Why silly scandals suit our politicians

I wonder if we will ever be able to resist fixing the suffix ‘gate’ to the end of any not-yet-sufficiently-salacious scandal? Ten years ago Andrew Mitchell MP actually had a scandal involving a gate and caused the dashing of one of my greatest hopes. This was the hope that some day a scandal would emerge involving a gate, and that when hacks tried to call it ‘gategate’ we would finally realise how silly all this was, and do away with the cliché entirely.

No such luck. In recent weeks alone we have had ‘partygate’ and ‘beergate’. In fact, reading the news I sometimes wonder whether our media is not simply looking for the next thing they can affix ‘-gate’ to. Because we do seem quite amazingly distracted. For days on end we have to imbibe a single, stupid, usually irrelevant story. How many days were spent on the MP caught watching porn on his phone story? Then, apparently satisfied, we move on.

What is striking is that even the claim by our politicians that they want to move onto more serious issues is clearly untrue. Take Keir Starmer, who has spent the past week in damage distraction mode. Every time he is asked about his historic curry he says that this isn’t what people want to be talking about. What they want to be talking about, he says, is the cost of living crisis, rising bills and so on. The Tories do the same thing when they are in trouble.

So let us pretend for a moment that we had the ability to completely clear away all the more frivolous news stories of our time. Imagine if Sir Keir had his way and that beer and curries were off the table. Or cakes and wine, in the case of No.