The end result, last week, was an unplanned meltdown, captured on camera and inevitably shared with the world via the Web.

The anchorwoman lost it. Spectacularly, she lost it. She announced that she was not going to do the bulletin as laid out.

She stuffed the running order into a waste basket close to her. She questioned the professionalism and sanity of her news editor. The two guys on the set with her did what might charitably be described as banter by way of reducing tension.

What was driving her nuts was that her news editor wanted to lead with the release of an emptyeyed blonde from prison. Never mind that a British Prime Minister was stepping down and being succeeded by a man who represented such a contrast to him, he might have been a different species. Forget that this Prime Minister had taken his country into a war predicated on the gut conviction of an American President. Ignore the implications for Britain and the world of the attitudes and philosophy of his successor. Let's go with Paris Hilton.

The scenario played out not just in that TV station but in newsrooms across the world this week. It was the quintessential instance of a man hoist by his own petard.

The departure from high office of a lucid, thoughtful, clever and diligent man was overshadowed by the departure from prison of a rich, famous, meretricious and incoherent halfwit.

Having arrived in No 10 Downing Street, buoyed up by cheerleaders from the world of show business, he found his departure from it diminished by a nonentity on the fringes of show business, born with a silver spoon in her mouth and a proven willingness to put both feet in there with it.

Good enough for him, his enemies would say. He had neither principles nor authenticity. He spent more time on public relations than on anything else, failed to reform the National Health Service, presided over corruption and took his country into an unpopular war.

The best his enemies would say for him is that he had an unfailing instinct for gauging where the public mind was at any given time and was a great communicator.

All of which is untrue. Blair spent enormous amounts of his time in office on an area and an issue - Northern Ireland - which was never going to deliver him popularity on 'the mainland.' Unlike Bill Clinton - who, despite being considerably less involved in the day-to-day process of peace-building, nonetheless got impatient enough to describe it as reminiscent of drunks going in and out the swinging doors of a saloon in the old West - Blair was silently patient to an extraordinary degree.

Because the semantics-littered path to the woefully-named Peace Process in the North was so long and so tedious, Blair benefited little from this, the one issue in his Prime Ministership to which he attended with passion and consistency and with minimal concern for how it would play out in media. This was a media bummer, but worth doing, nonetheless.

The perception of Tony Blair as a great communicator with an unparalleled natural instinct for the thought processes of the British public is as shallow as the parallel perception of Ronald Reagan.

Reagan was an actor who knew how to deliver scripts. Tony Blair was a politician with huge skills in delivering scripts, soundbites and media interviews, who is likely to be remembered most for the poorest of his communications.

Take, for example, the oft-quoted instance of his response to the sudden death of Princess Diana and his description of her, directly thereafter, as 'The People's Princess.' If there was a Nobel Prize for the mot juste, Blair would have won it, hands down, for that slogan.

In terms of quotability, it's up there with 'Just do it', 'Guinness is Good for You' and 'Go to Work on an Egg.'

In terms of banality, it is the alltime, outright winner. In terms of truth, it is the all-time, outright loser. Diana was not the people's princess. She was not the people's anything. Transient moments of highly public sympathy with pleasing individuals personifying a particular problem do not turn a paranoid self-absorbed rich manipulator into a champion of the masses.

Tony Blair's description of her was timely. It was clever. It was kind. It was popular. But it was spurious. Worse: it contributed to a mob-deification of the dead woman which turned coercive and controlling: the Queen effectively had her feelings dictated to her by public opinion. It became unsafe not to buy into the ambient bereavement bullshit.

It is, of course, the presence of Alistair Campbell - and, earlier, of Peter Mandelson - which hang question marks the size of wrecking balls around the 'Great Communicator' reputation of Tony Blair. Without going down the full guilt-by-association road, it is nonetheless legitimate to raise queries about their role and presence in the ex-Prime Minister's image-building. Alistair Campbell is and was a limited man of unlimited self-confidence, unbridled enthusiasm for media manipulation and unmatched contempt for the fourth estate from whence he came.

Peter Mandelson is and was a man with an improverished range of emotional responses and human connectedness and a matching poverty of ethical underpinning.

Without them, Blair might never have made it to the top job, but their presence and their desire to take credit not just for electing him but for creating him, may in the long term taint and diminish his reputation.

In the short term it put him, in the last few days, in a bizarre competition with the heiress to the Hilton empire. Tabloid media went with her. The broadsheets went with him.

The dogged authenticity which characterises Gordon Brown may reduce political coverage and write finis to the media-celeb politician, at least in Britain. The first would be worth it if the second could be achieved.

http: //ie. youtube. com/watch? v=6VdN cCcweL0