CHEAP SHOTS DO NOT A CLEVER PERSON MAKE

When did that element of the plain nasty that we now seem to take for granted become accepted - and go unchallenged? And when did journalists and public figures who really should know better resort to cheap, lazy shots to make a point?

Last week we witnessed Tom Watson, the Labour MP, display behaviour that reeked of classroom antics when he said to News International chairman and chief executive James Murdoch before a Commons Select Committee "Mr Murdoch, you must be the first mafia boss in history not to know he was running a criminal organisation."

Now, I'm no fan of the Murdochs and the behaviour of its organisation and some of those who represent it is repugnant. However, might we not have a right to expect an elected politician conducting himself within a committee session to behave somewhat better than a petulant eight-year-old or a third rate comedian in a tacky Benidorm bar?

We also had the Daily Mail's Amanda Platell (a woman who seems to hold herself in unfathomably high regard with little discernible justification) take a cheap pop at the BBC's supremely professional economics editor Stephanie Flanders.

Flanders, whose measured reporting of Eurozone events and the global economics crisis has been a breath of fresh air amidst all the naysayers and rent-a-gobs, was lambasted by Platell in typically nasty Daily Mail fashion.

Cheap shots are not nice - and they are certainly not clever. And when they come from those in public life who inform debate and influence opinion they are to be treated with scorn rather than us ever pandering to the inflated egos behind them.