The Today Programme has its Hague cake and eats it too

The Today Programme this morning demonstrated the problem with putting out an official statement on your private life: it makes the media feel that they have official sanction to discuss the matter. There were three separate discussions of Hague’s statement on the programme this morning. In a classic case of the BBC trying to both have its cake and eat it, one of the segments spent several minutes debating whether they should be talking about the matter at all.

Hague’s problem is that the press is now obsessed with this story; it isn’t going to let it go even after this extraordinarily personal statement. I understand why Hague felt he had to put out this statement but I suspect he might just have, unintentionally, encouraged further coverage of his private life.