The pressure is mounting on Rupert Murdoch's UK newspaper business News International after MPs on parliament's Culture, Media & Sport Select Committee accused execs at the company of "collective amnesia" and "deliberate obfuscation" when it came to the accusations of illegal phone hacking levelled against the newspaper firm's News Of The World.

This is the latest stage in a long running story, of course, which began when the NOTW's royal scribbler Clive Goodman was jailed in early 2007 after he admitted being involved in illegally intercepting mobile phone messages of the royal household in an endless bid to get a regal scoop.

Many inside the media said such hacking of individuals' voicemail boxes was common practice, not only at the News Of The World, but across Fleet Street. But bosses at NOTW owners News International insisted Goodman was a rotten apple, and that his illegal methods of story sourcing were not common practice at the company. Meanwhile, the Met Police, who had investigated Goodman, said there wasn't enough evidence to suggest a wider phone hacking scandal, while a new investigation by the Press Complaints Commission backed News International's official line.

But many reckoned News International were covering up for senior execs who - unless they were incredibly stupid - must have known Goodman and other journalists were busy hacking voicemail boxes on a regular basis. The same people considered the PCC's investigation into the matter to be one big whitewash, on a level that would be deemed scandalous by News International's newspapers if it were a government report on the activities of senior ministers or civil servants.

More recently The Guardian unearthed new evidence of other cases of phone hacking at the News Of The World. They also claimed that the Met Police had always had more than enough evidence that the illegal activities at News International went beyond Goodman, but that they had chosen to ignore it.

Said new evidence was considered by the Media Select Committee as part of its review of press standards, and, in a report published yesterday, the MP-team say that not only do they believe The Guardian's story, but that they have additional evidence to back the broadsheet's claims about their rival publishers.

With the committee's report pretty unwavering in its criticism of News International, and the Met and PCC's investigations of the NOTW's conduct, both the Liberal Democrats and key people within the Labour government last night called for a judicial inquiry into the affair.

News International maintain there is no affair beyond the Goodman case, and accuse the parliamentary committee of political bias. Certainly it is in both Labour and the Liberal's interest for the Murdoch newspaper group to be caught up in a scandal of its own in the run up to a General Election, given their flagship tabloid The Sun is fully backing David Cameron's Tories. Anything that would make hacks at The Sun and NOTW seem like a bunch of dodgy wannabe crooks would be helpful to all of the Tories' opponents.

And, of course, this whole story has an extra level of political intrigue, in that the editor of the NOTW during the Goodman scandal - Andy Coulson - is now communications chief for the Conservative Party. Coulson has always denied any knowledge of Goodman's phone hacking ways, though he did resign from the NOTW editorship for letting such things happen "on his watch".

Those who claim phone hacking was widely used on Fleet Street prior to 2007 say that Coulson's constant claims of ignorance of Goodman's actions means he is either a liar or a clueless fool. Neither labels - if proven true - would say much for David Cameron's recruitment skills.