As the Leveson inquiry resumes its hearings, I'm sorry that the great columnist Keith Waterhouse did not live long enough to give evidence.
We can guess what he would have said about the excesses of the red tops, since he made his views pungently clear in his book Waterhouse on Newspaper Style (1989).
The book charts the birth and moral decline of the tabloids, through their use of language:
"Content and the language in which that content is written cannot be entirely divorced from one another," writes Waterhouse. "Either can drag the other up - or down."
Especially, he said, when it came to sex.
"Material is often selected simply because it is seen as suitable for the full tabloid treatment. Once the decision has been made to publish [this] type of stuff... a style has to be evolved to get the maximum out of the story without being arrested for it."
The book, an update of Waterhouse's classic Daily Mirror Style (1981), might give Lord Leveson a few insights.
The way Waterhouse (left, in 1993) tells it, the rot started harmlessly enough with a smirking addiction to puns and facetiousness.
"Ladies' underwear, lavatories and private parts," he said, "have a chortling fascination for schoolboys, end-of-pier comedians - and popular newspapers.
"Show a tabloid sub a story about someone being locked in a lavatory and he will show you a headline containing the word FLUSHED and a rewrite containing the word inconvenienced."
This was surely not what was in the mind of editor Hugh Cudlipp when The Daily Mirror was pioneering a brash new form of journalism in the 1930s - a kind of revolution, Waterhouse called it.
"When reporters stopped calling policemen upholders of the law and started calling them cops, it was not only Fleet Street's musty terminology they were beginning to question... it was the end of automatic forelock-tugging," said Waterhouse.
The Mirror's Cassandra columnist Bill Connor was billed as "the terror of the twerps". When he died Waterhouse was given his slot, but eventually took his column to The Daily Mail.
Waterhouse quotes Mirror editor Sylvester Bolam (1948-53) on sensationalism:
"We believe in the sensational presentation of news and views... as a necessary and valuable public service in these days of mass readership and democratic responsibility. Sensationalism does not mean distorting the truth. It means vivid and dramatic presentation of events."
Somehow that ambition morphed into invention of quotes, contrived story construction and general sloppiness. Waterhouse attacks it all, in 60 sharp, snappily headlined chapters.
All this sounds tame compared to the dark practices Lord Leveson is investigating. But there are a few passages that take on a new significance in the light of the phone-hacking scandal, and give us a clue to what Waterhouse might have told Leveson. Take this, in the chapter on Sex Romps:
"There would be utterly no point in discussing how this kind of stuff could be better written. It could only be improved by not being written at all. No-one is forced to write it, any more than anyone is forced to read it."
"Those who care about journalism can only hope, as one routinely sordid set of revelations follows another, that it will be subject to the law of diminishing returns."
Apparently not.
Simon Pipe is a former senior broadcast journalist at BBC Oxford, now studying for a masters degree at Coventry University. His brief tabloid career included working on the Sunday Sport - but only for a day.
