The right-wing journalist and propagandist David Brock in his recent confession Blinded By The Right

The right-wing journalist and propagandist David Brock, in his recent confession, Blinded By The Right, details how, at the behest of men such as the billionaire Richard Mellon Scaif, he more or less manufactured anti-Clinton scandals. One of these, Troopergate, led indirectly, via Paula Jones, to the entrapment of Clinton over his liaison with Monica Lewinsky.But this was not purely an American affair. The journalist Joe Klein’s new book on the Clinton presidency, The Natural, touches on the aftermath of the suicide of Clinton’s friend and aide, Vince Foster. “Foster’s death,” says Klein, “reinforced the fantasy of a lethal immorality about the Clintons (at least among the more deluded sensationalists in the press, who spread the notion that Foster had been murdered).” One of the leading “deluded sensationalists” was Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, the Washington correspondent of The Daily Telegraph, and currently their man in Europe.

It was in a British broadsheet, then, that the maddest stories were given respectability. Is it possible that Britain’s fabulously partisan press learned the lesson of the Clinton years – keep fishin’ and you never know what you might not find, or even provoke?This week, one influential columnist on the left speculated that the “spin” stories were being ramped up by Europhobic newspapers, who see the destruction of Tony Blair’s reputation as the best way of winning or averting a referendum on joining the euro And you can see his point. Another related version of this argument has these newspapers trying to fill the void in opposition left by a policyless Conservative Party. And again it’s true that some right-wing commentators give the impression that they believe that Blair came to power as the result of a coup d’?t, and not on the back of two democratic elections.But whatever the motivation, there could be no media frenzy if it just involved the Mail, the Telegraph and, occasionally, The Sun They can’t do it on their own. And it is also true that John Major got much the same treatment, with his achievements blanked and the unremarkable sexual exploits of his ministers projected like a gigantic set of horns, to sit on the poor man’s brows whenever he appeared. I remember Andrew Marr then saying, quite rightly, that we – the media – should not do again what had been done to Major.It’s not bias, it’s the herd And what a herd. Cherie Blair was the big story two days ago, yet no one asked the PM about her comments yesterday.

Why? Because they knew that, so absurd was the synthetic outrage of some of them, they would have looked like complete fools had they raised the subject with her husband. But why were most of the other questions so poor, so spin-obsessed, so press-centred?It is not really permitted to say this, but David Blunkett wasn’t far off being right Our political journalism is, sometimes, bonkers. It is created in an incestuous atmosphere that makes Ozark family structures look positively extravert. They all work out of the same corridor, eat at the same restaurants, meet the same people and snap at the same prey. And their word – “this is a big story in Westminster” – goes with bulletin editors, home news editors and any other kind of editor.Politicians have connived at this. This government, which so many of us wanted to be so different, thought it had to do politics the same, realpolitik way as their predecessors – only better. So they, too, had their badmouthing, their off-the-record assassinations, constitutional manipulations and – all too often – pointless evasions.