The real damage of the Cherie Blair affair has been to the body politic

Graham Greene used to divide his books into novels, which were profound studies of the human condition, and entertainments, which weren't. If the Cherie Blair saga were a work by Greene, it would be more an entertainment than a novel. The events of the past fortnight have been absorbing, to say the least. But whether the story has the deep political and constitutional significance routinely claimed for it is more doubtful. Much else of what has happened at home and abroad while it was unfolding has been of vastly greater moment.

Nor have the press and broadcasters covered themselves with unalloyed glory. The original story in The Mail on Sunday, while containing the central truth that Mrs Blair had entrusted a financial matter to the convicted fraudster Peter Foster, included much that has turned out to be wrong or inaccurate. Nor is it paranoid of Mrs Blair to feel that the Mail and Mail on Sunday have been conducting a vendetta against her as a proxy for her husband. Both papers would like to see Mr Blair ousted from Downing Street. It is hard not to see the frenzy all three papers unleashed as disproportionate to the offence.

That cannot obscure the fact, however, that real issues have been raised. Since Peter Foster is an accomplished conman, it is hard not to have some sympathy with Mrs Blair for becoming entangled with him. He may well have inveigled himself into a relationship with Mrs Blair's friend and personal adviser, Carole Caplin, precisely because she was an intimate member of the Downing Street circle. Nevertheless, she cannot be acquitted of a lapse of judgement in allowing Mr Foster, a man whom she self-confessedly knew woefully little about, to handle the purchase of two flats, not to mention giving even limited help in his fight against deportation.

Equally Mrs Blair, who holds no public office, is entitled to her choice of friends. There is something admirable, in human terms, about her loyalty to Ms Caplin. On the other hand, Alastair Campbell's long-held and semi-public doubts about the degree of access afforded to her are understandable. You do not have to question Ms Caplin's own loyalty or integrity to take a general view that those who have a commercial as well as a personal relationship with the Prime Minister's family could in time exercise too great a hold on their clients because of what they know. In that sense, Mrs Blair cannot escape the fact that she is the Prime Minister's wife as well as a clever and successful woman in her own right.

Secondly, and more importantly, the result of what Mrs Blair quaintly described last week as the "misunderstanding" between herself and the Downing Street press office led to deception in the official handling of the affair. On several key occasions, spokesmen were unwittingly obliged to issue what were, if not downright lies, at least formulations so imbued with lawyerly minimalism as to be scarcely less reprehensible.

Mrs Blair's reluctance to help the Mail and The Mail on Sunday may be understandable. But for some time, newspapers much more sympathetic to the Government were told very much less than the whole truth about what was relevant, which Mrs Blair knows better than most is a minimum requirement of an honest witness.

The content of the story is much less important than, say, the Bernie Ecclestone donation in the first Blair term. But because the same tactics were resorted to in that and other cases, the handling of it has had a more corrosive effect than if it were a one-off. It is a serious setback for the efforts to finish with spin and half-truths. And it will make it correspondingly more difficult to restore trust, including, ironically, where the Government has genuinely good news, for example about improvements in public services. This, in essence, is why the affair, entertaining or not, has been depressing for what it says about the political process.

There are some concrete lessons. For example, Mr Blair should not continue to resist the widely recommended proposal for an ethics commissioner to handle complaints of ministerial and other government-related misconduct. In cases – perhaps including this one – where there is no evidence of misdemeanour or misuse of influence, they can be quickly and authoritatively dismissed. But in any case it would deprive the media of the role of judge and jury, as well as improving public trust in government.

But what is depressing is that at a time when there is a threat of war, huge political changes under way in Europe, and crucial domestic decisions on issues as varied as transport and pensions, an episode of negligible impact on the voters has been elevated to the level of national scandal. This was achieved by a lethal combination of a media frenzy, some of it malignly as well as politically motivated, and a defensive retreat by the principals into the bad old ways of misleading public pronouncements which deformed too much of the first Blair term.

There can hardly fail to be some collateral damage for the Prime Minister. But the real casualty is, in the widest sense, politics itself.