The big question racing round the media and the net is: did Jaffe walk or was he pushed? But in an age when the big news organizations are repositioning themselves as verifiers of the news, given the predominance of the blogosphere and the Twitterati as breakers of the news, it’s never going to be as cut and dried as that.

According to RadarOnline, and quoted in the Mail, Jaffe has stated: “The case was so all encompassing in terms of my time and the strict orders by the judge. I have other clients in serious crises who require my time.”

Reading between the lines, I can’t help but suspect that representing Oksana Grigorieva must have been tough – the story is wall to wall in America and there are any number of people getting in on the act, trying to make a fast buck out of the tabloid feeding frenzy.

Given that the internet is a remorseless story pump (imagine the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico before BP capped it, but replace the oil with a heady brew of gossip, scandal and press releases), any publicist dealing with a story as big as this one is likely to be on it 24 hours a day. That’s not a situation in which one can be strategic, as the constant flurry of rumour, counter-rumour and media theorizing would mean that everything has to be dealt with now, this second, without a moment to plan.

For a publicist, working in a situation like this is akin to throwing one’s career into a spin drier – there is no control to be had, especially when both the leading players seem to be dead set on making each other’s lives extremely difficult which, by extension, makes the lives of those working with them extremely difficult too. A good publicist doesn’t dish the dirt on their client, not even an ex-client whom they parted with acrimoniously.

Not that one is ever likely to find out precisely what is going on behind the scenes – there’s more than enough bullshit flying around to obscure that nicely. Better that a good story gets out, anyway – the truth in these instances is usually pretty dull.

There is also little money in this game. Very few tabloid figures can afford to remunerate for the sort of 24/7 council and strategic advice that the Mel/Oksana situation demands. Characters who allow their lives to be defined by opinion and the lust of the crowd will undoubtedly be terrible clients. It usually takes about 48 hours to come to that realisation.

And, most importantly, a sensible 60-year-old cherishes his life over and above high emotional spin cycle. Whisper it, who needs a toxic client. There is no glamour. There is only the horror.

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.

Money is the acne on the face of football and with teenage afflictions comes teenage behaviour. Young men with that much loose power stuffed in their wallets are prone to go a little crazy and Terry is no exception. Money and hormones repress morals – every time, without exception.

Top-flight footballers are a breed apart thanks to the astonishing amounts of money they take home; the offspring of a bestial union between money and sport. They should not be held up as exemplars of any sort of moral code. And don’t forget that great footballers make great targets for super-agents who want to make their percentage, for wannabe WAGS with eyes on the dream ticket these players represent, for clubs who require their pound of flesh. Football is as much about milking the cash cows as it is about sport. If not more.

The trouble is that top-flight footballers are getting too much cash, and too little of actual value to help them live with the amounts of money being thrown at them. Clubs and agents smile grimly when something goes wrong, say that lads will be lads and move on to the next golden egg-laying goose who can kick a ball. They rarely stop to consider encouraging an education for their ball-kicking prodigies, or taking the time to instill a code of reasonable conduct in them, or helping them consider investment policies that go beyond the purely selfish. Usually, they just use money and muscle to try and silence the media when things go wrong.

People like John Terry, Wayne Rooney et al are ordinary boys taken from ordinary lives and thrust into an overpaid, over-privileged world where the sky appears to be the limit. They are given no chance to acclimatize but are nonetheless expected to behave as if they’d been raised to virtue by kindly nuns. Who loses out when they can’t do that?

Should footballers be held up as great examples of sportsmanship? There’s no such thing as a true footballing Corinthian anymore – money has seen to that. Thinking that these values can exist in the modern sports arena is ludicrous – modern athletes are part and parcel of the quest to find that dark foreboding pit that is the seventh circle of Celebrity Hell. This type of human being is not at their best off the field, surrounded by super-agents, super-wages and access to super-injunctions when things go wrong.

All Terry can do is to try and communicate contrition, communicate a human side and demonstrate that, over time, he will change – and mean it! What will he learn if he is pursued into quitting by a vengeful media just for the sake of a story? Not much, I’d suggest; the only dignity left in football is in the game itself. Football is barely capable of losing more than it already has.

At the moment, the only winners are the men in charge of the money. The best PR they could get would be from putting in more than they take out of the sport – and I don’t just mean financially.

Certainly, the need to think about wider concerns makes outlandish and outrageous stunts a more difficult prospect in this health and safety and desperately money-conscious world. Some years ago, a band wanted me to help them arrange to completely stop traffic in Piccadilly Circus so they could play a gig from a flat bed truck – I had to hold a hand up and say “what are we going to do if an ambulance comes through with a heart attack victim on board?” The need to stand back and question all possible outcomes is even more imperative nowadays.

As much as the Rupert Pupkinish hedonistic approach is appealing, for its ability to grab headlines and for the sheer thrill of pulling something extraordinary and outrageous off, the parents of ‘Balloon Boy’ are proof positive that care has to be taken and that serious thought has to be applied if you don’t want an initially amused and fascinated public to turn on you if even the smallest thing goes wrong. Fame for the sake of it can be a costly business.