investigators were not complete bloody amateurs.

Roy Hobbs, from Doncaster said: “I was fully expecting a Sun front page along the lines of ‘SICK SCUM PHONE HACK SHAME’ with a paragraph about how the ‘sick evil scum shamed Britain’.

“Or maybe one of those dreary puns that arsehole radio presenters think are brilliant. Perhaps ‘Dowler and out’, or ‘Milly buggers’, but no. They seemed to have missed it completely. And here was me thinking it was the Greatest Newspaper in the World.”

He added: “Thank goodness the Daily Mail covered it by making the thing absolutely everyone is talking about the eighth story on the front page of their website, below the heart-stopping drama of a Royal canoe race and a couple of reassuringly familiar stories about foreign scroungers.”

Media pundits say the News of the World‘s seven million-strong readership will now divide into those who will spend the rest of their lives washing their hands 300 times a day and those who will continue to enjoy stories about fucking.

Wayne Hayes, media analyst at Donnelly-McPartlin, said: “At this stage it’s anyone’s guess, though one does have to question the commercial impact of Guardian readers boycotting the News of the World.

“Nevertheless I am sure those Guardian readers will cancel their Sky subscriptions the very moment the second series of Boardwalk Empire finishes sometime next year.”

Meanwhile David Cameron, who only last week presented Rupert Murdoch with a nude self-portrait, is to base his response to the scandal on hoping that secretly you don’t really care about it at all.

A Downing Street source said: “The prime minister’s political instincts are as reliable now as they were when he employed Andy Coulson on the basis that a former editor of the News of the World is physically incapable of telling a lie.”