As I pointed out previously Nick Clegg and the Lib Dems have never courted Murdoch and his cronies.

Actually, that was just the half of it.

We didn't just avoid him. We have tried, in different ways over a number of years, to cut the media mogul down to size and clamp down on the sort of abhorrent media practices that have been exposed of late.

As far back as 1994, the year before Tony Blair chose to fly to Oz to lick Rupert Murdoch's boots, we were calling for the OFT to investigate predatory pricing by the Murdoch-owned Times.

Three years later, when the new Labour government's Competition Bill was outlawing predatory pricing in other industries, but curiously not newspapers, we fought to try to get them included too. We also managed to inflict a humiliating government defeat on the subject in the Lords in the process.

That was courtesy of Tom McNally, who in 2003 succeeded in beefing up the government's media plurality regulations in the Communications Bill.

When the Lords debated media plurality in the light of the BSkyB takeover last November, Labour's Lord Puttnam remarked:

In truth, the only party that has consistently taken a thoughtfully independent position on this issue has been the Liberal Democrats. In this context, when I use the word "independent", I am referring to the Lib Dem leadership having felt itself free of prejudicial outside influences.

When the first stories about phone hacking dribbled out in 2009, Lib Dems were quick off the mark, using all the powers at our disposal to raise the issue and call for action (although, as the third party those powers were rather limited). We called for emergency statements in the House, questioned Andy Coulson's role, called for an IPCC inquiry into the Met's original phone hacking investigation and called for a judicial inquiry to boot.

In terms of clamping down on the grubby tactics of British tabloid hacks, we were calling for bugging private property to be outlawed as far back as 1992 and wanted aggressive media harassment to be made a criminal offence in 1994.

In 2003, we backed calls for a ban on newspapers and private detectives making payments to police officers and just last Autumn our conference called for an overhaul of the lame Press Complaints Commission, a chorus Labour and the Tories have only now joined.

Oh, and then there's the small matter of Vince Cable declaring war on Murdoch last year. Shame how that worked out.

Some of this stuff may sound pretty small fry but there's a limit to what a third party can do while the two bigger ones are fawning over Murdoch like Playboy bunnies at a Hugh Hefner pool party.

Bear in mind that while all this was going on, Blair got as close to Murdoch as possible without actually asking him out, Brown and Cameron were attending Rebekah Brooks' wedding, and Cameron and Miliband were hiring his former staff and attending his summer parties.

My point is that the Liberal Democrats have a track record of standing up to Rupert Murdoch. Labour and the Tories have done the opposite. I for one am happy that it looks like he might finally get his comeuppance.