The model, the Prime Minister's wife - and a tabloid paper

Recognising that she is likely to be exploited, Caplin has very sensibly joined the dance

I was recently asked to review the worst book that has ever been written. A message was left on my answering machine by someone from the features department of the Daily Mail, who wondered whether I would like to take a look at the first book by Sophie Dahl.

This was slightly unusual. I have reviewed for the Mail's rather good books pages and, on one occasion, I joined a team of writers attending The Vagina Monologues (the feature never appeared on account of the word "vagina" causing problems, apparently) but it is fair to say that I am not one of their regulars.

When I rang back, I was told that the view in the Mail office was that Dahl's book was something of a turkey. In fact, said the man in features, one of the headlines covering it posed the question: "Is this the worst book ever written?" I asked where the headline had appeared. There was a moment of hesitation. "Actually, that was the headline we were planning to use over the piece we were hoping you would write for us," came the reply.

Apart from being mildly insulted at the assumption that I was the kind of tart who would trash a book to order, I took no further interest in the matter until the following weekend when I noticed that an extract from the book in question, fulsomely described as "charming and romantic", was appearing in the stablemate of the very newspaper that had considered it one of the worst books ever written, The Mail on Sunday.

What did it all mean? There was nothing new in one newspaper gushing over a celebrity while another paper sneers at her, or even in the same newspaper changing its position every few weeks or so, but this approach – discrediting and praising someone at the same time – added a new twist to the old game.

It seemed like a media version of one of those dysfunctional, sado-masochistic relationships in which desire can only be kindled by humiliation. Yet that, it seems, is the way it goes in today's world of celebrity journalism.

This weekend the career of Cherie Blair's friend Carole Caplin took a new and exciting direction when her new column for The Mail on Sunday was launched. Caplin appeared reclining above the front-page headline, and in a sultry backless dress on the front of the magazine. A mind-boggling eleven pages were devoted to a series of photographs of Caplin – waving her legs in the air for a yoga shot, her favourite press shots and so on – accompanied by a sympathetic profile with the "tiny, lively and surprisingly bubbly" star herself.

After ten years of silence, Caplin had "finally decided to speak out" and, sure enough, there it all was – the friendship with the Blairs, how she had posed topless in order to get her own back on a disapproving boyfriend, her career as a lifestyle coach, the fantastic sex she has with her controversial boyfriend Peter Foster, and of course the press persecution of her and her mother which had upset her so much that she had a miscarriage in December.

To someone unversed in the ways of celebrity journalism, there is an odd fact at the heart of all this: the very newspaper which, a month or two ago, had published those stories about mad, re-birthing ceremonies with the Blairs and had gleefully described Caplin as a "former topless model", driving her, it is implied, to lose her baby, are, amazingly, her new champions and employers. In the way of these things, Caplin will doubtless be the subject of attacks from other newspapers this week, particularly after a documentary called The Conman, His Lover and the Prime Minister's Wife is broadcast by the BBC on Thursday, but it seems to me that she is something of a heroine of the new style of journalism.

Recognising that she is likely to be exploited by those around her – the documentary, by a former friend, was allegedly being filmed under the title "My Friend Carole in the Eye of the Storm" – and that truth in a modern tabloid is simply what the newspaper wants to be true that day, she has very sensibly joined the dance.

She has seen that the facts of her life as presented to readers, whether it be of re-birthing or miscarriages, soft porn or beautiful sex, are likely to have only a glancing relationship to reality and, having found herself a player in the celebrity soap opera, she has decided that it might be worthwhile to write a few of her own lines and be paid for it.

It is such a clever, subtle response that many will want to hire her as a lifestyle coach immediately. The rest of us will treasure her description of the journalists and others who have traduced her good name as people who "just went out and had their cake and ate it, then vomited it up and ate it again".

A mad hatter's tea party for exhibitionist bulimics – as an image for the nature of celebrity journalism, it is almost perfect.

terblacker@aol.com