On Saturday afternoon, as all hell was once again breaking loose in the Murdoch empire with the arrests of five senior people at the Sun in the police bribery investigation, I passed under Rupert Murdoch's windows on Fifth Avenue in New York – and got his latest tweet. Supposedly he was packing to head to London to take command of the crisis, but instead he was making a reasonable effort at normalcy, offering his views on various policy issues facing the US.

The man is a genius at holding it together. He's always run his business on the premise that everybody else is weaker than he is and that they will fold, while he perseveres. Since last summer – when hotter heads convinced him to close the News of the World – he has told those around him that they will come through the crisis if they don't panic. He may well be, in this regard, the most confident person at News Corp – and, indeed, earlier in the year, Murdoch was telling people the worst was behind them.

Except this is not true. The company's problems have not so much receded as piled up. The costs of hacking settlements are running to tens of thousands of pounds per victim. The legal problems of James Murdoch – once the certain heir apparent – mount. Some of Rupert's closest associates fired over hacking now suffer in exile – their loyalty growing ever-more fragile. The investigations in Britain proceed – resulting in this weekend's arrests. US action under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which could threaten Murdoch control of the company, becomes more likely. News Corp's control of BSkyB is ever-more open to challenge under the "fit and proper" standard. And the company itself has become a set of warring, every-man-for himself, fiefdoms.

Chase Carey, the company's chief operating officer who runs the entertainment side of the firm, which has not been touched by the scandal, reminds people his name is "Carey not Murdoch"; Roger Ailes, who runs the company's biggest cash cow, Fox News, is renegotiating his soon-to-expire contract, with near absolute leverage; almost everybody within the company, other than Murdoch himself, is blaming James Murdoch for the hacking mess; and Joel Klein, the lawyer who was brought in to run a new education division, has instead assumed vast powers and created vast resentments as the company crisis manager.

What's happening in Britain is eating News Corp up – its slow, agonising pace may even be more corrosive than the prospect of trials and even potential convictions. An extraordinary corporate death is taking place.

Murdoch's companies are poisoned, by his own aggressiveness, as well as by the culture of British tabloids themselves (there's little point in saying everybody does it, when it's obvious you are going to be blamed for it). The air itself is poisoned by a public animus the like of which has not been seen since Richard Nixon was run out of Washington. What's more, his American executives are fed up with Britain. The perception in Wapping that unseen company powers are selling them out is surely true – the American company loses nothing if Britain goes. Only Rupert would suffer. But instead of the inevitable, slow, humiliating death that is now being endured there is a much better way to do it. It could even be something of a noble death.

Sell the Sun. Use the proceeds (I'd guess £500m to £700m) to endow an independent trust that will run the Times and Sunday Times, hence ensuring another generation of quality newspapers in Britain (of course, no Murdoch shenanigans – this really has to be an independent trust; Harry Evans gets a seat, for sure).

This would certainly take the enmity, if not the air, out of the ongoing investigations; it might even allow the company to keep running BSkyB (though I wouldn't necessarily count on it); it might help save his son; and it would restore corporate focus to all the assets that are trouble-free and, a good many of them, growing nicely.

And what's more, finally, it would make his father, the late Sir Keith, proud.

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