Thursday 18thJuly

As a young teenager I was fascinated by the Profumo scandal.  A cabinet minister, a ‘prostitute’ a Russian Naval attaché, and the whole seedy underbelly of British post-war society.  And since then there has been scandal following scandal, though in my mind, of almost diminishing importance.

And now we are in the age of perpetual scandal, where every misdemeanor and crime or case of negligence or cover-up is a “scandal”.  Even phone hacking, though exciting as the mighty Murdoch was humbled, was hardly a ‘scandal’.  The scandal was that this was considered normal behaviour by our gutter press; that the ruining and invasion and ridiculing of ordinary people was justified for the ‘public’s’ amusement; that the publishers thought they could fill pages with semi-nudity and celebrity gossip and pass it off as news – that was the scandal.

And now daily we have scandals, one day rate-fixing, miss-selling of financial products, the next – too many deaths in hospitals.  And all the while the public’s confidence and respect falls even further.  It is probably true that without regulation people will slip into illegality, whether it be at the top of society or at the bottom.  If you think about it, it is only the likelihood of getting caught that acts as any sort of deterrent at all.  And then we have the problem of the guardians, the regulators and the ‘scandal’ of themselves covering up their own poor performance.  The ‘scandal’ of Government Ministers not knowing, or not asking; the ‘scandal’ of doctors who were doing their best with limited resources and maybe making the wrong call; the ‘scandal’ of MPs being awarded a pretty fair pay-rise, given the abuse of expenses that was also a ‘scandal’.

And so it goes on.   We need to reclaim the meaning of a scandal.  What we need is a real scandal; a Minister, a Prime Minister maybe, shagging a Celebrity, and the photo’s published in Italy, and available on the internet.  Then we would stop calling every irregularity another ‘scandal.’