I wonder if we will ever be able to resist fixing the suffix ‘gate’ to the end of any not-yet-sufficiently-salacious scandal? Ten years ago Andrew Mitchell MP actually had a scandal involving a gate and caused the dashing of one of my greatest hopes. This was the hope that some day a scandal would emerge involving a gate, and that when hacks tried to call it ‘gategate’ we would finally realise how silly all this was, and do away with the cliché entirely.