Like a Chinese meal, it is all you can taste and think about, but when it’s finished it’s forgotten and all you want is the next fix of foodstuff. There’s news, there’s excitement, there’s hyperbole scattered all over the place like MSG – and then it’s gone.

Of course, we are at the point that everyone is most interested in – the freak parade. Never mind the machinations behind the scenes or the commercial value of the brand; this is what the people most care about; the narrative, the crazies.

Given that it’s all about BGT right now, will we ever know the truth of what caused Cheryl Cole’s American X Factor exit and non-admittance to the UK judging panel? I doubt it, as the people have spoken and what they want is the tears, the heartache, the visceral stories, whether good or bad. What use is a nation’s sweetheart without some pain? We’ve used up the divorce tears – here’s the next weepie Cole adventure.

We know that Fox had a part to play, and Cowell, and many other factors, from agents to stylists – but it barely matters so long as the newspapers and Twitter benefit.

Brian Solis says that Social Media is creating its own ego systems. To survive, brands, businesses and celebrities should ride the shift in public perception and develop market strategies to work these ego systems. They need to recognise the shifts for what they are, however – the public has taken built in obsolescence at the heart of celebrity and business and celebrates it wholeheartedly – the nation no longer cares for yesterday’s cast offs. It only cares for the now.

We are living in one giant QVC-style shopping channel trading in celebrity; not a format that creates longevity. There’s no need when the consumer gladly moves on as soon as the sleb stops living in the now and starts thinking about the future.

Consumers are setting up information networks and are happy to be governed by social media connections. They expect the information to come to them in the instant – hardly anyone seeks out information elsewhere any more. They want it all NOW!

Yet, since no one is focusing on the past, no one is contextualising what’s happening now either, so let’s try to. Only people with platforms triumph – hence we see Cheryl Cole becoming cannon fodder to the march of the platform she’s been ousted from. High profile she may be, but she’s still just cannon fodder. It’s the people who’ve been spat out of the system who can offer most context on what is happening within the machine, but the machine has programmed us to expect a retrospective in ten years time asking “where are they now?”, at which we’ll grunt with slight recognition at the participants of all the old formats who never made it and then move on. There is no room for context in that model.

Fans and followers are firing up the process so it runs ever faster. Image is as disposable as a burger container. There is no point to super injunctions; the law is a blunt stick – and anyway, it’ll all be forgotten tomorrow.

Only a few are managing to succeed; Jedward are a prime example. But then they make no references to the past and they don’t care about the future – they may have represented Ireland at Eurovision, they may have met Obama but they have skins like rhinos and they don’t care. Their career is now and we have got to the point where the audience don’t trust people who talk about a future.

Maybe you just have to be stupid to succeed. Or, as I heard Simon Cowell tell a Britney impersonator: “Never mind the negativity. Ride it!” Salient lessons for Cheryl Cole and anyone else wanting to enter the social media whirl and the giddy world of celebrity in the 21st century.

I sat next to Robert Hill Smith, who runs the Yalumba winery. Yalumba is Australia’s oldest family owned winery – it was set up in 1849 by Robert’s great great-grandfather, a Dorset brewer called Samuel Smith who emigrated to Australia, made some money from gold and set up the winery which he named after the indigenous Australian word for “all the land around”.

Also there was someone who knows a fair bit about all the land around – or around politics at the least; Lynton Crosby. He masterminded several Australian election victories for John Howard, the failed 2005 election campaign for the Conservatives and Boris Johnson’s successful mayoral campaign. So when he started to talk about the recent election, I could not help but listen intently.

His overview was fascinating – and his insights into the pollster scene particularly so. According to Lynton, the pollster scene is littered with charlatans claiming that they worked on the Obama campaign. If you Google search for people who worked for the Obama campaign, he says, you’ll get 80,000 who claim they did. The real people are keeping a deliberately low profile.

He also thinks that Nick Clegg’s big mistake was not hiring a young team of hotshot social media whizzes to orchestrate a social media campaign for the Lib Dems. There’s nobody good working with political social media, Lynton told me. If Clegg had hired outside the usual boxes, he would have made a bigger impact – in his own right, rather than as kingmaker. He was the one candidate that could have benefited from a small, dedicated group of switched on social geeks.

This is advice that needs to be handed on to Nick Clegg, after last night’s second Leaders’ Debate. He appeared to have spent the week following his remarkable showing in the first debate positively wallowing in the good reviews. Certainly his people believed the good press enough to let Clegg give Brown and Cameron enough room to make up lost ground. That said, he survived pretty well mostly thanks to the MPs’ expenses scandal allowing too many people to see the puppet strings in this campaign.

It’s not just leaders making up lost ground – since Obama swept to power, there have been no significant advances in new media’s ability to influence thing. Surprisingly, given that GE2010 was expected to have an enormous social media impact, all the balls are in the analogue media’s court after two game-changing Leaders’ Debates. It has been conclusively proved that many millions of people will watch old media if the content is great.

There’s no doubt that the experience is deepened and aided by new media, and by Twitter in particular, but that’s not what’s been driving the sudden change in the shape of British politics. In the same way that the X Factor created a big moment for old-fashioned “round the box with the family” television, the Leaders’ Debates have made politics absorbing. It’s been political karaoke, particularly from Labour and Conservative, and people like to see a politician who recognizes that he’s on strings and tries to escape them, as Clegg did exceptionally in the first debate and pretty well last night.

It’s this karaoke element that has lead to Gordon Brown’s complaints that this is too much about personalities. But then he is too prone to throwing stats at the audience still – even though his performance last night was more human. Whether he likes it or not, politics does get overshadowed by personalities and the majority of the people who have been newly engaged by these debates have been talking about the personalities as much as, if not more than, the policies.

None of the parties have truly harnessed the digital media – they still rely on pumping out propaganda and all saying that their leader won the debate. None of them seem to have learned from the satirical backlash on Twitter against the right wing press’s demonisation of Clegg – these papers are on the back foot since people started skitting their more rabid pronouncements.

It will probably come down to the third and final debate to carry forward the hype and the election. But will people vote? Have these debates given people the confidence to vote? And will the rumoured upsurge in registered voters translate into hordes at the polling stations? Perhaps we should take a Twitter poll to find out.

The debate was carefully, rigorously planned as an attempt to revivify politics, seen as a necessity now that all trust has been leeched away from politics and politicians. But if the people behind its gaffe-free polish thought that this would help re-engage the electorate, who have been drifting away slowly but surely for years, they were wrong.

Everyone wanted to make the election interesting, wanted to grab the populace and generate positive word of mouth. It’s a shame, then, that the big two parties offered no big ideas, no choice.

Only one man made a concerted effort to engage in a meaningful manner with the populace; Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg. In football terms, he was Michael Owen in his first World Cup appearance – an unmarked outsider who took to the big stage as if he was born to it and blew the crowds away.

Clegg clearly took Cameron and Brown by surprise, easing himself into a position of advantage last night, partly because he wasn’t being heckled by backbenchers but mostly, I suspect, because he couldn’t afford any American advisers – fresh from the Obama campaign and clearly snapped up by Labour and the Tories – schooling him in the best ways to win a TV debate. He did it by using language that was recognisably human rather than highly polished. Whether it was enough to create votes for his party remains to be seen.

All eyes had been on Cameron, of course; the fresh-faced newbie until Clegg stole that crown. Cameron and Gordon Brown came across as too polished, too over-produced – just the sort of thing that gets the electorate switching off in boredom.

The killer component in last night’s debate was complacency. Everything was neat, controlled, polished to the point of looking the same. There were no surprises. The sense that this was a historic event was mostly lost because the main parties treated it as part of the same old same old – a karaoke politics show.

The debate certainly exposed the backroom boys who, now more than ever, need to find real substance and stop using and abusing the endless soundbites that are turning the elctorate off.

The drift away from politics amongst the young is a real threat to democracy, but what is there to engage them? Only Nick Clegg offered a real point of difference last night, but he was still deep within the usual rules of engagement. The populace has lost all but a few shreds of trust in politicians and a PR marketing plan that reads “look, this is how Obama won – WE should do that” is doomed to failure. They should think globally, yes, but Clegg proved they need to act locally.

The main parties have no idea how to win trust – from a PR point of view, they are fiddling whilst Rome burns. This was essentially a smug Westminster village exercise in karaoke politics sold as a major breakthrough.

The media needed to buy into the debate, because they are as culpable as the politicians in the diffusion of ideas and trust.

There were no straightforward winners – but the only loser was Cameron, who had started with nothing to lose but lost it anyway. The fresh face, the new blood, belonged to Nick Clegg. It remains to be seen if the rest of the election plays out this way.

From the negative electioneering of mashed up, satirical posters, to the dusting down of the old Saatchi creative team – to deliver up what Cameron’s mob hope to be a coup de gras to Labour (as was done under Thatcher) – its been a long and spectacularly phoney war; one that has, alarmingly, only focused on the media process.

Now, with even more spin and blather lined up to cover over the front pages with its own mutated brand of primordial goo, we get Sam and Dave via webcam, at home in their designer kitchen, the fertile photogenic young couple whom the Tories hope will get them over the winning line. Basically, another lump of undigested PR hype posited for the Westminster Village elite as the media heralds the election date and the gears of war grind into place.

Never before, however, have there been more examples and more critique of the marketing, PR and advertising that goes into an election campaign. As various party marketing grandees fumble with Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and guerilla marketing, they fail to grasp that the key issue is going to be whether the great unwashed are actually going to get off their backsides and vote.

The real state of politics is that the nation is utterly disillusioned with the process of power, the government and the corrupt politicians. No matter what the politics, PR and spin are ubiquitous and as a consequence we all mistrust politicians, especially in power. Whether it’s an interesting use of social media or pushing forward a political wife, none of the parties have, to date, proffered any real policies for the electorate to judge.

All we have been given is the slew and spew of marketing and a welter of PR blather. The papers spend more time commenting on new and old media tricks being employed to propel the parties into power than they do on what actually matters – policy!

Have the collective efforts of all the political parties to sell politics been a distraction that has hypnotized a nation? I would say yes, as we have seemingly given in to the Machiavellian forces, hired media hands and the strategies last employed by Obama that will lead each TV debate. This constant distraction and the media obsession with personality politics leads us further away from the real and pressingly urgent issues which are what we should be voting for.

Its an interesting start to the election and leaves me wondering: do the public believe in the theatre of politics at all any more?

Do they believe in the clusters of smiling supporters hanging off their leaders’ every word whilst the hapless media ruck is ignored? Or Cameron’s one man road show bouncing off the walls? Or Gordon’s team greeted en masse by clapping, grinning party faithful? Or slick, formulaic Cameron making speeches with his white shirt sleeves rolled up in an attempt to demonstrate his youth and vitality? The boyish Clegg photographed with Saint Vincent Of Cable?

I am breathless: its day one and already there’s been stunt after stunt, photo opp after photo opp – both Brown and Cameron more shamelessly proactive than Katie Price.

Please please keep it up! I just can’t wait for the TV debates next week…

His latest stunt, being widely reported on in the press at the moment, is the photo opportunity he took at a Normandy factory last Thursday, in which the workers he was photographed with were all shorter than he was.

Sarkozy stands at either 5’5” or 5’6”, depending on which journal you read – it’s abundantly clear that he is constantly kept on his toes trying to obfuscate on the issue of his height – but this latest venture, where volunteers shorter than the French president were called for to stand behind him as he made a speech, takes his problems with the state of his limited verticality to new heights. He seems to be developing a Napoleon complex. This is not an attractive trait in the French president, as history has shown.

The fact that the Élysée Palace spinmeisters haven’t taken the issue in hand, and instead seem to be actively falling in step with Sarkozy’s wishes, only adds to the Napoleonic complexity of the matter. They need to do something if they want to stop him becoming a laughing stock. One simply cannot be a global leader and not be able to deal with one’s height – or lack of it – in the 21st century.

It’s a PR disaster to be seen as so self-obsessed when there are much bigger issues in the world that need much more urgent attention. Sarkozy needs to get over his personal issues, throw out his Cuban heels, realise that he has an attractive trophy wife and that some people envy him for that (this seems to be the sort of recognition he’s craving) and, most of all, recognise that the whole world is watching – and laughing at – his methods of projecting himself.

This footage is from the original Belgian report that broke the news that Sarkozy was actively seeking people his height or shorter to stand behind him on the podium…

Gordon Brown may have expressed his apologies, may have “ensured that there are new rules so that this cannot happen again” but Westminster is a notorious whispering gallery and the press have been pecking up the strands of scandal dropped there for years to feather their nests. That is surely going to continue, outside official channels, as it has in the past.

It occurs to me that this frenzy of outrage is more an expression of fear on the part of the traditional media; fear that their sources may be decamping to the ultimate whispering gallery that is the internet, where rumour, conjecture and slander can live with considerably less fear of court action.

Bloggers like Guido Fawkes and Ian Dale are getting to the meat of a story more quickly, more effectively and with a wider reach than the analogue media; they must be chilled to the bone at their inability to lead the story. The papers are losing control and trust, hence their vicious reaction. If they can help halt the tittle-tattle’s flow towards the net, they will.

And this sort of diatribe has been part of the political mix forever. The metropolitan dinner party and lobby circles in Notting Hill, Hampstead and Westminster lap it up but, hypocritically, publicly disown it when outed.

The sad thing is that this latest round of technological, net-based spin and whisper is borne out of Barack Obama’s positive and hugely successful campaign to become President of the USA. But Britain’s political thinkers are so ingrained in negativity that they have inverted Obama’s campaign tactics and made something poisonous with them.

Consider the net a wire service, a huge, powerful story feed where everyone who wants it can get the message at high speed – delivered to their mobiles the moment it goes up if needs be. Psy Ops campaigns on the net are simple and easy to run, but it’s ludicrous and hypocritical of the media to suggest that this evil propaganda device is a new phenomenon. It’s just running at the speed of thought now.

The key soldiers in the Psy Ops political war on the web are ex-newspaper men and women and there are plenty of PR people sticking their members into the swill pit. But politics has always been a dirty, ruthless and cynical game and the only way out of this mess is for people is to stop glorying in the ruthless gossip and disinformation and take a more positive outlook on life, political or otherwise.

I’ve seen friends destroyed by the sort of tactics that McBride proposed to use – they haven’t been in public life for years and won’t be coming back unless a new attitude comes to the fore. They just don’t have the recourse to justice that the seriously wealthy have. There are a lot of casualties out there who’ll never get a fair crack of the whip despite the PCC.

What we need is a realignment of thought, not a few rules that are little more than sticking plaster placed over a crumbling dam.

The pie chart in question, below, was posted on the voltagecreative.com blog and is an aesthetically-pleasing version of statistics drawn up by the economist Barry Ritholtz.

Click on the image for a larger version

Whilst one can question the way the dollar prices were adjusted for inflation, there is no denying that this statistic shows explicitly just how much the American economy has been propped up on hope in the last 30 years, and the enormity of the task facing Barack Obama.

“We all create our own reality,” writes Monbiot, “and shut out the voices we do not want to hear. But there is no issue we are less willing to entertain than man-made climate change. Here, three worlds seem to exist in virtual isolation. In the physical world, global warming appears to be spilling over into runaway feedback: the most dangerous situation humankind has ever encountered. In the political world – at the climate talks in Poznan, for instance – our governments seem to be responding to something quite different, a minor nuisance that can be addressed in due course. Only the Plane Stupid protesters who occupied part of Stansted airport yesterday appear to have understood the scale and speed of this crisis. In cyberspace, by contrast, the response spreading fastest and furthest is flat-out denial.

“The most popular article on the Guardian’s website last week was the report showing that 2008 is likely to be the coolest year since 2000. As the Met Office predicted, global temperatures have been held down by the La Niña event in the Pacific Ocean. This news prompted a race on the Guardian’s comment thread to reach the outer limits of idiocy. Of the 440 responses posted by lunchtime yesterday, about 80% insisted that manmade climate change is a hoax. Here’s a sample of the conversation:

“’This is a scam to get your money … The only people buying into ‘global warming’ have no experience with any of the sciences.’

“’If we spend any money or cost one person their job because of this fraud it would be a crime. When will one of our politicians stand up and call this for what it is, bullshit!’

“’What a set of jokers these professors are … I think I understand more about climate change than them and I don’t get paid a big fat salary with all the perks to go with it.’

“And so on, and on and on. The new figures have prompted similar observations all over the web. Until now, the “sceptics” have assured us that you can’t believe the temperature readings at all; that the scientists at the Met Office, who produced the latest figures, are all liars; and that even if it were true that temperatures have risen, it doesn’t mean anything. Now the temperature record – though only for 2008 – can suddenly be trusted, and the widest possible inferences be drawn from the latest figures, though not, of course, from the records of the preceding century. This is madness.

“Scrambled up in these comment threads are the memes planted in the public mind by the professional deniers employed by fossil fuel companies. On the Guardian’s forums, you’ll find endless claims that the hockeystick graph of global temperatures has been debunked; that sunspots are largely responsible for current temperature changes; that the world’s glaciers are advancing; that global warming theory depends entirely on computer models; that most climate scientists in the 1970s were predicting a new ice age. None of this is true, but it doesn’t matter. The professional deniers are paid not to win the argument but to cause as much confusion and delay as possible. To judge by the Comment threads, they have succeeded magnificently.”

This is true for as many of the hotly contested and contentious issues and businesses of the modern era as you could care to name. It’s not just the fossil fuel companies who are plying the global PR world with huge budgets to sow confusion – every big corporation and government is at it. As Monbiot notes towards the end of his article, people are not easily swayed by hard fact and respond better to emotional arguments that fit in with their view of the world; something that everyone from the architects of the cold war to the war on drugs, the nuclear industry to Monsato know only too well.

A large percentage of the budget thrown at all of these and more has surely gone to some huge conglomerate PR firm, whose only remit is to persuade people that the facts are too complicated for them to understand and that the behemoths behind the absence of change are the ones who will reward them for their avoidance of anything difficult – a ploy which plays into the hands of the big business, as, in times of chaos (be it physical or intellectual) people tend to aim for the biggest bruisers on the block and believe in them.

To read George Monbiot’s article in full, click here. For Barack Obama’s perspective on this, have a look at this video.

Or at least it felt good for a little while, in the wake of John McCain’s gracious concession speech and Obama’s stirring acceptance speech. Now, only 12 hours later, the internet has started to breed colonies of bile and cynicism, hatred and demagoguery, which is spreading fast and picking away at the euphoria and hope, at that sense of history being made that anyone, of whatever political persuasion, must surely have felt when they woke to the news of Obama’s victory this morning.

It seems that the honeymoon is over almost before it started. Are people so cynical, in the wake of the Blair effect that came, eventually, to be seen as nothing more than spin and puffery, that they cannot even bask in the hope Obama offers for a little while? The internet opens us up to an endless array of opinion, and can be a great agent of change, but have the spinmeisters hardened us so much that we cannot see a good thing for what it is without having to rationalize it to death?

The most interesting detail in the Obama speech by far was when, in passing, he characterised the global economy – only in passing, mind you – as being in its worst state for more than a century. This strikes me as a genuine breakthrough and although it was only one sentence, it was clearly the product of much sweat in the back rooms of the Obama campaign. It is the sort of idea, surely, of a man prepared to try to do what he has pledged to do – change the world for the better. He has seen the problems the American people and the world face

The world should be focusing on these details, on the gracious pledge of help offered by John McCain, on the positivity that Obama’s election has engendered. If we listen to the haters, the people who booed the mention of Obama during McCain’s concession speech, the cynics who wonder, bitterly, if Obama can do anything he has promised so soon after the election, the Twitterers who compare his victory to the walk Blair took to 10 Downing Street which lead inexorably to the Iraq war, surely all is lost before it has a chance to be won.

Surely now is not the time for a PR backlash. Should we not all be hoping that Obama will live up to his promises, deliver change and fail to give any traction to the poisonous prophecies of the web’s anonymous nay sayers and doom-mongers?