As the year ends, we ought to take a moment to reflect on our off-with-his-head, rush to judgment culture – its dangers and its strengths. This year we have witnessed the strange and deeply disturbing story of Andrew Mitchell and the Downing Street police; turmoil for news gatherers at News International and the BBC; even the possible return of Chris Huhne to frontline politics.
All very different stories, of course, but all examples of how a fast and brutal news cycle encourages judgments which seem clear and often terminal, but which then start to unravel.
As I argued before he was forced to resign, the problem with the Andrew Mitchell "plebgate" row was that it was the kind of thing people thought leading Tories really thought and would say. Add to that a general assumption that the police are to be believed – remembering, too, that it all took place after the shooting of two officers in Manchester – and the balance of "common sense" opinion was against the chief whip.
The only problem, it now seems, is that commonsense opinion was quite wrong. What Mitchell himself calls those "awful toxic phrases" now seem to have been part of a police plot to smear him, and CCTV footage appears to contradict the police story.
The Police Federation is engaged in a political fight with the government and we still don't know the full story – so let's not sprint to judgment in the opposite direction either. But we do know this is murkier and fuzzier than it first appeared.
Given what he was being told at the time, Cameron was right to make Mitchell go, and indeed dithered for ages. Given what he knows now, he will probably bring Mitchell back before long, though perhaps not as chief whip.
What can the rest of us learn as a result? Perhaps something about the dangers of sentimentality clouding judgment: after the shooting, support for the police was very high – words like "heroes" and "frontline" were being much used. But just as not all nurses are "angels", not all police are heroes; and some, as the former minister Nick Herbert told the Observer yesterday, are corrupt. Leaking sensitive information to the Sun in the middle of the Leveson process was an almost comic example of Knacker's old-as-sin style.
We all also have to be careful about letting our "well that's what they're like" or "that's the sort of people they are" prejudices overtake a cautious view of the facts, and of proof.
A good example of this is the Jimmy Savile affair – not the question of Newsnight's failure to run a particular story but rather the witchhunt now in full cry. There was a lot of sexual harassment in the 1970s media world. There were also some cases of predatory paedophiles. It does not follow, however, that every doddering DJ or weather presenter with unlikely facial hair and a once-racy reputation is guilty of unspeakable crimes.
Nor is it the case that everyone who worked for the News of the World or who works for the Sun was ready to break the law to get a story, or even to turn a blind eye. Nor is it "obvious" that Huhne broke the law and is therefore finished in politics. Indeed, he may be on the verge of one of the more sensational comebacks in Liberal history – and they've had a few.
The truth is that we've suffered from outrage inflation for many years. It's become endemic in public life. Like a hot and undiscriminating stream of lava, the anger erupts in one direction at a time. It's MPs who are "all on the take" or BBC bosses who are "all greedy and incompetent" or the heartless royals or even the tabloids themselves. We work ourselves into a fever pitch of indignation. We demand a blood sacrifice … and then the world moves on, until the next eruption.
Is this the flipside of a culture which is also short of attention, and fails to properly monitor the powerful because, let's face it, monitoring is a dull and time-consuming business? All those non-executive directors, public boards, standards agencies, remuneration committees – had they done their jobs better, would we have had so many outbursts of scandal? If our papers and websites were meatier and duller, less short-term and celeb-heavy, would these explosions be needed?
It's hard to know, impossible to prove a negative. I'd rather live in a country with outrage inflation, however cruel it can be, than in a country in which the rich and powerful were able just to get on with their lives unchallenged. Best of all would be a country in which institutions and individuals were held to account in a serious, consistent and regular way.
The year past shows that, just perhaps, we are getting better at this again. Whatever you think of his conclusions, Lord Justice Leveson's inquiry was a painstaking and serious examination of the press. Nick Pollard's investigation into BBC News was hugely expensive and at times highly aggressive – but it was a thorough job. Without a good piece of investigative work by the excellent Michael Crick of Channel 4 News we wouldn't be talking about the murkier side of the Mitchell affair now.
Non-executive directors are being required to prove their competence. Perhaps most dramatically, after the Commons' reputation sank to a terrible low, we have seen the powerful re-emergence of proper, tough, self-confident committees of MPs taking on key issues. I'm thinking in particular of Margaret Hodge's public accounts committee and the tax avoidance scandal, but there are plenty of other examples. Parliament is working better.
So it's a mixed picture. There are monsters in public life, and there are places rotten with corruption; but very few people are utterly monstrous and most organisations are a bit rubbish, some of the time. Tarring and feathering people is enjoyable until – as some Murdoch journalists have discovered – other people do it to you. We need to remember that most people are complex and that they learn from their mistakes. We know this with our friends; it's true too of people behind the gurning caricatures in public life. And Andrew Mitchell wakes up this morning to find that, despite everything, his head is still attached to his shoulders.
Twitter: @JackieAshley