Long Spoons, Short Memories, Tall Stories

Short of toppling a statue of Rupert Murdoch and beating at it with their shoes, Britain's MPs could scarcely have depicted themselves in recent days more like the long-suffering victims of the despot's whip.

For displays of pomposity, self-congratulation, mutual back-slapping and retrospective posturing, the last week has known no equal. There were members of parliament standing up in the Commons on Wednesday declaring that in their handling of the News Corporation scandal they had collectively expunged memories of the Expenses scandal.

Gordon Brown - a man who can turn any amount of public sympathy to eye-rolling apathy with a single word - explained to skeptical government benches that it would all have been done on his watch but for those meddlesome kids at the Civil Service.

Faced with an open goal, the honourable members have not so much kicked a ball through it as dived bodily into the net. As Sordel writes, there are politicians, responding to the news of the resignation of Rebekah Brooks, flailing wildly in self-made toils in their desperation to press some new demand.

Yet where was all this a month ago?

To the peasants who stream, torches in hand, to Baron Frankenstein's castle, the news that this is the birthplace of the monster is at least news. Indignation is at least comprehensible.

Britain's politicians can hardly claim innocence in the original and subsequent cover-ups of wrongdoing at the News of the World. If Rebekah Brooks had a fiduciary responsibility (to know who was being paid by her paper, and for what) then so did politicians: to ensure that the investigation into the original hacking case was a little more probing than accepting the assurances of the very organisation being investigated.

The story of the News International scandal is not only about journalists going rogue in search of a story. The greater blame falls on the police and government that were supposed to prevent or punish that wrongdoing.

The spite with which MPs are attacking the Murdochs would perhaps be justified in small boys overpowering a bully. It rings false from people hitherto only too happy to turn a blind eye for the chance of an invitation to dinner.

Tomfoolery

Here's a challenge: try to think of some characters from Four Weddings and a Funeral and write down either the character name or the name of the actor or at least some distinguishing characteristic. Four or five should do.

Go ahead, I'll wait.

All done?

Now, take a look down your list and see if you have Tom, played by James Fleet. You may have described him as "upper class nitwit and brother to Kristin Scott Thomas's character, Fiona", although if so you would seem to have been taking this exercise more seriously than I anticipated.

What's that you say? Not at the top? Didn't really think so.

Now, to my point. Sordel believes that the very best that David Cameron can do in his entire career is to come away with a place in people's hearts as dear as James Fleet's Tom. That's it. It doesn't get any better. Cameron was never going to be the romantic lead of British Politics.

Tom is the quintessential example of the tolerable aristocrat. If someone were building a guillotine, his would be the last head in line for the basket, and by the time he arrived for execution he would have so won over the crowd that he would be set free with a gentle cuff of the ear.

Under the terms of their Hippocratic Oath, all would-be Toms fall under a strict enjoinder to "do no harm". They are also sternly admonished to keep well out of the way of trouble: something that Cameron has managed quite ably thus far, but "Golly ... bloody Thunderbolt City!" is still some way off.

If one is aiming to be Tom, the last thing one wants to do is to create the impression that your jacket is out at the elbows from brushing up against the likes of Andy Coulson and Rebekah Brooks.

Moreover, finding yourself on the other side of the issue to Hugh Grant, unlikely wielder of the Sword of Truth, is definitely a misstep.

The trouble with Tom is that really, deep down, the British Public has an instinctive hatred for him that only some clever mugging and a self-deprecating joke can attenuate. He who would be Fleet must first be fleet.

The News of the World scandal is Cameron's first real crisis, and it will be very interesting to see how he weathers it.