On his way in to testify at the Hutton inquiry last week, Tony Blair turned to look towards the media cameras leering from a distance. The image of the British Prime Minister's face, carried throughout the world, was a picture of the malady of western democracy at perhaps its most critical moment for 50 years, writes John Waters.
That fleeting glance betrayed an emotion somewhere between defiance and pleading, an expression of beleaguered incomprehension which, for all that it was personal, was also profoundly political, the look of a leader caught up in a madness he does not rightly understand.
Mr Blair was attending to give evidence at an inquiry he had himself established to investigate the circumstances of the apparent suicide of a government official. He had, in other words, appeared to invoke and co-operate with one of the checks retained by British democracy for its protection. Yet the mood was suggestive of a hanging party - a mob of placard-waving malcontents, a press gang dripping with cynicism and a general sense that he was fighting for his political life.
The idea that someone in authority must be "to blame" for something as incomprehensible as a lone suicide belongs in one of the dottier plots of Coronation Street. It is the product of a tabloidised society in which collective thought reaches critical mass at the level of cheap melodrama and saloon-bar spite. By the logic of the Hutton inquiry, no scrutiny will in future be possible of the behaviour of any individual, lest that individual go on to self-destruct. This promises, to begin with, the end of jurisprudence and workplace discipline.
The presence of a Law Lord in the equation does nothing to diminish the silliness of it all. It is silly that public controversy over a decision to take a nation to war has telescoped down into scrutiny of the private pain of one individual. It is even sillier that people see this as democracy in action.
The Hutton inquiry circus makes sense to political opportunists, conspiracy theorists, existential anoraks and the terminally disgruntled. To sensible people it makes no sense. Once, a British PM would have dealt with such an event in a terse statement to the House of Commons, leaving the rest to the coroner.
But politics has been replaced by something called "the optics", a miasma of distortion created by the fog of public ennui hitting the cold pane of media cynicism. Hence Hutton, all that fallout and the potentially lethal consequences for the capacity of leadership to make important decisions in the public interest.
Perhaps dictionaries of political phenomena will in time identify the 1990s as a period when something yet to be named "hyperdemocracy" or "melodramocracy" surfaced in advanced western societies. For now, we perceive things fuzzily, vaguely, paradoxically. In the mix, certainly, is creeping tabloidisation, with its debasement of public thought. Today's public demands, through its duly elected media, that its "leaders" answer to the most simple-minded logic while evincing the lower forms of emotional response. The result is government by taxi-driver, characterised by piety, sincerity and populism, rather than intelligence, responsibility and resolve.
Several years ago, mistaking some conspicuous trees for the wood, I warned that Blair's attempts to ingratiate himself with the Murdoch press would be his undoing. Today Murdoch remains embedded with the Blair government, but the infection he unleashed into the British body politic has seeped upwards to contaminate even the "quality" press and the national broadcaster.
Even the talents of the brilliant Alastair Campbell have proved insufficient to protect Tony Blair from the intrusion of the new hyperdemocracy, in which government derives from the cynical exploitation by a voracious media of the sub-intelligent whims of an idle, bored and insatiable public.
Campbell's job was to anticipate the doltishness of the public mood and pander to it before it could be exploited by media scrambling for material and mischief. In New Labour's first term he delivered with aplomb. But, inevitably, his undisguised contempt for media hypocrisy caused the tamed animals to turn on the ringmaster.
It all warns that, in the future, we may retain a form of democracy, but not the representation by intelligent people of the will of the people. Instead, we will have the hyperventilating response of a beleagured political establishment to a public clamour for this, that, the other and the opposite, all at the same time, a process governed by rage, fear, piety, stupidity and sentimentality. In these conditions, the steady knit-one-purl-one of responsible government will unravel in a succession of dropped stitches, as the leaders of democracy dance to the loudest, most witless voices in the land.