Ben Brogan calls it scrutiny, I call it a disgrace...

Call me old fashioned, but I dimly recall that we have a democracy in this country. The idea is that political parties lay out a platform for government, it gets picked apart by the media, by opposition political parties, by members of the public. Then, the electorate go out to vote, and may the best party win. Easy, isn't it?

It does seem that there has been some interference here though. Ben Brogan describes yesterday's Telegraph front page as scrutiny. No Ben, scrutiny is when you receive information, test it out, ask some questions to verify it or not, then publish if there is something worth reporting. Making an outrageous accusation without checking the facts first is an attempt to distort and corrupt public opinion.

I could hear an appalling rumour about Ben Brogan, find five enemies of his who are happy to vouch for its accuracy and publish it on the basis that this is what people are saying. Strangely, that doesn't make it true, and it certainly doesn't make it acceptable.

However, the big story here is the allegation by Nick Robinson that Conservative HQ invited in, one by one, the Tory-backing press to feed them 'juicy titbits' about the leader of another political party...

I now learn that political reporters from the Tory-backing papers were called in one by one to discuss how Team Cameron would deal with "Cleggmania" and to be offered Tory HQ's favourite titbits about the Lib Dems - much of which appears in today's papers.

So, the Conservative smear machine goes into overdrive again, led by newspapers owned by people who love this country so much that they are tax resident elsewhere for the most part;

• Daily Telegraph - owned by David and Frederick Barclay, Le Montaigne, 7 Avenue de Grande Bretagne (such a perfect irony!), 98000 Monaco;
• The Sun - owned by News International, proprietor Rupert Murdoch, a naturalised citizen of the United States, and;
• Daily Mail - the holding company of which is chaired by Viscount Rothermere, non-domiciled for tax purposes.

Now don't get me wrong, I have no objection to their tax status and have no reason to believe that they are evading their rightful tax liabilities in this country. However, one must wonder whether or not these people genuinely have this country's best interests at heart, or are just interested in doing whatever it takes to protect their own interests.

If the latter is the case, do Conservatives think that our democracy is better off as a result? More importantly, do we the people think that this is the case? As David Cameron himself said at the time of the Damian McBride scandal just twelve months ago;

"I do not know what Gordon Brown knew and when he knew it but what I do know is that he hired these people, he sets the culture, he is the leader and we need change in order to change the culture and stop this sort of nonsense."

That would be the sort of change that only affects other people, right David?...