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.