Quintin Jardine's blog

It doesn’t matter how we vote. It doesn’t matter whether the party we support is at the foot of the hill, at the top of the hill or neither up nor down. In a democracy, whether it’s our party that’s in power or one to which we are diametrically opposed, we, as electors and as taxpayers, are entitled to demand one thing of Her Majesty’s ministers: that they behave with absolute integrity when exercising the offices that they hold. We place our trust in them, all of us, right, left or centre.

And that brings me to Vince Cable.

I’m not going to comment on the fact that Dr (PhD in economics) Cable, has been a member of four different political parties in his career. (One more  than Churchill and two more than me.)  I’m not going to say a word about him having been a Glasgow Labour councillor back in the 70s, back in the hey-day of Lazarus Lally and Genghis McCann. I’m not even going to go back to yesterday morning when he was quoted, accurately, as boasting, inaccurately, I  hope, of his ability to bring down the government just by walking out of the Cabinet. No, I’m going back no further than yesterday afternoon, when the BBC broke the story of his self-professed declaration of war on Rupert Murdoch.

The issue’s simple: Cable, as Business Secretary, had ministerial responsibility for deciding  whether Murdoch’s News Corporation should be allowed to bid for complete control of BskyB, Sky television’s parent company. He had referred the matter to the regulatory body OfCom, but his vain bragging to his so-called constituents about a war that he thought he was going to win, made it clear beyond a shadow of a doubt that his mind was made up.

And that brings me back to trust. In situations which affect us all, where a minister is in a quasi-judicial position in an issue that is not set down in any party manifesto, we are entitled to demand that he is objective and that he will act in the national interest. More than that, those on whom he’s passing judgement are entitled to demand the same of him. Personally, I don’t want Murdoch to take his control of  UK media one inch further. But when the decision goes against him I don’t want him running off to the European Court either, running up a multi-million pound legal bill for British taxpayers.

Today, Vince stands rebuked by the Prime Minister, (a punishment that comes a poor second to a good bollocking by my cat) and his department has been stripped of responsibility for the areas in question. And yet he’s still in the Cabinet. This can’t stand, surely. The man has demonstrated very clearly that he is no longer worthy of public trust, if not in his integrity, then at the very least in his judgement. As one of his colleagues put it last night, he fell for the oldest trick in the book, a pretty face. I doubt if there’s a single person in the Westminster community who doesn’t believe that if this was an administration with an absolute majority, he’d have gone within an hour. You don’t have to look too far back in history for precedents. Peter Mandelson was sacked twice, by one of his best friends, for transgressions which look pretty mild by comparison. Go back to 1983, and Cecil Parkinson, Maggie’s heir apparent at the time and a much bigger figure than Dr Cable ever was or ever will be, found his career in ruins over a matter that had nothing to do with his performance in office.

But, as the BBC’s excellent Laura Kuenssberg pointed out, these are not normal times. The UK has a coalition government and it seems that for those at its head, holding it together is more important than preserving its integrity. This morning the Torygraph trotted out the names of another three ministers who had what they thought were private conversations with constituents bugged without their consent. They provided very clear evidence of something I’ve believed for twenty-five years and  haven’t kept to myself, that the LibDems would do anything to have a ministerial car rolling up to their door every morning.

Cable, and now Moore, Webb and Davey, have all made it very clear they feel they’re sleeping with the enemy. They’re doing it for reward, and that makes them . . . Stop, QJ! You almost wrote ‘prostitutes’ there, and you have much more respect for sex workers than for these guys.

Six months ago, the coalition was seen to be necessary. It even offered a new sort of politics to those less cynical than me. But can you have an administration that’s built at best on grudging compromise, one that has conflict at its core, one in which a lone buffoon believes himself to be so big that he is holding the whole thing up and that it would collapse without him?

I don’t believe so. I would rather be governed wholly by Holyrood than partly by Westminster, but as long as I have to live with the status quo I expect both institutions to be run to the highest standards, and that’s not happening in London, at we can see very clearly. It’s time, in my view, for Nick Clegg, and his fifty-six colleagues to go back to their natural habitat, the opposition benches, and for David Cameron to form a minority government, until it is the will of  parliament, or until he decides, that there should be another general election.