A TROUBLE shared is a trouble halved, they say. But before you start crying on someone’s shoulder, you should check they don’t have a tape recorder in their pocket.

This is the reality that Vince Cable is coming to terms with.

Part of me still can’t fathom the naivety and stupidity of what Mr Cable has done.

Then another part of me says something like this was going to happen sooner or later.

The Business Secretary was a model opposition politician, good at asking questions and pointing out problems. He was witty and affable. He made himself popular, and of course he liked that.

But now he is in government he has to give answers and provide solutions. His big problem is that he is in a coalition government.

So, he doesn’t like many of the solutions and answers that he is duty bound to provide.

Moreover, because some of those answers are causing a lot of people and a lot of communities pain, he finds himself unpopular. He doesn’t like this either.

He has tried to come to terms with this turnabout by telling himself that if it all gets too much he can walk away, ending the coalition and the moral and political dilemma it has placed him – his nuclear option.

It’s a comforting thought, but like a lot of the nice, cosy things we say to cheer ourselves up, a complete fallacy.

After a bad day at work, we’ve all said to ourselves that we’ll walk in tomorrow and tell the boss what he can do with his job. We never do of course, because nuclear options always involve self-destruction.

The pact that Mr Cable and his colleagues have made is just six months old, but they are already in too deep to go back. They’ve reneged on their tuition fee pledges, signed up to massive cuts on public spending and raised scarcely more than a polite cough over welfare and NHS reform. Most of them are compromised beyond belief.

But on the other side, you do have to question the attitude of the Conservatives. David Cameron could have sacked Mr Cable, but has allowed him to linger on. The arithmetic of a minority government demands it.

And so a government of promise morphs into a government of compromise.

The coalition promised us a fresh approach.

I and many others took it at face value and looked forward to more openness and honesty in politics.

Instead we have the old story of people saying one thing in private and another in public, of politicians clicking their tongues and shaking their heads about a policy, then voting for it anyway after some behind-thescenes arm-twisting.

At times the coalition reminds me of a sad, bickering couple locked in a sour relationship.

They’ve no future, but neither of them has the moral courage to call it a day.

In relationships like that it’s the kids that suffer. In politics, it’s the public.

Gloomy thoughts for Christmas Eve, but there’s one man who comes out of this smiling and in a win-win situation. He generally does.

That is, of course, Rupert Murdoch. There can be few men on earth who need an early Christmas present less than the head of Sky but that is what this mess has given him.

Mr Murdoch is a controversial, even hated, figure but he always seems to come out on top. I don’t know why, but if I ever get to heaven – admittedly a debateable proposition – I confidently expect to find a satellite dish stuck on the pearly gates.