With most cabinet ministers now heading to their Christmas hideaways, it will be interesting to see to what extent the Telegraph stories of subversive Liberal Democrats within the coalition has the life-span of an unpopular panto or has , as they put it in the world of newspaper hacks, ‘legs’ i.e. endurance.
In a sense the damage has already been done on two fronts. Firstly if has left Vince Cable as a lame duck cabinet minister- his reputation for speaking out on matters others fear to tread fatally compromised by the way he has meekly accepted a very public reprimand from the prime-minister and his party chief. The decent thing would have been to have the courage of his convictions, confirm that he meant what he said, and tender his resignation. An air of hypocrisy now hovers over the coalition which claims to be more principled than Labour.
Secondly the Telegraph story-or series of stories- are interesting for the way they were obtained. Not by frank discussion between politicians and journalists, on or off the record, but by two journalists pretending to be someone else i.e. constituents.
I leave it up to others to comment on what politics the Torygraph, sorry I meant Telegraph is playing at, and whose interests is it really serving by ‘exposing’ the Liberal Democrats as a bunch of untrustworthy opportunists, with a radical tick. But the stories themselves and the contrived methodology behind them reflects badly on the relationship between MP’s and ‘lobby’ journalists based in Westminster, and the extent to which it manages to get to grips with what ministers really do think and feel. These are stories which should have been bylined by political correspondents weeks ago.
