Honor enduring.(The media)

"The last quarter of the twentieth century saw a very big shift," said David Blunkett, the British Home Secretary, in September 2003, "where rights were predominant but duties were secondary. There has to be a balance restored to the two." The remark, by the cabinet minister responsible for police and prisons, among other things, can be seen in retrospect as a precursor to one last July by the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, to the effect that the 1960s-era "liberal and social consensus on law and order" had led to crime and social disorder. Blair was historically more precise but substantively more vague than his minister about what was the pernicious and socially destructive element in the 1960s "consensus," but I fancy he would not have disagreed with Mr. Blunkett that it was the spirit of individualism which led people to put their own gratification above the good of others, or perhaps even of "society"--which Margaret Thatcher once famously said did not exist.

Last summer, a month after Mr. Blair's aspersions against the 1960s and just under a year after his own paean to duty, Mr. Blunkett's long-standing affair of the heart with a married woman was exposed in the British popular press. The woman, an American called Kimberly Fortier before the story blew up and Kimberly Quinn afterwards (when she belatedly decided to take her second husband's name), was the publisher of the conservative weekly The Spectator. That publication might have been expected to show a certain sympathy for Mr. Blunkett's views about the balance between rights and duties, but its editor, Boris Johnson, a married man with four young children, was contemporaneously carrying on an affair with one of the magazine's columnists, Petronella Wyatt. Miss Wyatt, a single woman, was said to have aborted their child at the instigation of Mr. Johnson, who was also a member of Parliament and Conservative front bench spokesman on the arts. He was fired from the latter post by Michael Howard, his party's leader, when the news of their liaison broke in November--just as the Quinn-Blunkett one was back in the news.

For although Mrs. Quinn had reportedly ended the affair, confessed it to her husband, and been forgiven by him, Mr. Blunkett, who is divorced with three grown children, brought a legal action requesting visitation rights to Mrs. Quinn's two-year-old son, whom he regards as his own. It was said that a privately administered DNA test before the couple broke up had confirmed this. He believed that the child Mrs. Quinn was now carrying and that was due in February was also his. She and her husband, meanwhile, insisted that both children were theirs, irrespective of "biological details," and she petitioned the court to be excused further litigation on the subject until April, after she will have given birth. Her request was denied and Mr. Blunkett's suit allowed to go ahead. "I'm naturally relieved at today's judgment so I can continue my attempts to gain access to nay son," he said in early December. "I have never wanted anything about my private life and [the child's] paternity to be in the public domain and would never have gone to the courts if there were another way of getting informal access to him."

Mrs. Quinn, equally naturally, might otherwise have preferred to keep all discussion of what in dim and distant days past would have been called her "shame" as an adulteress out of the public prints, but in retaliation (as it seems) for the continuation of Mr. Blunkett's unwanted attention to herself and her children, she or her agents revealed to the media that the Home Secretary, whose duties also include oversight of immigration, had expedited the visa request of a Filipina nanny of hers, had hurried a passport request for her son with the American embassy, and had once given her two first-class railway tickets at government expense. There may have been other occasions as well on which she was beholden to taxpayers for benefits to which the minister's spouse, if any, would normally have been entitled. The assumption in all the media coverage of these details was naturally that such minor exercises of the perquisites of office on behalf of a clandestine lover were highly improper, and an independent investigation was ordered by the Prime Minister--who, nevertheless, expressed confidence that Iris minister would be found innocent of any wrongdoing.

Fortunately, all this personal history also raised fascinating ethical questions which helped to keep the ...