Most front-page news stories have a natural life of about three weeks.
And so the story that is the current British obsession - the fallout from allegations that tabloid journalists hacked into the voicemail messages of victims of crime, as well as celebrities and politicians - looks set to be relegated to the inside pages, even if only for a while.
But while British politicians have been consumed by this saga for more than three weeks, no parliamentary time has been found to pore over the problems that are threatening to drag the British economy back to the dark days of the 2008 financial crisis.
As the US faces potential credit ratings downgrades and a fiasco over Europe's sovereign debt crisis was narrowly avoided, for now, the UK cannot remain immune from the coming storm.
And regardless of the problems of its neighbours and trading partners, the UK has four pressing economic problems of its own to deal with.
The first is the country's alarming lack of growth. Figures out this week showed the economy flatlining. Britain has benefited from a 20 per cent currency devaluation and record low interest rates for more than two years, but its economy showed only 0.2 per cent growth in the second quarter of this year.
Pledges by the government to rebalance the economy away from financial services towards manufacturing also appear to have had little success.
While manufacturing has grown according to some surveys, the wider measure of industrial output has actually fallen. The loss of thousands of jobs this month at Bombardier, a train manufacturer based in Derby, belies the idea of a UK revival in the sector.
And so to the country's second major problem - the one that never went away - the absurdly overheating or seriously undercooked housing market. In London it remains overheated; elsewhere, decidedly tepid.
Average house prices across England and Wales peaked in August 2007 at £199,612 (Dh1.2 million). Today they are 18 per cent lower. Many of those who bought after 2006 are in negative equity.
Even if they are prepared to sell at a loss, they no longer have the deposit that banks will require to fund their next home. Experts reckon that more than 1 million people are effectively now prisoners in their own homes, unable to move to the next rung of the ladder and blocking the supply of properties suitable for first-time buyers.
The average deposit for first-time buyers is now £31,000 as loan-to-value ratios have moved from 90 per cent in 2007 to 77 per cent now. That means first-timers must find more than a year's worth of income. Is it any wonder they are now having to rent until their late 30s?
And so we come to the UK's third major problem: bank lending. To appease critics of the banks and bankers, the government has continued to demand more lending, particularly to homebuyers and small businesses.
On the housing front, ministers have cooked up a taxpayer-backed scheme in which £1.8 billion will be spent on helping first-time buyers.
In other words, it is propping up developers at a time when, outside London and a few attractive southern towns, all the signs are that house prices could continue to fall. It is an intervention too far.
For small businesses, all the evidence shows that banks are restricting credit to the smallest and most vulnerable businesses.
However, this may be no bad thing. The government is interfering with commercial lending decisions merely to take the heat out of popular accusations that it has done nothing to curb either the bankers' most dangerous activities or their rewards.
Which finally brings us to the fourth and perhaps most potentially serious problem in the long term. Energy prices in the UK are soaring.
One in five households spends more than 10 per cent of its disposable income on heating and petrol, and diesel prices are significantly higher than they are on mainland Europe. This is putting great strain on household finances, when real incomes are stalling, and adding considerably to the costs of many businesses. Long term, there is little sign that things will get better as the UK's supply of fossil fuels is depleted and ageing nuclear power stations are taken offline.
Nuclear power, which the consensus had finally come to consider the only realistic low-carbon solution to fossil fuels, is once again on the back burner, thanks to Fukushima.
With such an intractable in-tray, you can see why it has been tempting for Britain's politicians to get sidetracked by the sensational scandal surrounding the Murdoch empire.
But it really is about time the government (and the media) got down to the business of rescuing the economy.