Cherie Defies the 11-day Rule of Spin

Bill Clinton's image manipulators invented the 10-day rule, their estimation of the maximum time that the media would stay on the same story. If the president was still in power by the second weekend, then his enemies had lost - at least until they found a different angle of attack. Alastair Campbell also adheres to this theory, although apparently specifying 11 days, either because British reporters are less rapidly bored or because the UK is a country in which fewer things happen.

The theory was that the 10/11-day cycle existed because, while news coverage had become more furious - greater space and resources were given to any big story - it had also become faster. All addictions lead to a need to up the dose to achieve the same rush and news junkies were no exception. They soon needed another buzz. The makers of television soap operas describe the same phenomenon: the arc of any particular storyline can be sustained for fewer episodes than in the past.

So, regardless of which documents Cherie Blair may have seen, she's certainly torn up the spin doctor's handbook. Faced with the first failure of the 11-day rule, Alastair Campbell, during the 14th and 15th days of the saga this weekend, will be forced to consider the ways in which the story might be ended. The wisdom of the Clinton White House was that a media feeding frenzy was always finished by one of two things: a distraction or a lancing.

The latter medical metaphor refers to an occurrence - a resignation, a confession, an apology - which finally explodes the pus of publicity and removes the throb of public concern. In the alternative outcome, a more recent big event - the frequent use of the word news shouldn't dull us to its roots in the idea of novelty and freshness - distracts journalists and the public from the first one. So, for example, the Angus Deayton story was lanced by his sacking, but the Paul Burrell coverage, though still full of unburst boils, happened to be interrupted by the Cherie Blair story.

It's clear that Spin-doctor Campbell was wielding his lance this week when the prime minister's wife made her emotional public statement. But, even after that operation, media consultants could still feel heat and poison in the spot. The problem for Dr Campbell now is that wives can't resign or be sacked, and so the only way in which the septic flow might now be surgically released would be the arrest of one of the participants (highly improbable, on the available evidence) or some other event which placed restrictions on reporting.

Distraction, then, is a more plausible escape hatch. A Clinton spin doctor once told me that, when the president was in media trouble, you were horrified to find yourself becoming "a traitor to your nation in your dreams": thinking that it might be useful if something huge and terrible were to happen. Does Tony Blair now have to fight such fantasies?

Admittedly, at times when the Lewinsky fuss refused to blow, Clinton became impatient of waiting for a diversion and manufactured a distraction: usually by bombing Saddam Hussein. It's an American convention that journalists and opposition politicians reduce their abuse when the leader is at war. The David Mamet movie Wag The Dog - taking its title from the saying that, if a dog won't wag its tail, the tail must wag the dog - might be a smart booking for the Chequers cinema.

But, even in the unlikely event that Blair and Campbell were cynical enough to hope for a military solution to their first lady's problems, Britain doesn't have the same tradition of reticence at tin-hat time. Margaret Thatcher was removed by her party and abandoned by the press even as the Gulf war was being planned.

A perhaps more comforting comparison for the Blairs is with another high-profile British woman whose position very recently seemed threatened by publicity which questioned her involvement in legal proceedings. Just a month ago, the royal family seemed, from the headlines, on the brink of ruin: the monarch compromised, the heir scared of what might be said next by the friends and enemies of the butler Paul Burrell.

The only possibility of a lancing was a press conference by Elizabeth II or a revolution, neither of which was likely. But the Windsors were saved by a distraction. Cherie and Peter Foster have so claimed the airwaves that even the collapse of a second trial involving a royal butler, Harold Brown, has been quickly forgotten.

It's horribly possible that Osama bin Laden or George Bush will come through for Cherie as she came through for the Queen. But, in the end, the Blairs' best hope is that the media will simply flog the story to death by overcoverage. If the Sunday papers fall on to the Downing Street mat fat with more pieces on Cherie, it might at first seem catastrophic but, unless the killer fact is bedded somewhere in the text, further heavy press attention might usefully induce fatigue.

The 11-day rule may be dead, but it surely can't have been replaced by journalistic infinity. If the record gets past 18 days, however, then Tony Blair might also be rewriting the seven-year rule, this being the minimum term served by recent British prime ministers. If no distraction comes, there must be a lancing somewhere.