Vince Cable has been taped saying things about Coalition policies which he thought were private. He was caught by the dodge of wired reporters pretending to be constituents. This kind of sting is now common, though, so far, politicians have not been primary targets. It is part of the same culture as Wikileaks and it is will not go away. After all, this was not a Murdoch tabloid at work, this was the Daily Telegraph which, after the MPs expenses saga, shows itself as a potent and ruthless force in journalism. The theme is that the days of behind closed doors are themselves drawing to a close. People are no longer willing to be told what is said to be going on, they now want to know what is really going on.
All branches of government will have to get used to this and adjust. More important, the better informed voters must make good use of their newly acquired knowledge to make sound judgements about those who govern them. In the narrow context of what we have just learned from Vince, we can now chart the fault lines in the Government. It is not as strong as we thought nor as cozy in jovial give and take as we had we had been led to suppose.
The Tories would prefer to be a bit more to the right, though probably not Cameron, Gove and Letwin. The Lib Dems would prefer more to the left. But here there is a new dimension revealed by the sting. It is Vince who is fighting tooth and nail for the things Lib Dems hold dear. It was Nick who did the very courageous deal with the Tories, but it is Vince who emerges as by far the more powerful in the government, with one of the highest profiles among all the politicians in the country. Moreover if push came to shove, the majority of Lib Dems would follow Vince into a coalition with Labour. The figures do not quite add up, but after a bye-election or two they just might.
Meanwhile the single most important issue in front of this government is to deal with the bankers to public satisfaction. So far it is looking weak. If it gives the bankers an easy ride, it may lose a critical amount of public support in its drive to cut the deficit. There is much more at stake than the domicile of a handful of greedy financial gamblers.