I made my feelings about Maria Miller clear last year - Cameron must now suffer the consequences of not reading this blog

Here's how I described the Culture Secretary last year:

"a shrill, silly, finger-wagging, interfering, intolerant, time-wasting, career-obsessed, insensitive, dimwitted, confused harridan who should be dismissed from her post instantly and then kicked out of the Conservative Party on the grounds that, as an irritating, self-important, ridiculous, freedom-hating, mean-spirited, posturing ninny, she’d be far happier on the Labour or Lib-Dem benches." 

And my comments had nothing to do with her sensationally dodgy misuse of public money to make humungous profits on property deals! (To find out what I was fulminating about, click here.)

In the same post I predicted that Maria Miller was about to be sacked by Cameron. Obviously that didn't happen, and now he's going to have to face the consequences of not having taken the opportunity to defenstrate a spectacularly maladroit politician whose continuing presence in the Cabinet appears to owe everything to the fact that she can't pee standing up (unlike, for instance Andrew Mitchell, a minister who was ditched with unseemly haste despite - it now seems - doing nothing wrong). One assumes that if there were a few more female Tories at top table, Maria would already have been given the opportunity to spend more time dealing with her no doubt impressive investment portfolio (or, if we had our way, dealing with the Metropolitan Police).

Politically, everything's finely poised at the moment. The Tories are catching Labour in the polls: Miliband and his chums should be ten points ahead at this stage in order to be assured of outright victory next year, but they only lead by two or three points. The economy's on the mend, and Labour's dreary "cost-of-living crisis" narrative is unravelling by the day. On the other hand, Scotland's farcical bid for pseudo-independence still has to be seen off (not that most of us could care less - but Cameron evidently does), and the latest polls show the gap narrowing. The Euro elections are just around the corner, and, despite promising a referendum, the Tories are likely to take a pasting, with the UKIP vote confirming our rapidly growing contempt for Westminster bubble-dwellers.

So why would Cameron choose this particular moment to do something that's bound to annoy the hell out of 80% of the electorate? Mrs. Miller isn't a popular politician, even inside her own party. The lack of top female Tories matters not a jot to most non Guardian reading voters, who probably feel that if Maria Miller is a typical female politician, the less the better. True, it provides Ed Miliband with some ammunition - but we're talking cap-guns here, not howitzers. So why jeopardise votes by keeping her on?

Of course, she could do the decent thing and resign for the sake of her party, thereby saving her leader from the consequences of his own political incompetence. But history would suggest that doing the decent thing doesn't come naturally to Maria Miller. Nine months ago, I was unchivalrous enough to call Mrs. Miller a silly tart. I felt a bit guilty about doing so then, but it turns out I was in fact being far too kind.