Yet Blair has spent so much of his prime ministerial time with Campbell that he shows signs of thinking, above all, else like a journalist. Before 1994 he spent most of his political time with Gordon Brown, another figure with a highly developed sense of how stories will play in the media.Partly as a result of the influences of Campbell and Brown, the Prime Minister has become a sharp journalist too. He is gripped by stories relating to his own government.At the Hutton inquiry last week he talked of the story taking off when Andrew Gilligan put "booster rockets on'' by writing for The Mail on Sunday. This is how journalists talk, watching avidly as the story moves on dramatically.
Blair was reading a story as a fellow reporter, even though he was also the central player.In some ways Blair's journalistic instincts have been a huge asset. In a frantic 24-hour media, in which broadcasters often take up themes from anti-government newspapers, a politician would soon be lost without a sense of how to play the media. One of the reasons for the failure of the Conservatives to recover more convincingly is that their shadow Cabinet lacks any sense of how the media work.But Blair is a prime minister presiding over a massive majority and the leader of a restive party. When making decisions he should take many other factors into account before posing the deadly question: "Won't this play badly in The Sun?'' He has every right to continue attempting to present his government in the best possible light. It is only in the current inane debate about spin that such a proposition is controversial, as if the death of spin should herald a healthy era where Blair would attempt to present his government in the least flattering light.Post-Campbell, Blair's challenge and potential opportunity is simply to seek a new sense of proportion, where the elected politicians matter more and the policies are given some space to speak for themselves. Genuinely radical policies will make more impact on the voters than the distorting poison in parts of the media. Blair the astute journalist should give some more space to Blair the Prime Minister More from Steve Richards.
Fantastic news about Nicole Kidman: the Oscar-winning actress is looking thin, tired and nervy, according to people who saw her emerging from her yoga class in New York last week. She cannot sleep, has not recovered from the end of her marriage to Tom Cruise, does not have a steady boyfriend and longs for a baby of her own. In fact she is almost as bonkers as Virginia Woolf, whom she played in The Hours, and we all know what happened to her. This gratifying state of affairs - sorry, fears - that the star is suffering burn-out and "reaching the point of no return" - was reported in the Daily Mail, which would no doubt be mortified to learn that somewhere on the planet a woman has managed to be rich, famous, single, successful and happy. Actually, I am being too kind to the paper, which wrote about Streisand in a tone of gloating innuendo, cruelly contrasting a recent unflattering picture with her "radiant" appearance in the 1970s. The Sun reserved its approbation, surprisingly, for Sir Paul McCartney's wife, Heather, the former model who was until recently a gold-digging self-publicist who had bagged everybody's favourite Beatle. Last week, pictures of a visibly pregnant Mills sent the paper's hard man, John Kay, into sentimental raptures over the "amazingly tender scenes" as she and McCartney walked home after a prenatal check-up.What a difference a bump makes, and how much poor lonely Kidman, according to the Mail, would like one.
(Her two children with Cruise do not count, apparently, because they are adopted.) But the nasty twist in the paper's demolition of Kidman, pictured below, is its suggestion that "she has been driven to the brink by film roles about rejected, depressed and oppressed women - with whom she identifies to a remarkable extent". Regular readers of this column will recall that I loathed The Hours, partly because of Kidman's lamentable performance, but also because I am sickened by the fashion for movies in which substantial novelists such as Woolf and Iris Murdoch are portrayed as batty old bags.As night follows day, I knew it could not be long before someone would start suggesting that there were more than accidental resemblances between the actress and the role. Because the whole point about these movies - another one is on its way, with Gwyneth Paltrow as Sylvia Plath - is that they reinforce the notion that women cannot be creative and happy, a pernicious cultural myth that applies as much to actresses as it does to writers. Kidman did not help matters by expressing doubts about the wisdom of playing the novelist, making the baffling observation that "Woolf's unhappiness was just too similar to my own". Now she is said to be having problems on the set of the remake of Stepford Wives, where she has apparently expressed a reluctance to film outdoors in strong sunlight.
