Martin Kettle of the Guardian is having a bad run of form.

First this clunker about the Coalition’s plans to cut back of Labour’s oppressive legacy.

And now this one, arguing that any traffic offence committed a few years ago by Cabinet Minister Chris Huhne is so puny as to be unworthy of serious attention:

And even if, at the end of the day, the police come back and say there’s a charge of perjury or interference with justice buried in the case, I say drop it. It’s not big enough. It doesn’t matter enough. Let the matter rest.

Especially in the circumstances of a stormy horrible marital separation. In the end, we need to get this case in to perspective. Is it on a par with the case I read about in the Sunday Times at the weekend, in which a senior partner of Hogan Lovells, one of the country’s biggest law firms, "may face a police investigation" for fiddling more than £1m in expenses?

You bet it isn’t. That’s the sort of case I want the police working on. Not some common-or-garden speeding offence fiddle, which is absolute peanuts by comparison.

I could go along with most of this, albeit unhappily, were it not for the long slimy trail of absurd shifty evasions and misleading statements which Mr Huhne has emitted in recent days.

Had he confessed and thrown himself on the mercy of the Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister and wider public opinion, we might have given a sour shrug and ‘moved on’.

Yes, he’s behaved ‘foolishly’, as M Kettle quiantly puts it. But the sort of mistakes people make and the way they respond to them say huge amounts about them. 

As it is, in my opinion he has shown himself through his own behaviour over the matter to be unfit for any adult public office. Civil servants would not be allowed to behave like this – what should ministers?

So that’s why he deserves to be hounded and if necessary disgraced. Pour encourager les autres.