Not sacked for what happened in the sack

For those of you not UK readers, Boris Johnson was the Conservatives' Arts spokesman and is editor of right-wing magazine the Spectator. A real character he hams up being a bumbling upper-class old Etonian and has sparks of brilliant humour.

He has, however, made a gigantic misjudgement and been sacked from his front-bench position in the House of Commons. What is frustrating is the inability of much of the media and, it seems public, to understand that this has nothing to with the affair he appears to have had with writer Petronella Wyatt and whatever ramifications there were from it. It has simply to do with the fact that he described the stories last week as 'an inverted pyramid of piffle' before they turned out this week to be true, in the process lying to Michael Howard, the leader of the Opposition. Serious politicians cannot lie to the public or their leader and expect to be kept on, whoever they are.

However, the majority of people commenting on the BBC website seem to be unable to comprehend this. They seem outraged that the Conservatives are 'poking around in peoples' bedrooms'. Even the respectable Militant Moderate (who I'm sorry to flame because he commented to me earlier in the week about how pally this blogging business seemed...) seems to have jumped aboard.

Of course it's nobody's business what Johnson does in his private life. It is our business if he lies to his leader and lies in the press though. Nobody doing that can stay on, no matter how popular, amusing, refreshingly different or skilfull someone is. It is too easy to take a cheapshot at the Tories over this for doing the only thing they could. If the party was vindictive of people having affairs John Redwood wouldn't have been welcomed back into the fold less than a year after leaving his wife for his mistress.

I don't see why this is an issue for questioning the Conservatives at all, apart from Tory-bashing being a nice easy topic for the left-leaning media to dredge up again and painting them irrationally as the 'nasty party' being something they can't avoid.

He lied. He got sacked.

That's the wrap.