There have been brutal, bullying and in various senses bizarre press proprietors before him, but Rupert Murdoch's achievement in combining all the main political parties to try to thwart his ambitions in the House of Commons would appear to outdo them all.

While the careers and ambitions of Northcliffe, Rothermere and Beaverbrook, the outstanding buccaneer press barons of the earlier years of the 20th century, and their later counterparts, Robert Maxwell and Murdoch, are by no means identical, they raise one common question. Did these men begin to behave as they did simply because they had got their hands on the levers? Or was the attraction of getting their hands on the levers the chance to act as they did?

"Every extension of the franchise," wrote Alfred Harmsworth, later Lord Northcliffe, in 1903, "renders more powerful the newspaper and less powerful the politician." As the right to vote spread wider, the opportunity of using the press to sway opinion and thus dictate the course of events grew with it. What these men wanted was influence at the least; power – indirect or even direct – where that could be contrived.

Northcliffe, the first big 20th-century beast to emerge, had from the start his own particular, sometimes peculiar, views on how the world should be run. By the end of his life, in 1921-22, he was constantly detecting conspiracies, believing that Germans were lying in wait to kill him (he had a gun concealed in his pocket, he used to claim, with which he could kill seven Germans), that attempts were being made to poison him with Belgian ice cream – so much so that his staff had to intercept messages full of wild instructions, which he tried to send back to his newspapers.

But for many years before that his editors had to put up not just with his philosophies but with his whims. Displeased with his picture desk, he lined them up and put the tallest in charge; he astonished the Mail's head porter by promoting him to advertising director.

Yet here, on his own valuation, was the man who had won the first world war by his part in overthrowing the prime minister, Asquith, and replacing him with Lloyd George. And the government that Lloyd George then formed found places for two more proprietors: Rothermere, Northcliffe's brother, and the Canadian adventurer Beaverbrook, entrusted with responsibility for running the government propaganda machine (neither Maxwell nor Murdoch aspired to that).

They sought to impose their own agendas at home and abroad on the course of British politics. Rothermere's was the uglier, endorsing the British Union of Fascists and in time openly sympathetic to Hitler. When the two combined to try to oust Stanley Baldwin he responded by condemning, in words written by his cousin Rudyard Kipling, "power without responsibility – the prerogative of the harlot through the ages".

Beaverbrook liked to claim that he gave his editors freedom to say what they chose, and indeed his Daily Express, Sunday Express and Evening Standard sometimes took a contrary line; yet he kept bombarding them with messages outlining what he wanted to see in his papers.

In their book, Power without Responsibility, James Curran and Jean Seaton record that on one occasion 147 such messages were whizzed out to the Daily Express in a single day. Some were on matters of moment: the commitment to empire and imperial trade. Others were petty. The Express was required to print from time to time denunciations of Lord Mountbatten – replaced when Beaverbrook ended his feud by eulogies of Mountbatten – and complaints that Jean Sibelius still called himself a composer though he hadn't produced a new work for many years.

Unlike subsequent party leaders, Neil Kinnock did not truckle to Murdoch: indeed after the move to Wapping and the fight with the unions, he set up a boycott of Murdoch's papers, denying them receipt of Labour documents and press releases. Yet when Robert Maxwell, whom the Labour leadership distrusted, with very good reason, moved to acquire the Mirror papers, Kinnock and his colleagues were desperate to keep in with him, seeing it as the party's best hope of hanging on to the one group that customarily supported the party.

As for Murdoch, historians will dispute the nadir of the politicians' submission to Rupert's priorities. Tony Blair's attendance at the Hayman Island News Corporation conference? The opening to Rupert by successive prime ministers of doors closed to others? The secret consultations before high decisions over, for instance, the war in Iraq?

What happened yesterday in the Commons is hailed as a signal of a new and healthier era in which press barons will no longer have any hope of calling the shots. Maybe the decline in newspaper readership and the rise of media forms less susceptible to use for the purpose of baronial bullying will mean we shall see no more Northcliffes, Rothermeres, Beaverbrooks, Maxwells or Murdochs. Maybe; but don't bet on it.