Vince Cable: Foxtrot Oscar

The Vince Cable debacle usefully demonstrates why PR (proportional representation) and its promise of never ending coalitions is likely to be a bad thing for the Brits. We simply do not get the idea that a coalition - which by its nature is made up from people who fundamentally disagree about many things, and for whom the idea of "pulling together in the national interest" is not uppermost.

Coalition politics also means that lightweight amateurs such as Cable cannot be fired summarily as we would have once assumed, but has to be kept on in a reduced capacity as a sop to his faction while he is rehabilitated.

And this tale is a further example of the impossibility of discretion, secrecy and any sort of wool-pulling in the age of completely uncontrollable electronic eaves-dropping.