Celebrity News:

Michael Parkinson long ago became rather too starry himself, so it was hard to tell, watching one of his final shows on Saturday, quite who the real celebrity was.

It’s coincidence I’m sure (he is 72, after all) but Parky’s exit is perfectly timed, for the celebrity chat show is pretty much dead. Because even though the desire to be famous has never been greater, the respect for celebrity has never been lower.

One of the most interesting revelations from the teenagers who edited times2 last Monday was that they have no celebrity role models. When you look at celebrity magazines, from Hello! and OK!, which now look ludicrously old fashioned, through to Heat, Grazia, Closer and the newly-launched First, you can see why. They are dedicated to proving that celebrities have feet of clay. Why should anyone adopt as a role model someone they know to be on drugs, or anorexic, or deranged (or often, all three?) And why would anyone want to watch a fawning interview with them when they can chuckle instead at Heat’s ring of shame, in which unfortunate celebrities’ offending body parts (an ugly little toe, a spare tyre, a pimple) are circled in red?

We may think we mourn the days when stars really were stars - when Rita Hayworth and Katharine Hepburn were revered, when only a handful of Hollywood insiders knew that Rock Hudson was gay and Alan Ladd shorter than his leading ladies - but, from the moment we elevated them, we also began the task of taking them apart.

It started with the Hollywood gossip columns of Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons in the 1930s and reached its apogee in the form of the modern-day celebrity interview. Those who excel at it - The Times’s own Ginny Dougary is one of its finest exponents - manage to accomplish the difficult feat of paying genuine homage to the star’s accomplishments while at the same time exposing their flaws. The aim is to paint a truthful portrait of a real person rather than a hagiographic air-brushed image; to answer the question that anyone who has ever met anyone famous is always asked afterwards: "But what were they really like?"

I’ve interviewed only a few celebrities in my time but the ones I remember are the ones who were unpleasant: Frank Bruno (vicious), Phil Collins (rude), Bob Geldof (vicious and rude, with a hefty dollop of contempt thrown in).

But when people ask breathlessly, what were they really like, the unpleasant stuff is what they really want to hear, the comforting reassurance that being famous does not equate to being good, or happy. Schadenfreude seems to be the dominant emotion of our times.

It is a sign of how things change that when I interviewed those three, in the late Eighties and early Nineties, I didn’t reveal their nastiness in print. It simply wasn’t done. The same principle ensured that the royal ratpack, who all knew that Diana was having affairs, didn’t write about it. But life moves on. We no longer see why we should automatically respect someone simply because they are famous, just as we realise too that our elders may not be our betters, that teachers can be wrong and that governments sometimes lie.

In addition, technology - mobile phones, 24-hour news, CCTV and especially the internet - has proved a great leveller. The last decade has seen an extraordinary communications revolution and one consequence is that it is simply not possible to keep things secret any more. The more scandal we hear, the less shockable we become, and so the old-fashioned code, which stated that somehow the public should be protected from learning about a public figure’s bad behaviour, has disappeared.

You won’t hear many scandalous revelations around a chattering class dinner table these days; no secret on the scale of Edward and Mrs Simpson would survive longer than a few weeks. Any that you do hear tend to relate to politics, pretty much the last bastion of secrecy, but doomed in the end to be revealed whether out of revenge (an MP scorned) or vanity (an MP seduced) or ineptitude (an MP soliciting for funds from a stooge).

For this reason the most intriguing inter-viewees these days are politicians, not celebrities. We are not interested in Parky’s gentle probing while stars plug their latest film or record, or their publicity people’s ludicrous demands for lists of questions in advance and insistence that personal topics be avoided. We have realised we will not learn much about them that way; instead, why not, say, dump them in the jungle and watch for the survival of the fittest.

Indeed, it is only thanks to my decision to forgo Monday night’s I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here! that I discovered, by chance almost, that in fact there is still one true celebrity in Britain. The BBC’s riveting documentary Monarchyrevealed someone who can still inspire awe in everyone, from the humblest to the most powerful: the Queen.

There was the photographer Annie Liebowitz - pretty regal herself, turning up at Buck-ingham Palace with no fewer than 11 assistants for the royal photoshoot, a sensible precaution, as it turned out, because the Queen was running late and was certainly not going to go into extra time - who exited saying wonderingly: "I thought she was great. I liked the fact that she was feisty. Just great."

There was the unnamed American man in Virginia who said, with feeling, that he thought the Queen must have "the toughest job in the world", having to account for every minute of her day.

And then there was George W. Bush, the President of the United States, rendered for the first (and quite probably the last) time enchantingly endearing as he spoke, like a little boy, of how the Queen was "like a mom" and how her visit to the White House was the only time he had declared a dinner to be white tie: "I’m a pretty informal kinda guy but she is the Queen of England".

Why has her star quality endured? Well, she has consistently stuck to first principles: duty, country, family, ranked in the same order of importance as when she made her first visit to the US, 50 years ago. But there is another reason that occurs to me, and it is this: she has never given an interview.

It has to be José

I see from reading the sports pages that commentators who know far more than me about football do not believe José Mourinho should be the next England manager. They make much of the fact that the game needs to be improved at grassroots level, and that José is not the man for that. We don’t need a charismatic figurehead, they argue. I disagree. A great leader can inspire great performances and let’s face it, when was the last time England produced one of those? Anyone lucky enough to have had an inspirational teacher or boss will know what I mean. Their self-confidence is catching; it follows that if they believe you can do it, you will do it, producing from somewhere deep inside you talent and energy you never knew you had.

The English have become rather too cynical and over fond of irony. We’d rather be thought cool than risk looking as though we’re trying too hard. We’ve forgotten the value of passion and sincerity and sheer bloody-minded determination. The Special One hasn’t, though - so let’s get him back.

In the Brown stuff

On the subject of leadership, I’m told by those who met him that Bill Clinton had the mesmeric quality of making you feel that you were the only person in the room he cared about. Tony Blair meanwhile reduced clever men and women to slavering sycophancy by the simple yet effective technique of telling them how brilliant they were. If they’d written a book it would be on the desk when they came to see him, and he would remark on their intellectual rigour and the acuity of their insight, thus enslaving them.

The pity of Gordon Brown is that he had hoped that his stated values of graft, honesty and thrift would compensate for his perceived lack of charisma. But his cosmetically enhanced, white-teethed grimace is a poor substitute as he navigates his way through yet another crisis - sleaze, this week. And I can’t help noticing that once again his nails appear to be receding to the quick.