Come dancing, but choose your partners carefully

I doubt it could happen in any other country but Britain. The minister of state for business, a full cabinet member, appeared on a popular TV dance competition, all tuxxed up and tailed, and wowed the judges with his foxtrot.

Vince Cable won applause for his neat sidestep and immaculate sense of timing, but just a few days earlier he had been anything but the star of the show when he was stripped of some of his most important ministerial powers by David Cameron, the Conservative prime minister of the coalition government of which Mr Cable is a Liberal Democrat member.

The minister can no longer rule on matters affecting the media or telecommunications industries. In particular, he will not be involved in any decision by the authorities to allow or block a move by Rupert Murdoch, the global media magnate, to buy the 60.9 per cent of shares in BSkyB not already owned by his master company, News Corp.

Mr Murdoch is no longer a stranger in the Middle East. He visited the UAE this year to take part in the Abu Dhabi Media Summit and is preparing to launch an Arabic version of his flagship TV news channel, Sky News, covering the Middle East and north Africa from a base in the capital.

He also has a substantial cross-shareholder relationship with the Saudi businessman Prince Alwaleed bin Talal bin Abdulaziz Al Saud.

It's fair to say that Mr Murdoch evokes stronger views than perhaps any other media man in the world, and especially in the UK. There are those (Mr Cable is among them) who see him as the devil incarnate, who resent his growing power in the UK and global media industry, and who accuse him of "dumbing down" journalism.

But there are others who see him as a progressive revolutionary in the media, as a man who, at great cost and financial risk, has sustained or revived flagging newspaper titles and launched a successful satellite TV channel when almost everyone said it was bound to be a loser.

He has proved many people wrong over the years, and this has ruffled countless feathers in the self-regarding world of media.

I've met Mr Murdoch a few times (though I'm sure those occasions were more memorable for me than for him). During the bitter labour dispute at Wapping in the mid-1980s, I would definitely have regarded myself as a member of the anti-Murdoch camp, and had some bruises to prove it at the time.

Later, seeing how professionally and determinedly he managed his newspapers in the post-Wapping era, I tempered my views, and worked for him at The Sunday Times for a few demanding but rewarding years in the 1990s. I still recall the frisson of fear that went around the news conference when he walked in unannounced, to keep an eye on the product. I would now call myself a sceptical admirer.

Mr Cable can see nothing to admire in Mr Murdoch and "declared war" on him in the presence of two undercover reporters from TheDaily Telegraph. It was naive of him to do so, but even a politician must be able to speak candidly from time to time, and his animosity to the Murdoch regime was no secret anyway.

But his indiscretion means he can no longer have anything to do with the BSykB takeover. The final say on this controversial matter will now pass to Jeremy Hunt, the British culture minister, who would also probably declare himself a sceptical admirer of the News Corporation boss.

The BSkyB takeover itself is rather a strange affair. The TV business is entirely Mr Murdoch's creation. He already has 39 per cent of the shares, and family members and business friends have always been in the top management positions.

You might question why he needs to own the rest of the shares when he already has effective control, but the experts say it all boils down to desire to control and exploit BSkyB's cash flow.

The issue has become something of a line in the sand for Mr Murdoch's enemies. They argue that he already has an overwhelming position in British media and must not be allowed to extend his influence further. Some suspect there is a hidden agenda to the takeover, suggesting Mr Murdoch might bundle together his newspaper websites with subscriptions to Sky.

There could well be something in this. Mr Murdoch has once again led the way in the British newspaper industry by ending free access to some of his newspaper titles on the internet, but it has not been a resounding success. He needs to pull something out of the hat to make that strategy work, and some form of cross-fertilisation with Sky could be the answer.

While the politicians and media professionals see conspiracies, the money men have no such worries. It is interesting that the independent directors of BSkyB have not raised any objections to the takeover on grounds of principle, only on price: they say that the offer undervalues the company at US$19 billion (Dh69.78bn). If it were more like $23bn, they and the institutional shareholders would probably snap Mr Murdoch's hand off in their rush to accept.

It all shows how dangerously overcrowded it can be when politics, media and business gather on the same dance floor.