Vince Cable and the Telegraph sting – should he sue?

The business secretary might well be within his rights to find a means to sue or report the paper for breach of parliamentary privilege. Today programme and Vince Cable being turned over by the Daily Telegraph in his own constituency surgery, it's a challenging day for media ethics and our ideas about privacy, let alone trust. As you must have heard by now the business secretary was interviewed without realising it by undercover reporters posing as mums worried about benefit cuts. The result: today's "I could bring down the government" headline here.
Dr Cable told the Telegraph that negotiations can be difficult within the coalition but that everyone knows he has a "nuclear option" to resign. Don't quote me outside, he told the Twickenham mums. Were the mums unshaven, I asked myself, or sporting moustaches? Didn't Vince notice anything odd?
WikiLeaks there's not really much very surprising about this. Much of the value lies in the titillation provided by clandestine methods and frank language. But we all know Cable – the cabinet's Hamlet, I call him – has been fighting semi-public battles over bank bonuses and break-ups.
US diplomatic cables (no relation) we have been reading courtesy of Mr Assange – it's to Cable's credit that he says nothing in his supposedly private conversation that is different from what he says in public. Good. It would only have been a story if he'd said something dishonest like.
Daily Mail turned over Ed Miliband's new communications chief, Tom Baldwin, in spectacular fashion on Saturday. As regular readers know, the Guardian has gone after David Cameron's man, Andy Coulson, over his role – denied – in systematic interception of private telephony traffic by reporters at the News of the World, and the curious role of Scotland Yard.
Guardian should treat both men the same, some Tory chums suggest by way of a tease. Fair point. Meanwhile, today's Times has come after the Guardian, interviewing Assange in his country retreat, under a paywall headline.
Guardian for publishing the early Wiki leaks, and then itself publishing the one about top US infrastructure targets (the Guardian decided there was no public interest and some risk to the targets in doing so), the Times has now gone back on the attack. That's what papers do.
The Telegraph has a scoop, so don't whinge, Mike" is one way of looking at it. Freedom of the press justifies entrapment of a cabinet minister, incidentally a Lib Dem cabinet minister, not a Tory. They don't like Cable. in parliament and to his Twickenham constituents. That's what he thought he was being when talking to the two wired reporters. As a local MP he has obligations of confidentiality to constituents – MPs take this very seriously and so they should. People can lose their jobs.  It was a principle that Assange repeatedly raised, unembarrassed, when asked about his sexual conduct by the BBC's John Humphrys this morning. Talking about such matters "is not what a gentleman does It's not as if the tape proved that Vince likes cocaine or underage rent boys, both illegal activities and thus legitimate targets of press inquiry – as was the News of the World's Pakistani match-fixing probe, but not its hacking into royal or celeb gossip.
But the Telegraph did this only last month to Lord Young, who made some unguarded remarks about the unemployed in what he must have thought was a private lunch at an expensive West End restaurant. The tape ended up on the paper's website and he had to resign as a Cameron adviser, silly man.
He might well be within his rights to find a means to sue or report the paper for breach of parliamentary privilege – which the sting surely was in interfering with his duties as Twickenham's MP. But politicians have long been cowed and rarely take such steps unless the case is watertight and then some. Was it not the Telegraph that obtained (bought?) the discs containing all those details of MPs' expenses and ran them for weeks? It was and there was a defendable public interest in doing so, though it was much exaggerated and exploited by us all.

 Why, people like the reclusive Barclay twins, Dave and Fred, tax-exiles who own the Daily Telegraph and ferociously defend their own privacy on their absurd "castle" at Brecqhou in the Channel Islands. Their cautious Wikipedia entry gives barely anything about their attempts to use the courts, French courts as well as ours, including suing the Times. Google it yourself. Would the paper try this on with a City tycoon, I wonder? Somehow I doubt it.
whom I sometimes criticise for excessive aggression but who played this assignment with probing skills. As you'd expect Assange sounds complicated, he makes good points and some, political and personal, that made me flinch.