Friday 15th June

So, Mr. Hunt survives another day, or maybe a bit longer, who knows.  He certainly has a self-satisfied smirk on his face of late, in contrast to the man who has saved him; Mr. Cameron’s face is taking on more and more the appearance of a boiled lobster as he has to again and again defend the indefensible.  Who know whether Mr. Hunt was actually able to keep his obvious enthusiasm for the Murdochs under wraps and be totally objective; one would doubt that it was easy if at all achievable.  But the fact that his special advisor Adam Smith was in almost constant contact with them, slipping them snippets of information before Hunt had even addressed parliament, along with his own many texts do seem to indicate that he was looking after their interests as best he could given the constraints his quasi-legal position put him in.  To turn round now and say that Mr. Smith was acting on his own, as some sort of rogue agent, who never discussed what he was doing with his boss stretches incredulity to breaking point.

And why does any of this matter?  Are we not all tired of this sorry saga?  Because integrity is at the heart of public life, if we brush it aside and say that it really doesn’t matter then the public will lose any remaining scraps of respect they might have once had for politicians.  And the biggest loser is not the smirking Mr. Hunt, who is really quite a small fish and obviously way out of his depth, but the smiling duo of ex-Bullingdon boys Cameron and Osborne.  And in a strange way the longer that Hunt survives, the worse it all looks for Cameron.  They haven’t got away with it, nobody has been fooled, the Tories voted through gritted teeth, and the Liberals would have voted against if Clegg hadn’t begged them not to.    The longer Mr. Hunt remains the shakier does Mr. Cameron’s own position become.  Read on.