Rebekah Brooks: overcome by the Utopian dream? Photograph: Carl Court/AFP/Getty Images

There has been much inappropriate, salacious, and opportunistic speculation about the exact nature of the withheld communications between the former News International redhead Rebekah Brooks and the current Conservative party brownhead David Cameron, much of it in extremely dubious taste. I doubt, for example, whether the self-styled grand inquisitor Tom Watson MP would be pleased were someone to make public all his private business messages to the gravy girls at his local branch of The Gourmet Meat Pie Emporium! But unlike Watson, my main interest in the Brooks-Cameron messages is not political, or prurient, but linguistic and literary.

Admittedly, it is possible that, were the full texts of the pair’s missives to be brought to light, public confidence in Cameron would be destroyed for ever and the government would collapse, leaving a gaping power vacuum into which Ed Miliband might find himself tumbling, with all the undeniable historical impact of a damp sock falling into a deep trench latrine. But for me, what posterity will choose to preserve from the dialogues is Brooks’s response to Cameron’s 2009 Conservative party conference pep talk: “Brilliant speech. I cried twice. Will love ‘working together’.” The pellucid message fascinates, dazzling in its mystery, possessed of a bluntly opaque poetry, and will continue to resonate long after the star-cross’d pair themselves have completed their fearful passage, and death lies upon them like an untimely frost. Consider.

Brooks’s unusual use of apostrophes, rather than quotation marks, around the words “working together” appears to suggest that Brooks’s idea of her and Cameron ‘working together’ has some entirely different and privately understood meaning from the normal idea of “working together”. Would italics have helped? Could Brooks and Cameron have been planning to be ‘working together’? Or were they going to be ‘working together‘? Or, worse still, ‘working together‘?

Perhaps the much-quoted phrase from the duo’s original communique cache, “country supper”, as in “I do understand the issue with the Times. Let’s discuss over a country supper soon”, should also have had apostrophes around it, or have been in italics? Would “Let’s discuss over a ‘country supper‘ soon” have done more, or less, to inflame the suspicions of Watson’s puritanical leftwing cabal? Its presumably deliberate echoes of Hamlet’s lecherous pursuit of “country matters” would certainly not be lost on the Eton-educated Cameron. Rhythmically and dramatically, the substitution is almost too perfect.

Hamlet : Lady, shall I lie in your lap?

Ophelia : No, my lord.

Hamlet : I mean my head upon your lap.

Ophelia : Aye, my lord.

Hamlet : Or did you think I meant country suppers?

(Hamlet, Act III, Sc ii)

Elsewhere in the message’s nine words, Brooks brilliantly and economically evokes the idea of the uncontrolled emotion Cameron’s egalitarian political vision inspires in her. “I cried twice.”

Twice! Brooks cried twice. The weeping did not begin and then eventually subside, like the snotty bawling of a young foolish girl attending a Russell Brand gig, or officiating the back-garden shoebox funeral of a beloved hamster. No. The weeping began, was contained by sheer force of will, and then the undeniable power of Cameron’s crazy utopian dream of Privilege For All overcame Brooks a second time, like an enormous yes.

Make no mistake, Brooks seems to say, this was not some easily won epiphany, like the gut animal reaction to cheap music or cheap perfume, but the unwanted outcome of a struggle for self-control that failed, against Brooks’s will, and then failed again. It was a Fifty Shades of Grey-style tussle with unbidden idealistic desires, that nonetheless found their way to the heroine’s unwilling and wounded heart. If I might be so bold, the sentiment could only have been more dramatic had Brooks expressed it thus: “I cried. Twice.” But journalists are trained to write in sentences.

Cameron knows this. And so does Brooks. And for Brooks to break so boldly a fixed professional and grammatical law would perhaps have betrayed the pair far more convincingly that any amount of clanking innuendo about the riding of disobedient horses.

Time passes. We drive our carts and our plows over the bones of the dead. Leveson recedes into the memory fog. Now Savile looms aloft like Whitby Dracula newly transported in Transylvanian coffin dust, and other figures take shape in the mist, drawing the eye from country suppers. The air changes to soundless damage. Cameron will leave no legacy, and Brooks will be a stain upon the saddle of time’s swift stallion, no more. But choice phrases often linger long after the names of those who uttered them are forgotten: “It’s black over Bill’s mother’s”; “Oh! Oh! Mr Peevly! Mr Peevly!”; “That’s you that is”; and the immortal “I cried twice.” Brooks’ words will ring down the ages, divorced from the speaker and her addressee, but emblazoned as the new gold standard of emotional veracity. The News of the World is gone and the coalition will collapse. What will survive of us is love.

Stewart Lee’s DVD Carpet Remnant World is released on Monday