Oh How the Mighty Fall

Over the past few years, Vince Cable has nurtured a considerable reputation not only for economic expertise and political skill, but – fundamentally – for personal integrity. Within the course of less than a week, that reputation has been drastically undermined.

But he is not the only one who should learn to watch his step in the light of this latest media frenzy.

Which revelations am I referring to? His warning that if he were to leave, the government would be critically damaged and even brought down? Of course not – that’s merely a sound political judgement and a view shared by many an experienced commentator.

That isn’t to say that the real crux of his blunder did not make such a comment grimly ironic. After all, to tell a complete stranger in a routine (albeit confidential) meeting that he had “declared war” on Rupert Murdoch and ‘thought he was going to win’ does raise serious questions about both his judgement as a politician and his ability – essential to being a Cabinet minister – to make objective, dispassionate decisions.

Mr Cable assured his guest that he had not sunk to the level of ‘politicising’ the issue of News Corp’s takeover of BSkyB “because it was a commercial matter”. He may reflect that by declaring a personal vendetta on Mr Murdoch, he had plumbed even greater depths.

He would be right. Mr Cable’s outburst hints at a naivety and even arrogance as a minister that some may portray as being typical of a Liberal Democrat party still revelling in the warm glow of power that had seemed improbable just 9 months ago.

However, not least because of his own view of his role in the coalition, he could not and should not be sacked.

That’s because doing so would rob the Cabinet of a man who – squeaky-clean or otherwise – is nothing short of an intellectual powerhouse. One failure of judgement exposed by dubious journalistic methods is, in the cold light of day, not sufficient justification to pull down such a key pillar of this new-build government.

Instead, an under-reported aspect of this latest controversy is the further evidence it provides of the lengths to which journalists and editors, in the press in particular, are prepared to go in order to get a story. These kinds of under-hand, ‘sting’ tactics are becoming depressingly commonplace in 21st-century news media (the very same industry that some say is at stake in the News Corp saga).

It is rapidly reaching the point at which nothing a politician or any other public figure says or does, no matter how candid the environment, is ever sure to remain private. And the stakes are getting higher, with the careers of everyone from sports stars to government ministers being put in jeopardy for the sake of briefly interrupting the inevitable long-term patterns of dwindling sales and growing media diversification.

Gordon Brown’s ‘bigot-gate’ slip in the election campaign may have been largely his own fault – the microphone in his case wasn’t exactly hidden – but it seems to have inspired a wave of stories derived from secret recordings that carry the unmistakeable whiff of scandal that hacks find impossible to resist.

But for the sake of the dignity and integrity of their own trade (Murdoch-controlled or otherwise) – rather than those they pursue – they must.