Another day, another departure

With Yates of the Yard added to the phone-hacking casualty list, the fashionable game at Westminster is guessing how long the cabinet can continue to face-off against an onslaught of innuendo and implicit guilt.

The incomparable Dennis Skinner posed the question this afternoon as to when would there be resignations among “Millionaire’s Row” (his description of the Front Bench) and whilst rank-and-file coalition MPs responeded in chorused heckles, the jeers were half-hearted enough to indicate that they shared vaguely similar thoughts.

Labour has inevitably latched onto the comparison between Met commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson and David Cameron, who both hired former NoW senior hacks but exercised different extrication strategies when the proverbial hit the fan. But an uncomfortable aspect for tory ranks is the degree to which opposition finger-pointing was obliquely echoed by London Mayor Boris Johnson in his coded rationale as to why the two top cops had to go.

Idle talk in the tea rooms is that the PM may yet offer up a few sacrificial demotions to deflect further questions on the Coulson link and offset any prospect of a future leadership challenge. Very few however think that this is Cameron’s only ploy. He knows that the focus of Wednesday’s recall debate will be on the issue of “judgement” – and so does Ed Milliband. As such, the priority is to undermine the Labour leader’s moral high-ground by highlighting how his own party carries the Murdoch taint and then upstage him at the Dispatch Box. Easily done, based on past performances.

The government will not fall (if only because the procedures have not been agreed) and the unspoken aim of both leaders to land a few blows, claim their respective victories and then send off their loyal followers for a well deserved and slightly overdue recess. Tra-la.

Unless, of course, there is another resignation.