Skip to main content

Another day, another resignation

The Murdoch scandal.

The sky is dark with chickens coming home to roost.

Rebekah Brooks resigns and a day later is arrested. Les Hinton resigns. Further arrests are on the way. The noose grows tighter ever tighter around James Murdoch.

Meanwhile Sir Paul Stephens resigns as the Met Police commissioner- inevitable sooner or later, but interesting that it was sooner.

Some of the more excitable may say that Cameron himself is under threat, but in the political game of mutual assured destruction, he is no more guilty than most, and a lot less guilty than many. Tony Blair has probably not been sleeping too well recently either. In fact, although not good for the PM, it would take a far more dramatic escalation for his position to be under real pressure. Cameron may have made some new enemies, not least Sir Paul Stephens, apparently, but that is the swings and roundabouts of politics.

Meanwhile the Liberal, Democrats came under attack for being the only party with completely clean hands -not just because "Murdoch would not take their call" (thank you, Cristina!), but because the loathing of Murdoch was mutual. I think it takes a certain kind of prejudice to argue that the Lib Dems have behaved badly in this affair. Vince Cable may have shot his mouth off in a moment of vanity, but the Lib Dems have detested the Dirty Digger for decades and despised almost everything he represented with great ferocity.

So what is the real end game?

The scandal will continue to spread.

Murdoch will face ruin.

The Police will be investigated further and more News International and Police resignations and indeed arrests will take place.

On the other hand, while Ed Miliband may have won the first phase, it is not in his interests for much more than that to happen.

After all, if the can of worms of the last Labour government is opened, then the scale of the scandal will indeed enter the stratosphere.
Labels:

Comments

Ian Stewart said…
not Stephens, but Stephenson...
wasn't the LibDem call just to tell Murdoch to "get f@#%ed" and he knew there was no point in taking a call from people who loath you?
8:01 am
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Liberal Democrats v Conservatives: the battle in the blogosphere

It is probably fair to say that the advent of Nick Clegg, the new leader of the Liberal Democrats, has not been greeted with unalloyed joy by our Conservative opponents. Indeed, it would hardly be wrong to say that the past few weeks has seen some "pretty robust" debate between Conservative and Liberal Democrat bloggers. Even the Queen Mum of blogging, the generally genial Iain Dale seems to have been featuring as many stories as he can to try to show Liberal Democrats in as poor a light as possible. Neither, to be fair, has the traffic been all one way: I have "fisked' Mr. Cameron's rather half-baked proposals on health, and attacked several of the Conservative positions that have emerged from the fog of their policy making process. Most Liberal Democrats have attacked the Conservatives probably with more vigour even than the distrusted, discredited Labour government. So what lies behind this sharper debate, this emerging war in the blogosphere? Partly- in my ...
20 comments
Read more

Concert and Blues

Tallinn is full tonight... Big concerts on at the Song field The Weeknd and Bonnie Tyler (!). The place is buzzing and some sixty thousand concert goers have booked every bed for thirty miles around Tallinn. It should be a busy high summer, but it isn´t. Tourism is down sharply overall. Only 70 cruise ships calling this season, versus over 300 before Ukraine. Since no one goes to St Pete, demand has fallen, and of course people think that Estonia is not safe. We are tired. The economy is still under big pressure, and the fall of tourism is a significant part of that. The credit rating for Estonia has been downgraded as the government struggles with spending. The summer has been a little gloomy, and soon the long and slow autumn will drift into the dark of the year. Yesterday I met with more refugees: the usual horrible stories, the usual tears. I try to make myself immune, but I can´t. These people are wounded in spirit, carrying their grief in a terrible cradling. I try to project hop...
Post a Comment
Read more

Are the Liberal Democrats Libertarian?

A few days ago Cicero met with one of the better known figures in the Libertarian Alliance, Brian Mickelthwait . Brian writes for various blogs that I enjoy reading- including Samizdata . Ahead of our meeting Brain expressed "scepticism" about the Libertarian credentials of the Liberal Democrats: "My charge was that when you meet a Liberal Democrat you never know what he will believe. The one who talks to you is likely to say what you want to hear. But the others will simultaneously be telling other people with quite different views what they want to hear. So don't vote for these lying creeps." Political parties- all of them- are coalitions of people who quite often disagree with each other. Apparently we are not supposed to "air our dirty linen in public", but actually one of the reasons that the Liberal Democrats appealed to me was that they were prepared to talk about issues and policies amongst themselves in public. The eclipse of the Liberal Party...
18 comments
Read more