News that Rebekah Brooks, the former chief executive of the troubled News of the World, has now been arrested in the phone tapping scandal raises fresh doubts - previously unsuspected - about the ethics of creative writing programs. Let me explain...

I've just had a delightful end-term lunch with my fellow tutors at the university where, to the distress of publishers, I teach creative writing. To evade campus professors and other spies, we huddled together in the humid darkness of a downtown pulque bar.

All of us bemoaned the futility of our jobs.

‘Why do we scatter dreams and fairy dust on cohorts of would-be J K Rowlings,’ I asked ’when they have as much chance of getting published as A S Byatt has of winning a beauty contest?’

‘Not so!’ mourned Judy, writing mentor par excellence. ‘One of my 20 year-old students has just been offered a three-book publishing contract.’

‘That’s wonderful!’ I cried.

‘It’s horrible,’ she said. She snapped a bread stick in half. ‘I can write like an Orange finalist on steroids but all my novels are rotting in slush piles.’

It was true, alas. And the one truth was the direct cause of the other.

She writes like an angel. Her novels gleam. Her student? Chick-lit froth.

‘Publishers don’t buy Literature any more.’ She wept into her guacamole. ‘Unless it’s by-lined by Jordan.’

‘Not in my class,’ I sighed, swallowing a tequila worm. ‘She’s a lady with all her future in front of her.’

A bread stick whizzed past my ear.

‘I must unequivocally distance myself from these scurrilous suggestions,’ said the Head of Journalism (HoJ), who had recently joined us. ‘It is alleged that hundreds of best-selling novelists have emerged from university programs in creative writing. Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan, John Boyne, Emma Darwin…’

‘It must be true,’ I said. ‘It’s in Wikipedia. But for every novelist who’s on a Tesco shelf, ten thousand better writers are pulling pints in pubs.’

‘Or working for slave wages at literary agencies,’ Judy muttered ‘soaking the unfranked stamps off unsolicited manuscripts then binning the manuscripts.’

‘And yet, many a fine novelist has honed his or her craft at the Writers’ Village story writing competition,’ I exulted ‘where they can receive helpful critiques upon every story they enter and at no further charge. What’s more, by simply entering their name in a little box beside my blog they can receive a free mini-course in creative writing!’

Judy frowned into her ceviche. ‘If I read that in a blog, I’d call it spam.’

‘Our duty is clear,’ I said, ignoring her pique. ‘We must run a master class for first year creative writing students called The Truth About Writing.’

Judy wailed: ‘Then we’d have no students in the second year!’

I demured: ‘We’d retain our integrity.’

She riposted: ‘We’d lose our jobs.’

(Students please note: nobody in real life ‘demurs’ or ‘ripostes’. Eschew the aureate inquit or lose a mark.)

‘I suggest a compromise, ‘ said HoJ. He smiled, as sly as a professor. ‘We will put Michael Allen’s excellent book The Truth About Writing on the campus web site under Essential Reading. Our duty is then done and our jobs are safe. No creative writing student has ever accessed the university web site or the Essential Reading list.’

‘What is this wondrous book?’ I asked.

‘It is the most devastating critique ever written about modern publishing,’ he said, signalling for a third round of pulque. ‘It’s so true that no publisher dare publish it.’

‘That’s why I’ve never heard of it,’ I sniffed.

‘But surely you have?’ He frowned, with all the spurious civility of a phone-tapping journalist. ‘Can it not be found on your own web site at this very moment, and without charge, by clicking here?’

‘Careful, HoJ,’ Judy warned him ‘you’ve just breached the Fourth Wall. The next thing we know, you’ll be addressing the reader directly and pouring him a tequila.’

The Head of Journalism peered invitingly into the humid shadows of the pulque bar. He looked up. He looked out. He saw you.

'One worm or two?' he asked.