Will the right-wing media eat its own enfants terrible?

I admit that I've probably watched the Lawrence Fox drama play out with a certain sense of wry amusement. Perhaps that's because I understand that, with actions, come consequences. And, if you don't want to accept the consequences, your options might not be terribly palatable.

That means that there are certain rules to be adhered to. For example, the right to free speech is balanced by an acceptance of the consequences of expressing them. If you really are a free speech warrior, then that's actually quite easy. Say something vile, be thought of as vile by a bunch of people, some of whom may have the ability to alter your life. You may conclude that the benefits of being vile outweigh the penalties.

Alternatively, you can restrain yourself from expressing some of the things that you might otherwise want to say, in order to protect the things you care for - wealth, family, loved ones.

But saying something stupid and unpleasant and then apologising in order to protect what you have means that you're not a free speech warrior, you're actually more than a little cowardly. You've suddenly realised that you don't fancy the consequences and would really like to wriggle off of the hook.

It tends to come to all of the (predominantly) right-wing media exponents of extreme positions in the end. There's a buzz to being paid to say things that most people wouldn't either have the nerve to say publicly or want to espouse in the first place. And our media pay well for those who rise to prominence. The catch is that there are plenty of people who hold, or are willing to express, opinions that are provocative or sensationalist, and thus to maintain your lucrative position, you have to push a little further all of the time until you reach the tipping point where your viewpoints aren't just edgy but widely accepted to be offensive.

And that's when your average media company usually decides that their brand is more important than your salary, and you get canned. They need the advertising revenue and, in a world where social media campaigns can very effectively persuade advertisers to look elsewhere, standing by an offensive columnist is just not worth it financially.

How to replace that buzz of attention is the next problem, and that means attracting attention by being even more "out there", shouting into the void. And yes, you can probably make a living, for a while, appealing to a smaller and smaller, albeit more fanatical, audience until you end up like Katie Hopkins (remember her?) - reduced to travelling the world being ever more childishly outrageous in search of the next cheque.

Alternatively, you can row back from your more outré positions and attempt to re-enter the mainstream of commentary. But does that mean that your original statements were made simply to earn money, and that you never believed them in the first place? And what does that say about you as a person, or about your integrity?

And, as the media cycle gets shorter and shorter, and as technology allows more and more people to express themselves and their opinions, the time taken to go from enfant terrible to friendless embarrassment reduces too, and the financial benefits shrink accordingly.

So, Lawrence, was it really worth it? Only you can tell...

MP pay - is it really too difficult to read the whole story before engaging outrage mode?

Yes, it seems.

Oh, you want me to say more than that. Right. Ummm... let's see. Wait a minute, it's on the tip of my tongue...

In my day job, I spend my time examining all of the available data in order to define any areas of doubt and uncertainty and then, having done so, work out a fair and rational way of dealing with them. It is surprisingly enjoyable, especially as you learn more about human nature and about how people organise, and rationalise, their lives. You get to meet interesting people and get a sense of their worlds.

So, it would be odd if I spent five minutes looking at one particular piece of data, and drew my inferences from it alone, ignoring all of the rest. And yet, people seem perfectly willing to do just that when it comes to politics, politicians, and how our country is run.

Let's take MP salaries as an example. They have been awarded a 9.26% increase in their basic salary by IPSA, the independent arbiter of what an MP should be paid, as well as the rest of their package. 9.26%, or about £7,000, that's an outrage, right? In isolation, it is a lot of money, especially given the pay restraint to be applied to the public sector (and it amazes me the level of ignorance about that too, but that's a different story, for a different day perhaps).

Of course, it isn't the whole story. The personal contribution towards their pension will be increased, and the resettlement allowance for MPs who are not re-elected has been axed and replaced with a rather less generous 'loss of office' allowance only to be paid to MPs who fight their seat and lose - think of it as redundancy money, as paid to a lot of people when they lose their job. And there are other, reasonable reforms such as the abolition of the food subsidy currently payable if the House sits after 7.30 p.m.

The overall additional cost to the taxpayer? Nothing. Nada. Zip. Heavens, even the Civil Service paybill is increasing by 1% per annum.

There are some elements which might be questioned. Why, for example, should it right for future increases to be linked to the growth in average earnings, when the public sector will be pegged to something rather lower than that if the Government's own figures are to be believed?

But that isn't a cause for outrage particularly, especially if future increases are linked to those of average employees. It provides a realistic incentive to spread the benefits of economic growth rather more widely, even if taking the median figure for pay growth might be more credible than the mean.

Unfortunately, most people will read the first sentences of the story and never bother to get to the end. Indeed, attention spans seem so short now that getting to the middle appears unrealistic. It does not augur well for an intellectual renewal if our body politic, does it?...