Here is tomorrow's news.

In China's "trial of the decade", Gu Kailai, wife of disgraced politician Bo Xilai, will be found guilty of murdering businessman Neil Heywood but she will be spared the executioner's bullet because she has confessed and because of a lack of physical evidence. (After being found dead last November in the unfortunately named Lucky Holiday Hotel in Chongqing, the Englishman's body was quickly cremated. Only a small slice of his heart remains.)

So how can we be so sure of the outcome? Because the Chinese government has every reason to disassociate itself completely from Ms Gu and Mr Bo, who were once the gilded couple of the "Red aristocracy". (She is the daughter of one of Mao's foremost generals and he once the rising star of the party and its former chief in south-west Chongqing.)

The Chinese leadership wants to use the trial to show that the country lives by the rule of law. And it wants to ensure that this scandal does nothing to disrupt the smooth transition to a new government when the party meets this autumn to "elect" seven new members to its nine-strong standing committee. Mr Bo was considered a shoo-in for one of them until he was sacked without explanation in March.

Today's trial will have nothing to do with justice as we know it. Ms Gu, a well-known lawyer, cannot choose her own defence counsel. She is unlikely to have seen the prosecution evidence or be able to cross-question witnesses. The press is excluded. The proceedings are being rushed into court in a remote province, hundreds of miles from Beijing. And the state news agency Xinhua has prejudged the proceedings by stating the evidence against her is "irrefutable and substantial". The entire trial may be concluded in less than one day.

In a country where attempts to stifle the activities of bloggers and tweeters have proved futile, there was never any chance of keeping this case quiet. It is still unclear just why Gu Kailai wanted Neil Heywood dead. He had been the couple's "fixer" over many years and seemingly had helped their son get into Harrow, his own old school. The boy also studied at Oxford and Harvard, hardly the normal education for an ordinary Chinese boy. The couple seem to have fallen out with Mr Heywood over money and there are allegations that he posed a threat to the boy. This is said to be her motive for murdering him. With accounts of cyanide poisoning and Ms Gu wandering in a crazed state after the crime and evidence that Ms Gu and Mr Bo had amassed a vast fortune abroad, the story reads like a cross between Macbeth and an airport thriller.

She once boasted in blunt terms of the efficiency of Chinese justice, compared with the US version: "You killed someone, you will be arrested, tried and shot to death." Today, she may be grateful that it doesn't always work like that.

For the Chinese government there is a thin line to walk. It needs to demonstrate that one of its elite is subject to the same justice as everyone else, while suggesting sufficient mitigating circumstances to justify clemency. But it is hard to do that without lifting the lid on a world of personal power struggles, corruption and thuggery. That is the antithesis of the idea that the Chinese government attempts to cultivate: that it is a true meritocracy, even if it is not a Western-style democracy.

In the interests of damage limitation, the Chinese censored press tries to portray Ms Gu as a freak and a criminal. But in this era of "weibo" (the Chinese equivalent of Twitter) and microblogging, the official versions of events from the government and state propaganda are increasingly questioned. China boasts of its stability but it is hard to conceal signs of a vicious power struggle in a country where it is said you only need to move your lips to start a rumour but you have to run until your legs are broken to refute one.

This week China will count its Olympic medal haul with satisfaction but this scandal says much about the true nature of Chinese justice and politics and there is little to boast about.