The obsession with investigative journalism is self-defeating because rare is the scoop that is not a leak by some interested party.

What is called 'Betsygate' is freelance journalist Michael Crick's complaint that Mr Smith's wife Betsy did little to deserve the GBP15,000 (HK$194,000) she was paid annually to work as her husband's diary secretary. According to Mr Smith, she spent 25 hours a week overseeing his engagements.

Mr Crick is a man of distinction. He read politics, philosophy and economics at New College, Oxford, dabbled in Labour politics, and was president of Oxford Union. He also wrote Stranger than Fiction, an unflattering life of Lord Jeffrey Archer, the novelist, and does work for the BBC.

His information came from anonymous emails and internal Conservative party memos. When the BBC shied away from his story, having burned its fingers over the part another journalist, defence correspondent Andrew Gilligan, played in the death of the government scientist, David Kelly, Mr Crick turned from investigative reporter to public-spirited citizen. He handed over the evidence he had collected to Sir Philip Mawer, Parliamentary Standards Commissioner, head of the anti-sleaze watchdog.

Other media personalities have since weighed in. Lord Black, who owns the Daily Telegraph and the Spectator, believes Mr Smith is dispensable, though for other reasons. Boris Johnson, the Spectator's editor and a Conservative party MP, feels his leader has been cruelly treated. Indeed, the dividing line between media and politics has all but gone, with Mr Smith blaming the 'friends and allies in the media' of Conservative party rivals. People probably think of Mr Crick with gratitude for giving them this sensational piece of political theatre.

The questions asked are whether 'Betsygate' will let beleaguered Prime Minister Tony Blair off the hook of the Hutton inquiry into Britain's justification for attacking Iraq, and the suicide of weapons expert David Kelly. Has adversity made a new man of Mr Smith, lending vigour to his words and resonance to his voice so that today he strikes terror into the hearts of those who yesterday dismissed him with derision? Who will become prime minister-in-waiting if 25 Conservative MPs muster up enough courage to force through a confidence motion?

The interaction of the four women in Mr Smith's office fascinates readers. Apart from his wife, who may or may not have been there, two secretaries reportedly tried constantly to upstage each other. A third is dropping broad hints that she will tell the Mawer investigation her arm was twisted to make her say that Mrs Smith was there when she was not.

Amid all this gossip masquerading as politics, few spare a thought for how one journalist after another can threaten to capsize what has been called the most aristocratic of democracies and most democratic of aristocracies. The British take for granted what might be called media triumphalism.

Mr Crick even exalted it by blaming Lord Archer's political survival to date on inadequate media persecution. 'I think journalists have been guilty of giving him too easy a time,' he wrote.

It is enough to make my late mentor, James Cameron, turn in his grave. He was an incisive yet sympathetic commentator who argued that, unlike the US, Britain's constitutional checks and balances and institutionalised opposition made journalistic activism unnecessary. He might even have endorsed Queen Victoria's view that journalists should not be allowed into 'the circles of higher society'.

But then, as gossip columnist Nigel Dempster - reputedly the world's highest paid journalist, who recently announced his retirement - found, the problem for Britain's bright newspaper writers today is not so much getting into higher society as getting out of its possessive clutches.

Sunanda Kisor Datta-Ray is a visiting senior research fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore. The views expressed in this article are those of the author