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Thursday, this week, was not the country’s proudest day, that much is certain. First, tens of thousands of Daily Express readers’ hearts were broken when it was announced that Diana was killed mundanely by a drunken French dickhead and not offed thrillingly by crack MI6 assassins under the orders of Prince Philip. Then we were told that our post offices – 2,500 of them – are to be culled like so many poor unfortunate badgers.

And then, despite the planet sweating like George Bush at a spelling competition, the Government announced that both Gatwick and Stansted airports are to get new runways. And then the Government announced that moody arms deals and ‘the national interest’ with Saudi Arabia trumped bribery investigations and human rights. You know, trivial stuff like that. After another body was identified in Ipswich, the announcement that Tony Blair was questioned by police as part of a corruption investigation – the first Prime Minister in history to be so – was the crowning turd on a big stinking pile of them.

What a shining beacon we must be to the rest of the world. Or, ‘We’d be interested in hearing your experience, including how it applies to Lord Levy,’ as Vladimir Putin put it earlier this year – after the Prime Minister’s fund raiser had been arrested in connection with the cash-for-peerages scandal – when Putin was questioned by British journalists about corruption in the former Soviet Union. Imagine being lectured on ethics by the Butcher of Grozny. It’s like being told by Gary Glitter that you’re hugging your niece too tightly.

‘A good day to bury bad news!’ screeched countless armchair conspiracy theorists when it was announced that Blair had been helping the police with their inquiries. And who can really blame them. After ten years of dossiers, initiatives, war, evasion, obfuscation and downright lies, cynicism must be hard-wired into the psyches of most of the British public.

That said, if New Labour’s notorious news managers did try to inhume the story under the weight of dead princesses, prostitutes and post offices, they didn’t do a very good job. Their infamous powers of controlling the news are clearly fading. The second it was announced, ‘Blair questioned by police’ went in at number one with a bullet on the news channels and stayed there.

You can gain a measure of a) the contempt in which the Government holds the public and b) how terrified they are of the story gaining greater currency, by reading how the Prime Minister’s Official Spokesman (PMOS) briefed journalists on the matter. Take…

Asked if the police were in uniform, the PMOS replied that he was not getting into details, and as he was not at the interview, he did not know.

..and…

Asked if the police had come in through the front door, the PMOS said he did not know which door they had entered through.

The lack of specifics prevented journalists from painting too evocative a picture. It stopped news stories being filed along the lines of ‘Uniformed police knocked at the famous black door of Number 10 Downing Street today as they questioned the Prime Minister as part of their ongoing corruption investigation’. As if ‘plain clothed policemen slipped in through the back door of Number 10 Downing Street today…’ is any more edifying.

How about this:

Asked whether it had been No10 or the police who had arranged the interview, the PMOS said that he was not getting into the processology at all.

Processology. We’ve never heard of it either. When in a corner, this lot just make it up. Try it the next time the bank manager asks why you’re massively overdrawn: ‘Well, you see, it’s all down to the ithinkyouareadickheadology.’ Chances are he won’t nod sleepily and let it slide like the lazy, frightened-for-their-prestige and compliant journalists present at the press briefing must have done.

(Read the briefing in all its inability-to-answer-a-straight-question glory here).

And on it went…

Put that if the interview had been arranged by No10, and given that today was the day of the Diana report, the PMOS replied that categorically, that was not a factor at all and there was no linkage to other events. In terms of the process, the PMOS said he was not getting into it.

…and…

Asked if this had been a window in the Prime Minister’s diary which had been made available to the police, the PMOS said again that he was not getting into the processology, but repeated that there was categorically no linkage to any other events that were taking place today.

Why avoid discussing the ‘processology’ and ‘getting into’ the ‘process’? The rest of us, or so we’re told, have nothing to fear if we’ve nothing to hide. It’s something of a mantra chanted by a government wishing to record the minutiae of our everyday lives on some database or other. Going by the level of concealment going on here, Tony must be shitting bricks. Whether it was the case or not, all this slippery cobblers feeds the impression that the Prime Minister conveniently found a date in his diary to entertain the Met’s finest when the news was full of East Anglian serial killers and royal car crash conspiracies.

It’s like having a partner who splashes her or himself with perfume or aftershave in order to cover the stink of their seedy dalliances. If your nearest and dearest came home with their pockets stuffed with cash but were evasive and shifty about how they’d got it and what they’d given in return, you’d be thinking about putting ‘Lonely This Christmas’ on the stereo. The fact that Blair hasn’t been tarred and feathered and thrown in the Thames suggests we’re happy to tolerate it from our Prime Ministers.

(First published in this week’s The Friday Thing.)