But also because the Tanaiste did precisely what the two previous leaders of the Progressive Democrats did in their time: halt the day job to demand explanations from their senior partner.

He just didn't get the same pay-off.

When the PDs, under Dessie O'Malley or Mary Harney, stopped talking, the background music went minor key, and media used words like "ominous". When the PDs do the same under McDowell, the background noise is fingers drumming impatiently while media uses words like "political sulk".

Like Young Albert in Stanley Holloway's monologue about the kid who pokes a lion in the zoo and promptly gets swallowed, Michael McDowell poked the Taoiseach's problems and found himself travelling up and down media's alimentary canal as a result.

All of which blows a hole in the management axiom that "If you keep doing what you've always done, you'll keep getting what you always got".

Not if the times have changed, you don't. Not if the accused man has changed. Not if the background details have changed.

The times have changed and the man was neither Raphael Burke nor Charlie Haughey. For the Tanaiste, the first challenge, therefore, was to decide whether the issue was a genuine crisis or a hiccup. At first glance, he made the right call:

this was something to be examined, something the Taoiseach would have to explain, but no more than that.

That his instinctive response had a poor outcome is due, first and foremost, to the concentric circles model of political isolation. The first circle around McDowell was his own party. The second was media. Both served to isolate him from the quality of public response to Bertie's loans, gifts and houses, which was radically different to their response to heaves and scandals around Charlie Haughey.

The first circle . . . the PDs themselves . . . was an amalgam of confusion. On the one side were Liz O'Donnell and Tom Parlon, yearning for the high moral ground which defined the PDs. On the other were the pragmatists who regarded the high moral ground, in this instance, as one seriously unattractive piece of real estate. Sure, they could pull out of government and get a couple of days of great headlines.

But government would continue without them.

Never mind that it's manners to wait until you're asked . . . independents were already offering themselves on plates, apple in mouth and frilly paper around their nethers, ready, willing and able to support Bertie and the lads. Some of those lads on the Fianna Fail backbenches had a bit of a drool going on at the prospect of filling the PD cabinet positions, even if it was for only eight months or so. The ability of the PDs to offer robust opposition was going to be spancelled by Fianna Fail saying "We're just delivering on the programme of government you lot agreed to. What's your problem?"

PD high moral grounders regarded their new leader as way too lenient in his response to (and putative participation in the preparation of) Bertie's Tuesday Dail speech. The Tanaiste's muttered compliment to the Taoiseach at the end of that speech was bad enough, from their point of view. That he applauded was worse.

"There was quite simply nothing, from the PD perspective, to applaud about, " was how one of them summed it up.

They also blamed him for poor forensics, holding that, as a senior counsel, he was perfectly placed to sit Bertie down, interrogate every fact, and demand explicit assurance that no other damaging facts were lurking in the background to emerge in the following days.

Inside this seething circle sat McDowell. Outside that seething circle was another circle: media. Media was a-tremble with the thrilling possibility of throwing a corruption party like in the old days: come as you are, just bring your own rumour or conspiracy theory.

The two circles ignored the fact that the general public had already made up its mind. It was not running a temperature. It was not turning on every news bulletin. It was not doing high fives at the prospect of Bertie-destruction.

The general public had made a subtle, nuanced decision: this was different, in scale and nature, to earlier scandals. It wasn't that they glossed over what Bertie had done because he's a nice guy.

They thought he'd been bloody lucky to be handed sums large enough to have bought any one of them a house back then. Taking the money simply put him in a continuum of political takers: sure that's what they all do.

In sharp contrast to media, however, the general public did not regard this as a firing offence.

The Irish public always has what Scott FitzGerald defined as genius: the capacity to hold two mutually conflicting beliefs simultaneously. They thought the Taoiseach was a sloppy messer in his private life and finances. They thought the whiprounds were icky, and keeping the dosh in a sock in the hot press (as Pat Rabitte proposed) was weird, but they didn't see any of this as seriously impacting on his premiership. Plus, there were jokes to be told. Like the one about the enormously likeable owner of the Goat Grill, who lost a limb after a shotgun attack:

Question. What did Bertie say to Charlie Chawke when he asked for his money back?

Answer. 'You haven't got a leg to stand on.'

Media doesn't have that comfortable ambivalence and the PDs certainly don't have it. So, immediately after the Taoiseach's unapologetic apology in the Dail, media started to beat up the PDs for insufficient rectitude. Fiona O'Malley, sideswiped in the middle of a radio interview about energy, jettisoned the "moral watchdog" stance of the PDs without a backward glance: not our job, she indicated. Politics is about policies, not watch-dogging.

Then Bertie's Chaucerian cast of characters enlarged. Paddy the Plasterer was joined by Michael the Bus-driving House-vendor. The word went out from the PD leader to his troops: button your lips. If that was the only word going out, it might have worked, in spite of the brand-lovers within his party who felt they should have decisively gone at that point, no matter what the risks, and that for Mc Dowell . . . "the epitome of our brand" . . . to stay put was a betrayal.

But it wasn't the only word going out.

"Annoyed" was the other word. The Tanaiste, it was said, was "annoyed" at the drip-feed of emerging nasties. The measured prissiness of the term was a mistake. It positioned the reaction as personal huffiness, rather than moral outrage. It made the media feel it was all over, bar the pouting. This was further complicated by the odd announcement that the Tanaiste planned to meet the Taoiseach in Gonzaga and two other venues over the weekend, as if the two men were dating.

It's too easy to blame Michael Mc Dowell for all of this. Leadership is a habit that takes time to settle in. He got no time.

Nor did he get the clarity of information he might have expected, not just because of his excellent working relationship with Bertie Ahern, but because of the latter's affiliative nature.

Bertie Ahern has a track record second to none of anticipating the feelings of sensitive groups (like the trade unions) and picking up the phone to defuse tensions. For McDowell to learn about the house purchase through media was an odd break in that pattern which undoubtedly threw him.

A contributory factor to McDowell's isolation was his lack of a programme manager, together with the relationships, information-conduits and back-channel damping-down of disagreements the role involves. He was on his own.

Those who work closely with McDowell say that, surrounded by an able team, he is a good listener who questions and probes until a wise position becomes an inevitability. On his own, he fails to distinguish between the issue and his ownership of it, tends to reach certainties too quickly and be rattled by having to climb down from those certainties into an emotional rather than cerebral response. This makes him snippy with journalists, which in turn influences media portrayal of him as a testy u-turning egoist.

Received wisdom is that this episode has done for the PDs and for Michael McDowell as a leader.

In fact, it may be the watershed between old PD and new PD. It undoubtedly provides McDowell with the opportunity to recognise and play to his real strengths and to surround himself with people capable of creating the infrastructure of trust necessary in a coalition government.

Nor does it have to be that hard. One Fianna Fail minister, asked recently which of his colleagues he'd take to a desert island, opted unhesitatingly for McDowell, who he described as:

"best company, best read, stimulating and funny".