So Maria Miller has gone. Predictable enough I suppose. I don't have any feelings either way about Ms Miller, who seems neither to have behaved desperately badly nor terribly well. Most of the general public will greet the news with a shrug - another politician who may or may not have had her snout in the trough. She was cleared of the charges brought against her, but found to have been unco-operative with the investigation. "Legalistic" was the term used. That's what happens when your husband is a solicitor.
The real reason Ms Miller has resigned however is that, rightly or wrongly, she became the subject of a rolling news story. You can see the way it works. Journalists have 24 hour news programmes to fill, and no journalist ever made a reputation by saying, "You know what, I don't think this is a very big story". The news is full of "Growing pressure on Mrs Miller to quit", omitting to say that the pressure is coming from journalists themselves. Eventually someone from No.10 rings up and says, "You know what Maria, I think it would be better if you went".
The next phase is that journalists then reflect on the process they themselves have put in train (I saw a feature on Sky news yesterday in which Kay Burley went through a timeline of David Cameron's supportive pre-resignation utterances; and of course disgruntled back-benchers are always happy to put in their two penn'orth, on or off the record, to keep things spicy).
So journalists win at both ends of the story. They win by rehashing stories about the hapless politician, thus applying pressure which generally forces a resignation. Then when the resignation has happened they run another series of stories about the political processes involved and the fault lines it reveals in the MP's party.
Most fatuously of all, a few years down the line the politician makes a come back. Look at Peter Mandelson. Look at David Laws, who resigned as Chief Secretary to the Treasury in 2010 over an expenses scandal, spent two years on the backbenches and has now returned as a minister in the Department of Education. Where was the outcry in the press at Laws's return to Government? Curiously, the press isn't anything like as interested in the returning sinners. And Maria Miller will be back herself, I'd bet my last penny.
This is pretty much the acme of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
At PMQs yesterday Ed Miliband laid into David Cameron. Perhaps because the TV in the gym had the sound turned down, my attention was drawn to the figures on either side of Mr Miliband. One was Ed Balls. The other was Harriet Harman. It was Harman, you will remember, who was under the media spotlight not long ago because in her capacity as Legal Officer of the NCCL she associated with an organisation which thought it was OK for adults to have sex with children. And yet there she was, nodding sanctimoniously along with her leader. Now that's how to brazen it out.
