Vince Gets His Cables Cut

I am waiting; just waiting. Waiting to go to the North of England for Christmas. My original travel plan was to drive on Tuesday, 21st December but weather was bad in the Midlands and there were reports of blocked roads and long delays. We are not very good at coping with snow and the country has been gripped in an icy chaos during the last month. There has been little snow in most of England and Wales in the last couple of days but the BBC, RAC and AA were all warning us this morning that 14,000,000 motorists would be out on the roads today travelling from somewhere to somewhere, and advising them all to travel on the motorways. Sure enough, by lunch-time there were lots of traffic jams. I suspect that today will be the same so I am now intending to travel on Christmas Day. Hopefully the car will be OK and the roads are traditionally quiet on this day.

Meanwhile the Liberal part of the coalition government has got into trouble because of a scam by Daily Telegraph reporters posing as constituents of various MPs and ministers to get them to make unguarded remarks about their Tory colleagues. But the biggest gaff has been Vince Cable telling two reporters that he was at war with Rupert Murdoch and that he would see that Murdoch would not get 100% control of BSky B. Most people in the country believe that this would be the right result but after this gaff was revealed - not by the Torygraph but by the BBC's Robert Peston who had the story leaked to him via a mole in the Torygraph offices - Murdoch is looking like the wounded party. The newspaper, anxious to show us that it was revealing weaknesses and disputes inside the coalition stopped short of making the Cable gaff public because they too are against Murdoch. Now David Cameron has taken all responsibility for media matters away from Vince Cable and moved it to the Dept of Culture and Sport, where the Tory minister is more sympathetic to Murdoch. The result will be probably that Murdoch will get his way - as he usually does - and this is bad for Britain.

There have been many complaints to the Press Complaints Commission and it is to be hoped that they will come down strongly on the Daily Telegraph - but I am not optimistic.

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