What is it about children and childcarers that makes them unworthy of a minister uncompromised and uncompromising, unstained and unbowed?
Although Margaret Hodge is a believer in childcare, her reputation as an Islington council chief was badly dented by an ugly and defensive response to child abuse in her patch.
Beverley Hughes's installation as Hodge's successor has brought few cheers.
She was redeemed by the Prime Minister after doing time on the back benches, where she'd been forced into a kind of political quarantine following an immigration debacle. She will not have expected that her second change would be shadowed so soon by an emerging scandal. It should be seen not as a burden but an opportunity.
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