Paul Vallely: When is a peccadillo a sacking offence?

The key question bosses ask is 'can he do the job?' You might call it the Clinton defence

How many mistakes are you allowed before you get fired? No, we're not talking here about Mr Blair's slavish pursuit of Mr Bush down the road to Iraq. Nor about the man who got the dose wrong in the Moscow theatre siege. Nor, even, about the cross-dressing proclivities, or lack of them, of Princess Di's butler.

This is serious stuff. I need to know where exactly is the line between a cocaine-fuelled night with a prostitute in a Manchester hotel room (which is evidently OK) and three-in-a-bed romps with your mistress and her girlfriend, singing the Oasis classic Wonderwall naked in the shower, while your common-law wife is on the eve of going into labour with your first child (which is apparently not OK).

Angus Deayton, the host of Have I Got News For You, managed to survive the former but has now got the push for the latter. It all raises intriguing new insights into the age-old question about where exactly the line lies that separates private vices from public life.

It was six months ago that some tabloid broke the news that the svelte and self-satisfied TV comedian had embarked upon what the red-top papers call a drug-crazed night of passion with a hooker after watching Man Utd play. (It didn't tell us whether they won or lost). But Deayton seemed to survive. He was not, the pundits pointed out, an arbiter of the nation's morals, merely a comedian who pokes fun at other people's peccadilloes.

His boss, the BBC1 controller Lorraine Heggessey, one paper reported, smacked his bottom (metaphorically, one assumes, since the point was reprimand rather than further titillation) and told him not to do it again. She also halved his fee to "just" £25,000 per show. Funny how mercenary morality can be.

Poor old Lorraine. She certainly gets the tough decisions. It fell to her to axe Michael Barrymore. He too had got through all manner of revelations about his homosexuality (an offence in itself, the BBC feared, to many of his matronly fans). He shrugged off his former wife's claims that he beat her up, drugged her and – oddest of all – shut her out of her own home when Diana, Princess of Wales popped round. Even after a man was found dead in his swimming pool, amid allegations of forced drug-taking, he survived – indeed the BBC agreed to add a couple of chapters on the drowning to his imminent autobiography. Until, that is, Ms Heggessey went on radio to say: "I think it would be difficult for him to make a comeback. I'm not that sure viewers would accept him."

What brings about such judgements? Perhaps shifting social mores make judgement calls difficult. Gone are the days when the avuncular Frank Bough was swiftly consigned to off-camera darkness when it was revealed that beneath his V-neck pullover lay a propensity for a bit of drug-charged S&M. Or indeed when the Blue Peter presenter Richard Bacon was summarily removed after he admitted taking cocaine. In those days betraying the image of innocence was sufficient. Nowadays celebrities are allowed to operate in a stratosphere where normal rules of morality, if there are such things, do not apply.

Some say it is about ratings. The reason the TV presenter revealed as Ulrika Jonsson's alleged date-rapist last week was so swiftly removed from the air, the cynics insist, is because his bosses were going to axe him anyway because of falling viewing figures. Barrymore, by contrast, was riding high in the ratings. So is Angus Deayton; into its 24th series, his show's viewing figures are as high as ever and it has moved from BBC2 to BBC1.

In the end, I suspect, there is another reason. The key question decision-makers ask is "Can he do the job?". You might call it the Clinton defence: it's the economy, stupid. That explains why it took two programmes of the new series to discover that Angus couldn't do it any more.

Even guests such as Christine Hamilton managed to score points off him, and his co-stars, Ian Hislop and Paul Merton, gave him a merciless kicking. On seeing footage of Ulrika at the top of the show, Hislop began by quipping: "Is there anything else going on in this country apart from a list of Z-list celebrities having sex with each other?" Warned by Deayton not to disclose the identity of Ulrika's rapist Merton asked: "It wasn't you, was it?" And so it went on. So remorseless was the barracking that at one point a woman in the audience shouted out: "Leave him alone." To which Merton replied: "Is that a friend of yours, Angus? Don't worry, love, it's only another 20 minutes to go."

Throughout Deayton squirmed with smirking embarrassment. At one point, when he fluffed his autocue lines, Merton said: "If you lose the skill to read out loud you really are losing the power to do this job." Many a true word, BBC morality decided, and not that much of a jest.

p.vallely@independent.co.uk