One of the strangest themes of Rupert Murdoch's long relationship with Britain is his habit of expressing the pain of a persecuted outsider. It's a peculiar trait for someone who makes and breaks governments, who can ignore parliament and bypass British tax laws.

For as long as most of us can remember, this dynast posing as an anti-establishment newcomer, this patriotic Australian who became a citizen of the United States, this family-values diehard who went off with another woman, has been running things behind the scenes. We are used to his power and sardonic disdain for Britain but last week a line was crossed when Murdoch's News International dismissed a parliamentary committee's report on the phone-hacking scandal at the News of the World by saying that the all-party membership of the committee had formed some kind of a conspiracy.

The accusation of persecution is typical – a gangster reflex made in the knowledge that the company can't be touched by MPs, or the media. Apart from the BBC, the FT, the Independent and the Guardian, the Observer's sister paper, which investigated these allegations of phone hacking and £1m paid in hush money, the media has remained shamefully silent. The hacking operation and use of inquiry agents, which for legal reasons has yet to be fully disclosed, is bad enough but the company's defiance represents a sharp new humiliation because it forces us to acknowledge the decline of national resilience and impotence of our institutions.

Even a paper such as the Daily Mail seems to tremble at the thought of what the 78-year-old mogul might do, and it is no exaggeration to say that what we've seen since the culture, media and sport select committee began investigating "the near industrial scale" of the hacking is the suppression by many news organisations of a story that Downing Street declared was "absolutely breathtaking and an extreme cause for concern". This is a matter of grave public interest.

It is inconceivable that any agency, party or commercial concern in Britain would be able get away with spying on the military, royals, celebrities, sports figures and government ministers and then react with the what the report identified as "collective amnesia" and "deliberate obfuscation" – in other words the default response of a crime family. The all-party members of Tory John Whittingdale's committee could not have been clearer. They say: "We strongly condemn this behaviour… News International in particular has sought to conceal the truth about what has really occurred." It is significant that they also criticised the metropolitan police for not broadening their 2006 investigation into Clive Goodman, the News of the World journalist who was jailed and caused the departure of the then editor Andy Coulson.

You may well ask why such large-scale criminal activity fell victim to what approximates to Balkan lassitude. The money sloshing around, the scores of important people hacked, the dormant police files, the two dozen journalists who may have made illegal requests and the private detectives, one of whom was employed by Andy Coulson at the News of the World after a seven-year jail sentence for a serious crime against a vulnerable woman, add up to more than a story of overzealous tabloid reporting. The whole thing stinks.

The affair becomes much more worrying when you consider the way the Murdoch organisation has lined up behind David Cameron to maintain privileged access to No 10. No doubt there was a sense of timely conferment among Conservatives when the Sun announced it was deserting Labour after 12 years and backing Cameron instead. Rebekah Brooks, the News International chief executive and Cameron's neighbour in Oxfordshire, was almost certainly as happy as her former colleague Andy Coulson, now David Cameron's communications director, who still has quite a few questions to answer on all this.

So media power and political power achieve an ever greater degree of merger, just as in Italy, but let us be quite clear that Murdoch's primary interest is commercial, as it has been ever since he bought into the News of the World 41 years ago. Already we see the pressures that the Murdoch family will bring to bear on David Cameron if he becomes prime minister. On Friday the Times, which now barely disguises its pro-Sky agenda, ran an editorial on the BBC's cuts, accusing its websites of "dumping free content on to markets where its rivals have no public subsidy". The phrase bears an uncanny resemblance to James Murdoch's MacTaggart lecture in Edinburgh last year when he talked about the BBC "dumping free, state-sponsored news on the market." The editorial read as if the Times editor James Harding had been taking dictation.

Neither James mentions the dumping of free Murdoch news on the market by the Sky website, which is just as likely to put local journalists out of work as the BBC, but the more important point is that the Times shows that it has already become part of the corporate campaign against what is, despite all its faults, the greatest public broadcaster in the world.

Murdoch's agenda has never been more naked, and if the Conservatives win, News International will have a government that feels in its debt, as well as an important ally on the inside – Andy Coulson. We may very soon be back to the days under Blair when the News of the World executives went into No 10 and drafted legislation on paedophiles, only this time the BBC and broadcasting regulators will be in News International's sights. As the business secretary Lord Mandelson said after the Sun dumped Labour: "There are some in the commercial sector who believe that the future of British media would be served by cutting back the role of the media regulator. They take this view because they want to commandeer more space and income for themselves and because they want to maintain their iron grip on pay-TV… They also want to erode the commitment to impartiality. In other words, to fill British airwaves with more Fox-style news." We should pay attention to what he says – he understands the beast very well.

Given what is known about the practices of Murdoch's print journalists, most people would regard the extension of News International's influence in TV as a very bad thing, which is precisely why the company acted to try to cover up the scandal. A total of £700,000 has been paid to Gordon Taylor, head of the Professional Footballers' Association. This is to say nothing of the £792,000 paid out to a sports journalist because of alleged bullying by Andy Coulson.

But this is scuttlebutt in comparison to the spectacle of News International getting away with outright contempt for our law and for parliament. Berlusconi's Italy is not such a distant nightmare.

•The head of the PFA is Gordon Taylor; this article has now been amended.