Alan Watkins: Oh dear. The removal of Mr Kennedy is now looking a bigger and bigger mistake

The grand object of policy is to avoid upsetting Mr Murdoch

At the time of her fall, Margaret Thatcher's parliamentary private secretary was Peter Morrison. He was a heavy drinker and a homosexual, so combining the recently publicised characteristics of Charles Kennedy, Mark Oaten and Simon Hughes, though he drank much more than Mr Kennedy, and was a less affable person as well. Mrs Thatcher had got it into her head that only rich Tories should be asked to become her PPS, and Morrison was certainly rich.

She was also taking a risk, not only because of Morrison's tendency to fall asleep at crucial moments - he was blamed, perhaps unfairly, for her failure to win the first ballot outright - but also because of his disposition to get into trouble in public lavatories. It may have been only one incident, which kept being recycled, as is the way of these things, but it seems to have been a case of:

"Why bless my soul if it isn't Mr Morrison again. You got a home to go to, sir? Well, if you take my advice you'll go to it in double-quick time."

Luckily, this was a matter of Westminster gossip merely and never reached the papers. Immediately before becoming the Prime Minister's PPS, he had been a junior minister. At around this time it was my habit to go to a somewhat self-consciously gentlemanlike club for supper on a Sunday. Morrison was there with a pleasant-looking young man in his late twenties or early thirties. Alan Clark was also present. Out of Morrison's hearing, I said to Clark:

"I suppose that's Peter's latest fancy."

"Honestly, Watkins," Clark said, "sometimes you can be incredibly bloody naive. That's not Peter's boyfriend. It's the man from the ministry, who's been sent out for the evening to see that Peter doesn't get into any trouble."

The purpose of the foregoing is to demonstrate that, in politics, these are not entirely simple matters. For myself, I marvel at Mrs Thatcher's tolerance and broadmindedness over 15 years ago. Or perhaps - as with Harold Macmillan in the Profumo affair - she wasn't told. But presumably the Whips knew all about Morrison's proclivities, and allowed the Prime Minister to make the appointment which she wished to make. Maybe they were too scared of her to open their mouths.

Whether we should have a law of privacy has been chased around the bushes for several years now. I do not propose to reopen the discussion, except to say that it is perfectly clear why Parliament has not legislated on the subject. After all, the recent breakers of confidence - or, if you prefer, tellers of truth - were The Sun and the News of the World, both proudly owned by Mr Rupert Murdoch. The grand object of policy of all governments (the process really got underway in the 1980s, when Margaret Thatcher, acting through John Biffen, waved through the acquisition of The Sunday Times) has been to avoid getting on the wrong side of Mr Murdoch. So much is straightforward enough.

What is less clear is why the judges have been so timorous. In the past 40 years they have constructed the doctrine of judicial review, under which ministers can be held to account and, sometimes, their actions found to be unlawful. On the whole this change has worked to the benefit of the public.

In roughly the same period the judges have developed a law of confidentiality which did not exist previously. This has worked to the benefit of the rich and the powerful, who use it to smoke out employees whom they consider to be "disloyal" or troublesome in other respects. They employ it as a useful and in some ways more efficacious supplement to an already oppressive law of defamation.

My worry is that a law of privacy will develop in the same way: as a mechanism whereby the rich and the powerful (which, in this context, includes political parties, though it may not include individual politicians such as Mr Oaten and Mr Hughes) prevent the public from knowing what it is entitled to know.

There is something else. Most people are not, in the nature of things, in public life. But everyone thinks he or she is entitled to a private life which is protected from close scrutiny.

This view derives from a fragmented society in which people travel long distances to work; families are split generationally; friends at work are not the same as neighbours at home. It is the way we live now. Even so, it is not sensible to say: She is a good person but, of course, her private life is her own affair.

Mr Oaten and Mr Hughes find themselves in the trouble they are in because they judged, rightly or wrongly, that the constituency to whom they were trying to appeal (that is, the Liberal Democrat members) would not vote in sufficient numbers for candidates possessing their sexual proclivities. Perhaps they were mistaken about this. The former Chris Smith is one of the most popular and respected of politicians. Mr Peter Mandelson, whose approach is different - it is, legitimately enough, one of "Mind your own business" - goes on from position of pomp to position of power.

Not only did Mr Oaten and Mr Hughes reject Lord Smith's open approach or, for that matter, Mr Mandelson's sharper attitude: more than this, Mr Oaten tried to give the impression of a devoted family man, all coffee mugs and cornflakes, while Mr Hughes was giving a rendition of the old Lionel Monckton song: "A Bachelor Gay Am I".

At least things are not as bad as they were in 1976-79. In 1976 David Steel succeeded Jeremy Thorpe as leader following a brief interregnum by Jo Grimond. Mr Thorpe was arraigned on a charge of conspiracy to murder in a case involving a homosexual lover, a shot Great Dane, a hitman and several villains from South Wales. The Liberals (as they were then) blamed the press and, at their conference at Southport in 1978, yelled: "Jackals out." At the 1979 election they won 11 seats with 14 per cent of the vote.

Mr Thorpe's trial took place later in 1979, when he was found not guilty. Afterwards he contemplated taking action for libel, but Lord Goodman, the greatest solicitor since Cicero, told him that he was a very lucky man who would be well advised to preserve a period of silence.

I believe a Liberal Democrat revival will prove more difficult this time around, because of the arrival of Mr David Cameron and because the terms of political trade have changed. With every week that passes, indeed, the removal of Mr Kennedy looks a bigger and bigger mistake.