WE know it was wrong. We know it was wicked. The question is what can we do about it?

Faced with a multi-national as mighty as the Murdoch media empire, the citizen feels powerless. But there are things we can insist that should be done on our behalf and things which we ourselves should do, to respond to these appalling allegations of phone hacking I have no confidence in any internal investigation by News International.

The investigation would be carried out by their Chief Executive Rebekah Brooks. She was editor of the News of the World when this behaviour was allegedly rife. She would be investigating herself. Most people would see it as a whitewash. They would be right.

There must be police investigations as these allegations comprise several clear attempts to pervert the course of justice. Those inquiries must find out the truth about links between individual journalists and police officers.

More critically, they must expose to public scrutiny the relationship between the Metropolitan Police and News International at managerial and corporate level.

We may, as a society, get by with having a press that has forfeited public confidence. We can’t function with a police force that has gone down the same route.

So for the moment, the momentum is on our side, the side of the public, the side of decency.

We can sit back and enjoy the Murdoch moguls squirming under questioning and how inept their media performance has been.

Come the weekend, we can exercise our rights as consumers and leave the last edition of a certain newspaper on the shelves.

But it can’t stop there.

We might applaud the MPs who have finally found their backbone, the advertisers who have put principle before profit. But there’s no guarantee it will last.

We must not let that happen.

To ensure that we are protected from the kind of barbaric behaviour that certain sections of the media have been allowed to get away with, there must be a Royal Commission on the press.

In other words, the chance for a fresh start.

This must cover ownership issues and until it makes a ruling, News Corporation’s bid to buy BSkyB should be put on hold. Mr Murdoch won’t starve in the meantime.

It must cover regulation. I honestly hope it will not advocate state regulation of the media as that will be a sad day for a free press.

The media should police themselves – but do it properly.

The current toothless, decrepit watchdog, the Press Complaints Commission, should be put quickly and painlessly to sleep.

It must remind MPs that their primary duty is not self-preservation and silence in the face of manifest abuses by the press. It is to expose that wrongdoing and to legislate effectively to prevent it. It must remind editors that they also have a higher duty than the bottom-line and provide a coherent definition of what is in the public interest.

More than 20 years ago a Tory politician, David Mellor – who remembers him now? – warned the press they were drinking in the last-chance saloon.

It seems that since then some media organisations have been enjoying a lock-in, while the authorities turned a blind eye to their excesses.

Now the plug has been pulled on News of The World. There can be no doubt that time has been called.