Faced with what could be the biggest story in British political history, the papers were forced to raise their game

Somebody had a scoop on one of the episodes that apparently led to the arrest of Lord Levy in connection with the cash-for-honours scandal.

It wasn't a blogger (see my column last week), nor was it a Westminster political correspondent. It was dear old Auntie BBC, widely accused of being soft on new Labour, and, more specifically, it was Robert Peston, its recently appointed business editor, who is accused of gabbling his words too much.

On 10 July, Peston revealed on BBC TV news that Levy had advised Sir Gulam Noon - known as "the ready-meals entrepreneur" in the posh papers and "the curry king" in the red tops - to alter forms completed for the House of Lords Appointments Commission so as to conceal his £250,000 contribution to Labour funds. In the following morning's papers, only the Mail, and to a lesser extent the Times and Telegraph, made much of it. The Guardian ignored the story entirely until it appeared on its website, attributed to the Press Association, at 10.30 am.

Faced with what could be the biggest story in British political history, the papers had to raise their game. The morning after Levy's arrest on 12 July, every paper had it above the front-page fold, except the Express, possibly on the grounds that His Lordship hadn't been questioned about Diana's murder.

The Mail could scarcely contain itself. "Tony Blair is to be questioned under caution by detectives," its first sentence stated baldly. Police rules required that anyone arrested should be fingerprinted, it drooled. Levy "knows where the bodies are buried" was the joyous inside-page headline. Next day, it brought Max Hastings into action, guns blazing. He had seen "the whites of his [Levy's] eyes, the flickers of fear". That, presumably, is one of the benefits of Max's new high-definition TV which, as he had earlier told Mail readers, is now installed in his country home. Still, he instructed, the police should "forget the monkey [and] put the organ grinder in the dock".

Most other papers couldn't quite believe it would come to that. "Being quizzed by the police should not imply guilt," said the Sun, showing unusual reluctance to leap to judgement. In the Times, Roy Hattersley, as if addressing an old-style Labour conference debate on a composite motion, wished to "make my position absolutely clear". Though he remained one of Blair's "irreconcilable critics", it was "not his [Blair's] style", nor Levy's, to commit "crimes and misdemeanours".

Several commentators accepted the "friends of Blair" line that the police were behaving like drama queens. Tim Hames, in the Times, thought the "misuse of the law to achieve political objectives" was comparable to attempts to impeach Bill Clinton over his sex life.

John Rentoul, in the Independent on Sunday, no doubt drawing on a deep well of legal knowledge, announced "the police exceeded their powers in arresting Levy". They should have taken one look at the evidence "and decided not to waste public money on an expensive investigation". The Guardian's Martin Kettle thought it pathetic that we are all so exercised by such trifles as selling honours and (reference John Prescott) sexually harassing female underlings. In one of the week's more extraordinary sentences, Kettle wrote: "Whatever else you can say about Blair, dismissing him as a failure is hardly one of them."

But Kettle was beaten in the "did he really mean to write that?" stakes by William Rees-Mogg in the Times. "The Prime Minister," wrote the sage of Somerset, "has lost his grip on world events." So that's why there's all that fighting in the Middle East.

New sophisticate

In the Guardian's annual list of the 100 most powerful people in the media, Richard Littlejohn suffered the steepest fall, from 49th place last year to 83rd this year. This followed the conventional wisdom that Littlejohn, the country's highest-paid columnist, had failed to make a successful transition from the Sun to the Daily Mail.

But the Guardian's judgement may be outdated. In recent weeks, the Mail has started to flag Littlejohn on its front page again. His column, criticised as too common for aspirant Mail readers, has begun to adopt a slightly more sophisticated tone. For example, on 14 July, he defended the rights of Hindus to hold open-air funerals. He didn't favour "a bonfire of corpses on every street corner", but he thought "our legislators and Hindu theologians" could reach "a sensible compromise".

Littlejohn was clearly writing on the principle of "my enemy's enemy": he also argued that Hindus should be indulged because, unlike Muslims, they didn't make "menacing demands for special treatment". Still, I had never seen the words "sensible compromise" in a Littlejohn column, and I hope that those liberal-minded folk at the Guardian will take note and reward him with a promotion next year.

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