I might be wrong, but it all feels so fake. Certainly, David Beckham looks set to sue the US magazine for the claims that he went a bit Rooney.

Bauer – who publish In Touch – clearly did not comprehend the chaos that would be unleashed. I suspect their office must have echoed with the cry of: “Bugger the truth, the story is too good to ignore!” The fall out and collective web chatter suggests a plethora of conspiracy theories. My favourite so far is the one that suggests that it is a hoax attempting to derail England’s World Cup bid.

A close second is the theory that it’s a desperate publicity play by the fragrant model, a ridiculous attempt to generate traction at a time when she has designs on becoming governor of NYC. Can the US stomach their very own La Cicciolina, the porn star who was elected to the Italian parliament? Stranger things have started in the bedrooms of international football stars. If so, the deluded über-babe has gone to a lot of effort to force herself onto the celebrity radar.

I expected the wonderfully funny fake Max Clifford twitter account to go into overdrive, anticipating a flurry of tweets suggesting that he leaked the tale to cover up a breaking exposé concerning Simon Cowell’s affair with Goldenballs.

In a world of total lunacy please take time to read the mischievously wicked tweets from @Straightsimon and @Max_Clifford. God bless the respective camps for allowing these comic tweeters to hilariously cyber squat; they prove beyond doubt the publicist Jim Moran’s dictum: “There’s nothing so dismal as a fact!”

“…if a new era of transparency throws light on the secretive deals struck in the boardrooms of the BBC, insiders warned of dramatic changes to the way it does business that could set it on a collision course with its stars and their agents.

“‘There would be an absolute feeding frenzy,’ says Mark Borkowski, the entertainment industry publicist and founder of Borkowski PR. ‘It would spark a war between the media and celebrities over the amount the BBC pays and suddenly agents will need to convince the media their guy has value.’”

It seems likely that he will go, and soon, despite a few bullish headlines suggesting that we should blame the players rather than the manager. Capello’s struggles with English and his authoritarian regime will not stand him in good stead. And he is not an accessible man, which is utterly essential in a job like this.

Look at Simon Cowell, a man who is subjected to equally rigorous scrutiny. Despite employing the services of Max Clifford and having a bank balance that could be easily used to buy off damaging stories, he remains entirely accessible. That this accessibility is carefully structured is certain, but it is more than just an impression and it certainly appeases the media.

Whoever takes over from Capello will have to be aware of this and be able to manage the media as surely and subtly as he manages the players. Whoever it is will really need to be an Englishman, or at least someone who speaks English as their first language – it is essential, from a footballing and a PR point of view, that the new manager is a clear communicator.

The manager of England’s football team, like the CEO of a big company (who can see the correlation between Tony Hayward and Capello, both inexpert at getting a useful point across?), needs to be savvy and manage expectations, be they supporters’, players’ or the media’s.

I suggest Harry Redknapp, a manager who understands both front and back pages, has no truck with ivory towers and who would most likely instil a sense of discipline in a new set of players.

I think Redknapp could take the England football squad into a brave new world of carefully downscaled expectation. Ironically, this could lead to England doing rather better in future.

I wonder what Barnum would have done? Yesterday, I went to see an exhibition on him for the 200th anniversary of his birth in Sheffield at the National Circus and Fairground archive at the University of Sheffield, run by Vanessa Toumin. It was brought home to me once again that Barnum never lost an opportunity to network with the famous people of his day, such as Mark Twain, and make sure that he and his ideas were deeply embedded in the 19th century conversation.

So embedded was he that Regent Street and Piccadilly used to be littered with freak shows inspired by Barnum’s example – look at the busy shopping haven now and you’d never think it was once the UK’s carnival central.

Now that all else has failed with BP’s efforts, I think there may need to be a Barnumesque response to the oil spill – some grandiose scheme to get behind a piece of equipment or behind a person involved in the clean up. Something that will bring surprising information into the foreground, rather than the usual hush up. It would be absolutely delightful to see them trying to repair their damaged reputation in a noisy, colourful burst of showmanship.

PR has taken a backward evolutionary step lately – it’s sad that Max Clifford is the go to man of choice, that information must be hidden or drip-fed when it should be celebrated in Barnum fashion. Barnum may be criticised now for the freak shows, but many people forget that quite a number of them earned so much through Barnum that they were able – and willing, too – to bail him out when times were tough. Colonel Tom Thumb earned the equivalent of $17 million a year.

I’ve also been looking at Meeky – see here for more information – and it goes to show that nothing is original in promotion.

Everyone tries to capture the public’s imagination and generate interest – the tools of communication were primitive in Barnum’s time, yet anyone prepared to use a bit of showmanship became rich.

Any showman nowadays is influenced by Barnum, whether they realise it or not; the spores of his genius have spread far and wide. Now it’s just a question of applying his means to today’s slightly more advanced tools of communication. In BP’s case, they need to be a bit rough and ready – all this just goes to show that you just can’t be slick with an oil spill.

It’s worth bearing in mind that, had this been a high-ranking politician, people would be doing all they could to find out whether Jacobs had planned this and would be doing all they could to destroy her. As it stands, it is unlikely to get investigated fully and the only true losers will be football fans – particularly if Triesman’s unguarded slurs on the Spanish and Russians lead to the UK not hosting the 2018 World Cup.

Nobody in the media will follow this through to the bitter end – and certainly no one will investigate Max Clifford’s role too deeply, as he’ll surely be coming with another story that packs the same sort of carefully gathered emotional punch that sells shedloads of papers.

It’s an absolutely shocking state of affairs if we have come to a point where everyone knows the value of kiss and tell and where anyone who wants it has the know-how to leverage the most amount of money out of the media, regardless of the damage it could cause. Even those that do not know what to do know where to turn to get it done: Max Clifford’s door.

But it’s a terrible, self-defeating state to be in if the media and all the people feeding it such choice titbits are concerned about is a quick profit without any consideration for the good of the nation as a whole.

The debate was well attended; over two thirds full. Joining me to argue for the proposition were Max Clifford and the retiring Union president, Jonathan Laurence. Opposing the motion were Times journalist Hugo Rifkind, showbiz writer Zoe Griffin and James McQuillan, who appeared on The Apprentice.

The other speakers last night went for a comic interpretation of the motion. My technique was more serious-minded, more Old Testament – Quentin Tarantino fans might have deduced I was trying to mimic Samuel L Jackson’s famous biblical Pulp Fiction speech.

I was attempting to play devil’s advocate as well as being more deliberately, obviously provocative. Max was off-the-cuff languid and crammed his speech with career anecdotes. He opened by defending good Reality TV – no surprise, as his chief paymaster is Simon Cowell.

The others were a mixed bag, going for laughs. Hugo Rifkind, the leader writer for the Times, was very good, and reminded the room of some of the bad stuff. He went for Max as the real reason for the negative residue from reality TV, suggesting that Max has promoted and created many poor role models.

Zoe Griffin praised the stars that Reality TV has bred, highlighting Ben Fogle and Myleene Klass, as well praising the revenue Reality TV has generated for the GNP. I wasn’t all that sure about her argument, but she looked great in a fab frock. James McQuillan was pure stand up and self-deprecation – he treated the whole night as if it was a task on The Apprentice.

I am pleased to report Jonathan, Max and I went away winners by 5 votes – a very tight call. Winning, I am told, is a significant tick on the CV – this is, after all, the oldest and one of the most prestigious debating societies in the world.

Below is the transcript of the speech I gave.

President, ladies and gentlemen – good evening.

The very fact that Max Clifford is prepared to publicly bite the hand that feeds him is a measure of the seriousness of the situation our society now finds itself in.

There have always been celebrities, of course. Every culture under the sun reveres fame. Heracles or Odysseus, John Lennon or Joan of Arc – we know without doubt that certain people’s astonishing adventures, thoughts, ideas, poems, novels or battles will live on throughout the ages.

But it is becoming harder and harder for these people to be heard over the slew and spew of information in a world that runs on instant access

So what has changed? What is different about modern celebrity that makes it so uniquely corrosive?

Let me take you back to 1834, when that true genius of celebrity, PT Barnum, moved to New York and discovered the astounding commercial potential of the human freak show. Today, we may disapprove of exhibiting physically deformed men and women for profit.

But I ask you: is Jeremy Kyle any different?

And by Jeremy Kyle, I mean Jerry Springer, the opening rounds of the X Factor and everything else in this degrading morass of reality TV that a British crown court judge aptly called: “a morbid and depressing display of dysfunctional people whose lives are in turmoil.”

There can be little doubt that so-called “reality” television – an oxymoron if ever there was one – is responsible for this perversion.

The gospel of Reality Television is easy to understand. Everyone can be a celebrity. No skills are necessary. And low emotional IQ is a major advantage.

Today’s get-known-quick generation think that fame is an end in itself and that work is for losers. The Reality TV generation seek notoriety in the mistaken belief that it is the same thing as eminence, distinction or achievement.

They have been conned.

Reality TV is a reductive force, which exists in a self-serving media bubble – a cosy pact between format owners and media barons. Now, if that were all it is, that would be bad enough – a modern-day equivalent of Barnum’s freak show… unedifying, but pretty harmless in small doses.

But that is far from its true nature.

In this shallow and foetid Petri dish, we are growing a phoney society. One where 14 year old girls can appear on daytime TV to tell the world that their admiration of Katie Price is so great that they are being remodelled to look like her – because they believe that this alone will make them famous!

Please note, in passing, that beauty is almost always placed at a premium as a culture collapses.

Indeed, it was Eleanor Roosevelt who remarked that:

“Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people.”

On this logarithmic scale, our Reality TV-plagued society is surely due to disappear up its own neocortex.

Psychologist Jean M. Twenge cites a telling indicator in her book Generation Me. In the 1950s, she says, just twelve percent of teens age fourteen to sixteen agreed with the statement: “I am an important person.” Yet by the late 1990s, seven times that number—eighty percent—of teens said they agreed with it.

Of course one needs belief in oneself to do well, to become more than the sum of your parts – but this rampant “self-esteem” is in truth narcissism by another name.

And as I think we can all agree, the seemingly easy route to fame that Reality TV affords is opium to the narcissist’s addiction. We risk breeding an entire generation that doesn’t understand, or want to understand, that nothing worth having comes easily.

In the ten mind-numbing years since Big Brother appeared on our screens, Reality TV has become a major force in our society. It feeds people’s hopes and dreams with a progression of sound bites that illuminate nothing but a phoney ersatz nirvana. Beyond our shores, the West is spreading a ‘fame virus’, seemingly unaware of the spread and effects of the contagion, which by any measure is now a pandemic. Countless children and young adults across the globe are desperate to “live the dream”, unaware that they aren’t even dreaming of a life.

Where, then, are the real heroes? When society genuflects toward plasticated icons of fame, they cannot see real heroes. They miss out on the subtler role models, can see no positive illustrations of value, of worth. And this, too, is one more consequence of Reality TV culture (another oxymoron). It makes it less likely for anyone with genuine, hard-earned talents to make an impact on the world at large.

Ladies and gentlemen, the motion tonight is well-worded

Wretched.

What an appropriate description for our current national psyche.

Perhaps in a country where trade and industry have been reduced to a trickle, where blue collars have nearly all been bleached white, there is little else for the young to do but dream of glory in what seems the best way available. That, at least, is understandable.

Less pardonable is an education system that plays along with this mass deception. I, for one, believe that our children deserve better.

But where will this end?

As a culture, we appear to be moving into a world run on Reality TV rules, insane prospect though that is. Our religion is celebrity. Our sense of community has been reduced to slots on a TV scheduler’s spreadsheet. Our conversation is piped to us via the tabloid media. All plastic, and all thoroughly wretched.

Meanwhile, we are losing the richness of life to a monochrome, reductive view of the world where too many people have been lead to believe by media moguls and TV producers that they too can be demi-gods, without putting in the work or even deserving the worship.

We live in a culture that agrees with Keats that Beauty is Truth.

However, we seem to have forgotten the second part of the famous close to Ode to a Grecian Urn: that Truth is Beauty, also.

Truth, today, is lost in a manufactured version of reality populated by beautiful, synthetic people. And the world suffers for it as more and more strive to be perfect, useless people whose only ability appears to be rich, pretty and unhappy.

Historian C.D. Odell claimed that: “the freaks of the dime museum served the purpose of raiding dull persons from the throws of their inferiority complexes”. Freaks served to boost the punter’s self esteem. The same could be said of watching Jeremy Kyle, but for the fact that so many people watch and decide that they will go on the show to claim their moment of fame – amplifying their internal deformities to please the audience.

Reality TV is, I believe, a tranquilizer for the masses, as the freak shows were in the dime museum days. But instead of people thinking ‘thank god I’m not like that’, they are now thinking ‘it could be me’ and they go out of their way to get chosen for reality TV shows. They freak themselves up to have a better chance of getting on the show.

The divide between rich and poor is bigger than it’s been in a very long time at the moment, but the overriding mood is apathy. Where once people rioted – against the poll tax, in Toxteth and Brixton – due to high level of discontent – they are now opiated by Reality TV. It has produced apathy amongst the young.

Where once you had to be talented to be famous and make money, now you don’t.

Literally anybody has a chance at being picked for a reality TV show and with that comes a certain fame and capacity to earn money – for a little while. The “ it could be you” phenomenon drives the apathy to fight back and reduces the need to have any opinion about our society. Governments won’t change anything because we are given a (false) sense of hope which keeps up down.

And consider this.

Consider it and weep.

More young people have voted on TV shows such as Big Brother and the X Factor than vote in major political elections.

You may be wondering whether I’m over-egging it. Whether, in fact, Reality TV has some beneficial side effects that I’m concealing from you? As entertainment, surely it must at least make us happy?

Actually, no. It drives young people and children to be more self-obsessed, more beautiful, more perfect, more grown up and more miserable in an attempt to gain fame and money.

In a 2007 Unicef survey, more than a quarter of the British children polled (27%) agreed with the statement: “I often feel depressed.”

What made children saddest, in this survey, was their appearance. Almost a fifth, of both sexes, were unhappy with how they looked. A study by the Girl Guides recently discovered that 46% of girls aged 11 to 16 would consider cosmetic surgery and that girls started to find fault with their appearance as early as 10 or 11. Reality TV has created a generation that believe fame and celebrity is their birthright and who cannot function properly because they feel they must make themselves look better to achieve all they desire.

One thing is certain; our moral compass has found a new magnetic field; one that points out a new slant on Oscar Wilde’s famous epigram: “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”

This is a generation growing up hooked on fast story lines and an optimistic, unrealistic view of reality. A generation growing up believing that they are in the stars and barely registering that they are staring straight into the gutter and have been for years.

I urge you to vote in favour of tonight’s motion.

The blog discussing the debate I participated in on Monday has stirred up some comment too – there’s also a blog from the chair of the event, Trevor Morris, comparing Max Clifford to Marmite, which is well worth a read. It’s on director general of the PRCA Francis Ingham’s blog. Click here to find out more.

It was a rather curious and disappointing night; most of the questions from the floor were from people seeking insight via anecdote and I found myself missing the grillings I got from wannabe journalists 15 years ago about the nature of PR. The media has changed, without doubt – celebrity has come to be a sop they use to send us to sleep easily at night, a sort of weak-horlicks fairytale with all the calories and morals removed.

When it comes to celebrity, the media are too often an industry dependent on lives going wrong so they can print half truths and soap operas. The modern media can’t seem to find – or find the time for – the voices of those contributing something of worth to society. Everything is too prearranged. All those bright young things who wanted to be journalists now want to be in PR, as there’s always money to be made there.

But critical opinion is being lost. Does no one want to know how photos of John Terry and his wife in Dubai – which has strict privacy laws – were taken? It had to be by careful arrangement but no one questioned this last night. Everybody knows everything and nothing – the useful details are lost beneath a swath of cosy anecdote.

Debate is at an all time low – it is not even fashionable in politics, as Gordon Brown’s giving over of himself to the personal via the medium of his TV interview with Piers Morgan the other day proves. That and the fact that the political parties are all trying to bag celebs to help win the upcoming election (click here to see a piece on this in the Telegraph for which I gave a quote) rather than debate and think their way out of their problems.

I’m well aware that the world is constantly changing, as it should, but to have young wannabe publicists and journalists sidestep entirely a proper discourse and just accept the nature of things as they are on the surface is disturbing. There’s always money to be made – asking questions won’t, in the long run, stem the flow of that income. The power of questions is that, by questioning, one can change things. True constructive analysis and debate is the only way for the media, PR and the world to move forward – equilibrium need not mean stultification.

Next up after that is a debate at the University of Westminster on Monday, February 15th on Celebrity Brands: Desire, Dollars and Danger? It’s an equally topical debate, asking if we are near the limit of public interest in celebrities, or if there is no limit, whether celebrities mirror or lead society and if they need or deserve greater protection from the media. Bearing in mind the Tiger Woods case and the more recent John Terry meltdown, we’ll also be discussing what the risks and benefits for brands of associating with celebrities are.

Chewing over the issue with me are Max Clifford, Julian Linley (ex-Heat editor and now creative director of Bauer Media), and the advertising guru Trevor Beattie. The debate will be chaired by Trevor Morris, Visiting Professor of Public Relations at the University of Westminster, and the co-author of ‘PR- A Persuasive Industry?’ It should be a fascinating evening.