Midway through Tony Blair's first term, the comedian Rory Bremner, after a series of ineffectual attempts to get a hook into New Labour, produced the sketch that ended the Blair honeymoon.
Bremner played Blair and the Channel 4 journalist Jon Snow appeared as himself, interviewing Blair in a set piece one-on-one. The sketch was unexceptional, until a moment of disruption occurred in the shape of Alastair Campbell, played by an actor whose name I don't recall.
Campbell strode onto the set of the "interview" and told Snow that he'd had his pound of flesh. In his hand he had a rolled up newspaper. Blair protested that he'd plenty more to say, but Campbell quieted him with a glare.
As Snow got up to leave, Campbell went over to Blair as though he were a naughty child, shoved the newspaper under his nose and demanded, "Did you f***ing say that?" Thus began the beginning of the second phase of the media's relationship with Tony Blair. Before, it had been virtually unanimous adulation, to the point of embarrassment. Swept to power on a wave of disillusion with the Tories, Blair could do no wrong. Experienced and sober journalists, male and female, appeared almost in love with this charismatic radical who had made Labour electable after a generation of farce and failure.
It wasn't just that they didn't want to get stuck into Blair - they didn't know how, in the climate of reverence they had done much to create, to begin unpicking their own version of reality. Leaders who embody the optimism of their time are difficult to criticise and almost impossible to satirise. Bremner began the undoing of this conundrum with what was essentially a hugely enjoyable fiction: that Blair was the puppet of his spindoctor. It is scarcely an exaggeration to suggest that out of that first sketch there flowed an entire sea change in the mindset of modern Britain, culminating in the obsession with "spin" that dominated the debate about the Iraq war, the death of scientist David Kelly and the Hutton inquiry. Anyone recalling the genuine horror of those events of three years ago must be stuck by the risibility of media claims that, last Wednesday, Blair was undergoing his "darkest day since 1997". Why? Because, on this "Black Wednesday", three of Blair's ministers were "embattled".
Blair's health secretary, Patricia Hewitt, was "embattled" because she had been "jeered and slow handclapped" by nurses at a conference. Big deal. The home secretary, Charles Clarke, was "embattled" because of the release without consideration of deportation of a number of non-national prisoners, who had subsequently "gone missing". I can't help thinking that if these prisoners had been routinely deported on release, the same journalists who now demand Clarke's head on a plate would be hollering about racism and human rights. And, of course, in the most journalistically relished case of "embattlement", deputy PM John Prescott was "battling to save his job" as a result of revelations that he had had an affair with a civil servant 24 years his junior.
This confluence of difficulty caused the British media, from earnest broadsheet to the most degraded tabloid, to become incandescent with hyperbole. Tony Blair was "grim" and "despairing". It was "a very bad Blair day". Clarke/Prescott/Hewitt was "humiliated" and "in deep trouble". The government was "drunk on the arrogance of power". And so forth. Back references to the final days of the Major government a decade previously facilitated solemn inferences about what happens to politicians "too long in power". It is mainly, of course, nonsense.
None of the issues which purportedly converge in the alleged apocalypse of last Wednesday alone amounts to a crisis, and the one journalists were most exercised about (the Prescott affair) was none of their business. The idea that the deputy PM had an affair with a civil servant because he was "drunk on the arrogance of power", rather than for the reasons other people have affairs, is a typical construction of the tripe factory that is the latter-day media. In the past decade, Tony Blair, despite leading the most successful British government in generations, has gone from one extreme of untouchability to the other.
This has occurred, however, less because of anything intrinsically degenerative about his administration than because it is in the nature of journalism to pull down what it has built up. Mr Blair summarised the problem succinctly: "In the media culture we have today, where there's no problem that isn't a crisis, no difficulty that isn't a catastrophe, no week that isn't going to end up the most terrible thing that's ever happened, you get on with doing the job."
Unfortunately, because this reads as self-serving, and because Mr Blair's analysis depends for its promulgation on the entity it indicts, its truth will go over the heads of the public. In the end, the distractions created by the media frenzy, rather than any objective assessment of blamefulness, may decree that a scalp or two is necessary to end the frenzy and allow the survivors to get on with the job.