Take this story leading in the Telegraph this morning:

Downing Street is at the centre of a fresh security scare after it emerged that private emails written by one of Gordon Brown’s senior officials had ended up in the hands of one of Britain’s most controversial political bloggers.

The emails, which made a number of unfounded, innuendo-laden suggestions about the private lives of David Cameron, George Osborne and other Conservative MPs, came into the possession of Paul Staines, who writes the Guido Fawkes political blog.

The emails were sent by the unnamed adviser in January from a high-security Downing Street account and have been touted to newspapers, including this newspaper. The Daily Telegraph decided against purchasing the emails. However, it was understood that at least one Sunday newspaper was poised to publish the embarrassing details.

There seems something not quite right in this supposed news-story. It reads as if it is based squarely on one ‘source close to Downing Street’, with no attempt to dig around a bit into what might be going on (including the personal agenda of the ‘source close to Downing Street).

Why does it have such prominence? What’s this really all about?

Then check out Guido:

Guido has hard evidence that Tory MPs have been smeared, and that a particularly vicious concerted smear operation was mounted against George Osborne, smears that Damian McBride – a civil servant – knows and admits in writing are untrue, yet he was still instrumental in spreading.  Some well known lobby journalists have knowingly gone along with it.  This is a lot bigger than some minor bloggers spat.

Downing Street are deliberately trying to make out that this is just another round in the Draper v Guido battle – that is why the Telegraph have slanted their story in the way they have.  It isn’t.  It is about a poisonous long term smear operation based in the heart of Downing Street and run by the prime minister’s press and political adviser, Damian McBride.  Names will be named and shamed…

Well might we sigh that the nation’s affairs are reduced to this sort of thing, with people at the heart of policy playing idiotic games for scraps of political advantage.

More importantly, it shows why the ‘mainstream media’ are failing. Too many lazy senior journalists have sold themselves and their reputations for the sake of ‘access’ to inside information.

Senior politicians and advisers have busily cosied up to different journalists, offering them good stuff in return for an easier time (and not too many questions asked). This demeans all concerned, plus it tends to reduce newspapers to chickens rushing over to be fed as and when the government generously brings out small handfuls of bran.

The chickens of course all focus on the bran – why should one chicken peck too hard at the greed and humiliation of the others in this situation and thereby risk losing out on this cheap nourishment?

A situation which of course mightily suits the person with the bran, and ruins the way public affairs are conducted.

Luckily there are still plenty of people in the system with some honour who want these machinations to be revealed.

Plus we have blogs and other ways in which more of the truth can be put out (although here too the risk is that eventually bloggers themselves will get dragged in and manipulated as favoured targets by the bickering desperate spin-doctorate).

It all comes down to Standards in Public Life.

The whole point of Standards is that they set flexible but nonetheless real limits on behaviour which have to be respected, with consequences flowing from failing to respect them.

Whereas the whole point of Spin as practised for far too long in the UK is to avoid responsibility: to get away with what you can get away with. Upholding Standards is fine if it is convenient, and talking loudly about Upholding Standards is essential. But above all for the Spinners there is no sense that upholding Standards is an end in itself – part of what being in government means.

Memo to next government:

Be grown-up. Restore and respect Standards and the very idea of Standards – and then take the political hits you deserve when you fall below them.

And help the media grow up too, by not sitting senior journalists in a high chair and feeding them mush.