Twitch those curtains

I can understand why Tony and David think that David's private life should be beyond the pale and not referred to – a practical matter – and I myself am not bothered one teeny bit about who he was shagging, given my opinion of his non-shagging activities – but I find myself unwilling to condemn media reports on the matter designed to feed

The prurient interest that many in this country take in the private lives of public figures

which is of course

one of our least attractive national characteristics.

(thus sayeth the Indie).

I'm not talking here about the allegations of him fast-tracking visa applications for nannies and lending railcards and all that guff, which is at least illegal, if trivial compared to what he's doing perfectly legally. I'm talking about pointing and going “ooo, the dirty bugger, cheating on his wife, ooo”. Curtain-twitching basically.

The reason for this is that the policies that he promotes are so appalling, yet seem to get so little interest apart from by the usual suspects. Lords and Liberty and so on can scream about how bad an idea ID cards are, cartoonists can ridicule him but is he thrown out? Is this damaging to his career? No. A bit of extra-marital sex is though, it appears.

This isn't a game. This man is promoting policies that are actively harmful to the populace. Admittedly, he's not the sole originator of these, and doubtless if he goes he'll be replaced by someone similar, and it would be better if the reasons why the policies were bad were better known so that the replacement couldn't just promote the same ones, but getting rid of the current Home Secretary for whatever reasons will at least make things harder. If petty moralising is what it takes then fair enough.

And I still hurt, though the hurt is gradually moving around to the front now, not that that really makes it much better.

Edit: I also added an online version of The Boiled Egg Game to the toys section of the site. This will make sense to at most four or five people in the world.