Quintin Jardine's blog

QJ shocks the world: I agree with Vince.

I  came to view Dr Cable as something of a sleaze-bag some time ago, and when he announced his pride in putting the student tuition fees increase before the House of Commons, that nailed it down for me. (The coalition won’t last long, but the Lib Dems are too stupid to realise that with their whining they’re in the process of bringing it down, and thus giving David Cameron the chance to blame them for what he really wants to do: call another election next Spring, at which he will win a thumping majority, since there will be no effective opposition. QJ prophesy: a year from now, Danny Alexander will be leader of a very small  Lib Dem parliamentary party. QJ long shot: by then Nick Clegg will be a peer, probably in the Cabinet. Outsider odds against that one, but if someone offered me 100 — 1 I’d have to put a tenner on it.)

But that was a digression, for the underlying concern about this week’s exposes … and here is where, remarkably, I agree with Dr Cable … is the behaviour of the Daily Telegraph in sending reporters into MPs’ surgeries to pretend to be constituents, then secretly recording the conversation. To make matters worse, they seem to have done it as provocateurs, in the hope of a result. In other words, they weren’t following up a story, they were out to create one. This cannot be right. For sure, it’s going to affect the relations between members throughout the country, and it’s probably going to backwash over other journalists, in terms of what their contacts are prepared to say to them. If I was an MP I wouldn’t tell the time to a Torygraph journo now, without at least two witnesses. What’s next? Priests being taped in the confessional? Probably.

This must stop, and there’s an easy way to do it. The secret recording of conversations, audio and video, other than by criminal investigators, must be made illegal with penalties up to imprisonment for those who do it, and for those who authorise it. In cases where a journalist is convicted, editorial responsibility should be an automatic presumption, and each should suffer exactly the same punishment. The media will scream if such a bill is put forward, but nobody will sympathise, as it is the same media who have made it necessary.