Media outfit Harbottle & Lewis has come out fighting in the wake of "hackgate". The firm has sent a strongly-worded letter to the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee attacking News International for wrongly representing Harbottle's role in the scandal.

Ever since the full extent of hacking at the now defunct News of the World's emerged, all the players in the scandal have been scrambling over one another to point the finger. First up were the Murdochs, who appeared before the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee to lay the blame squarely at the door of their lawyers. They claimed the Harbottle had been instructed to investigate the extent of the alleged criminal behaviour at NI, and that the firm had "made a major mistake" in saying that hacking was confined to jailed reporter Clive Goodman.

More Select Committee evidence yesterday

But Harbottle is having none of it, and has fired off a turgid 23-pager to the Select Committee. For those who cannot face wading through the whole verbose thrilling missive, the essence of the firm's case was that its instruction was only in the context of a particular employment case. On the basis of this narrow retainer it sifted through 300 emails, taking two weeks and charging £10k to produce a two paragraph letter confirming no evidence of "illegal actions". The firm insists it was not brought in to, in the words of Rupert Murdoch, "find out what the hell was going on" and couldn't in any event as it has no criminal expertise.

Making things even trickier for the Murdoch dynasty, former NI in-house legal chief Jon Chapman has turned on his former paymasters. He insists that it was "very misleading" to characterise the Harbottle investigation as a "general internal inquiry". Ex-NI legal head Tom Crone and former NoTW editor Colin Myler have also piled in to dump on NI, accusing James Murdoch of misleading the Committee.

As for the law firms, the blame seems to have been kicked over to criminal firm BCL Burton Copeland, which Harbottle claims undertook a much more substantial investigation into goings on at NI. Although it was suspiciously absent from the Murdochs' evidence. It's the scandal which keeps on giving.