That a woman intent upon destroying a man who has outlived his usefulness to her can, in effect, decide that he should not continue as a senior member of the British government is deeply menacing for democracy. Should this become the benchmark for the ethical assessment of the character and conduct of politicians, we are in the deepest trouble.
And in the matter of the British Home Secretary and the chaotic end of his affair with Kimberly Fortier-Quinn, the precedent is rather more baneful. A relatively trivial matter, in which David Blunkett may have tenuously availed of his position to speed up a nanny's visa application as a favour to his lover, becomes the instrument of that lover's campaign subsequently to assassinate his character. That Ms Quinn was herself the principal beneficiary of this transaction seems not to count in the weighing of its venal content, or to disqualify her as whistle-blower.
And it is scarcely thought relevant in much of the public discussion that this campaign of character-assassination was conducted initially to drive Mr Blunkett away from his baby son, and subsequently as a punishment because he refused to be driven away.
There is, indeed, at play the morally bizarre notion that Ms Quinn may have been perfectly entitled to do this in order to protect what is called her "family".
No special powers of insight are required to envision the potential ecology of all this. Firstly, it becomes clear that, in the modern media's obsession with setting traps for public figures, we have lost the means to nurture a healthy hierarchy of venality in the public arena. The actions of Ms Quinn are demonstrably far more despicable than anything of which Mr Blunkett stands accused, yet it is he who falls on a sword strategically placed by her. It should be a matter of the gravest concern that public discourse is no longer capable of maintaining distinctions of degree between technical political misdemeanours and serious breaches of the ethics of human interaction.
Secondly, the idea that a man of such personal heroism and ability should lose his position because of a personal weakness for a woman is disproportionate to an extent that places the world at the mercy of the petty and wicked, while banishing the valiantly human. Mr Blunkett is a deeply passionate man whose love of poetry has led him astray as to the character of a woman he came to adore. And though a whole culture might seek to have it otherwise, these events have bound the destinies of these two people and their child or children together for what is likely to be the rest of David Blunkett's natural life. It is clear from his resignation interviews that Mr Blunkett anticipates that this future will bring great pain and great joy.
But what cannot, surely, be gainsaid is that the public life of our world is in dire need of more people like Mr Blunkett: brave, determined, brilliant, passionate and, yes, foolish. We need, whether we realise it or not, people in government who know what it is like to pace the boards in the small hours in a maelstrom of emotion on foot of a lost love. For how else can we ensure that our societies are governed in accordance with the contours and jagged edges of the human condition?
And we certainly need men in public life who know what it signifies for the psychic health of society that fathers do what they can to remain in the lives of their children. For how else can we ensure that we will continue to have societies at all? To follow the logic and precedent of what has happened thus far would be to hand the public realm over to the prig, the Pharisee, the bully and the blackmailer, to make it impossible for an individual who is, as one commentator said of Mr Blunkett, "a fully-paid-up member of the human race", to remain in a position of power and influence for any longer than a once-intimate enemy is prepared to allow.
The power implicitly awarded by this episode to such as Ms Quinn is the power to rule by holding to ransom the darkish secrets of people who have unwisely loved them. To so readily accord such a ruthless woman the means to destroy David Blunkett is to place a blackmailer's charter on a lectern in the vestibule between the private and the public and, in the guise of promoting high standards in public life, to place our societies at the disposal of the private agendas of people with few if any scruples at all.
The mainspring of this process, certainly, is the literalised culture of a selectively black-and-white judgmentalism inflicted by an increasingly pitiless and unprincipled media, but the primary lever is presented, willingly if not enthusiastically, to the scorned, the vengeful and the poisonous, to treat public life as though it were a game of snakes and ladders in which the ugly of spirit will triumph and the great invariably go down.