• We live in an age of personality and of “the personality”. It is an age where fame is an objective not a resultant, where every facet of a personality is pored over for column inches and TV sound bites. In times past scientists could become world famous for their discoveries, adventurers for their feats of daring. But now we live in an age of media creation and public complicity where walking-talking personality vacuums - Posh-and-Becks etc - are made to appear interesting and the interesting are disappeared. 
• This age of personality has grown up as the capacity of the media to propel figures at us through newspapers, films, TV and radio, and the Internet has expanded at breakneck speed.
• Politicians, often famous, occasionally infamous, have been caught-up in this development both out of necessity and by design and in so doing politicians have brought politics into the age of personality with them.
• Despite the great political personalities of previous eras: Gladtone, Disraeli, Lloyd George, Churchill, Bevan, Barbara Castle, Enoch Powell, I think the watershed event in the burgeoning relationship between politicians and the media (and hence the real dawn of the age of personality in politics) was the election of Margaret Thatcher to the Conservative party leadership in 1975.
• The media was presented with a figure of undeniable personality, a locus around which it could trace a renewed interest in politics, after the rather grey years of Wilson and Heath, while politicians and their advisors became more and more interested in the media and its capacity to get them and their messages to a wider and wider audience.
• Result? Politicians began to supplant film stars as the most famous people on the planet. Some even found it possible to move from one field to the other: Reagan – known (?!) as an actor (in)famous as a politician.
• Television and increasingly the print media are impatient forms of communication. Lengthy disquisitions on the state of the economy or the education system are not what the media want. As time has passed brevity has become the buzzword: explaining Thatcher or Reagan, or in more recent times explaining Blair or Clinton, has become easier then explaining the policies associated with them.
• Tony Benn has often repeated the assertion that politics is about policies not personalities. In the modern world this is both ironic - few politicians have wielded their personality so well and so successfully as he - and, I’m afraid, wrong.
• Posh-and-Becks have had to make way for Tony and Cherie as Mr Blair has become only slightly less ubiquitous than Carol Vorderman. Personality tag lines have been used as journalistic shorthand: Margaret Thatcher became the Iron Lady, Ronald Reagan the Great Communicator, and Bill Clinton, in rather less exultant (although more accurate) fashion, has become Slick Willy and the Great Fornicator.
• Politicians come shrink-rapped with special advisors, press secretaries and spin-doctors. The goal of these somewhat shadowy individuals is to “get the message across” but the message is becoming more and more subsumed within given political personalities. And if the personality and the image aren’t right the message is likely to suffer. Look at Robin Cook.
• If having the right message is important for political success, having the right image in this age of personality is vital. In British politics the Tory party was quickest off the mark and Margaret Thatcher the first beneficiary: in the dawning age of personality they could rebuild her; they had the technology to make the first bionic PM. The hair was changed, the clothes and make-up were tweaked, the voice ratcheted down an octave. Interviews about life as a grocer’s daughter in Grantham abounded. The contents of her wardrobe and her freezer became matters of public record, as did her dress sizes, her taste in curtains and wallpaper and her thoughts on combining motherhood and a career.
• As the personality of Margaret Thatcher waxed so did the fortunes of her party; as that of her Labour counterpart, Michael Foot, waned so did the fortunes of his party. During his three years as leader Michael Foot was presented as the Worzel Gummidge of British politics. The age of personality was in the process of claiming the first of many scalps. His thick glasses, long white hair and walking stick and his penchant for crumpled suits and donkey jackets defined Foot’s personality, his public persona. In debate and in his writings Foot could be utterly devastating, but in the politics of personality Foot was old and out-of-touch, incapable of appealing across demographic and class divisions; his party suffered in its own right and by association with its leader. 
• The personality disaster of Michael Foot should have been more than enough for any political party, but Labour hadn’t quite finished sacrificing itself on the alter of personality politics. With the election of Neil Kinnock Labour went part way to learning the lessons of its recent history – the need to modernise the party. But as Kinnock removed some of Labour’s quainter hostages to fortune (unilateral nuclear disarmament, wholesale re-nationalisation) from the media’s sights it soon fixed upon another target. Kinnock’s image was changed and his personality focused upon as Labour sought to play up the virtues of its new leader. The ‘Bobby Charlton’ hair was dispatched along with the T&G tie. Dark suits and regimental ties were used to impart gravitas and respectability. He was shown coaching his son’s rugby team in order to display sporting vigour. To accentuate his humble roots he famously became the “first Kinnock in a thousand generations” to go to university (as well as, on this evidence, being the first man to trace his ancestry back to before the last ice age!). 
• But as Labour woke-up to the news of politics in the age of personality, so the media decided to kill the messenger. Despite Labour’s best efforts Kinnock was seen as “that Welsh windbag” and, as Denis Healy remarked in 1992, “because of (his) physical appearance on TV a lot of people, especially women, did not think he would make a prime minister”. Or, as an acquaintance of mine once put it "I wouldn't vote for Kinnock for the same reason I wouldn't buy Radion" (Radion comes in a bright orange box, Kinnock had ginger hair – what more does one need to say?) 
• Following the death of John Smith in 1994 the Labour party acquired the apotheosis of political leadership in the age of personality - Tony Blair. Blair was everything that John Major wasn't and that Margaret Thatcher hadn't been. Thatcher may have had a knack for embodying our prejudices and aspirations, but Blair came complete with stigmata. In the sensitive 90's Blair could feel our pain and many of us loved him for it. He seemed intent on leaving politics behind and wholly embracing the age of personality. Major had succeeded in projecting his everyman persona in 1992, but he couldn't repeat the trick in '97 - or at least the media wouldn't let him. Media attraction had deserted Major. Blair didn’t need to be everyman: he could be all men (and at all times)!
• Politics in the age of personality can be vicious to those no longer in favour: either through media caprice or because of personal failing. Major suffered from the former; many more have suffered from the latter. Although it is not unheard of for politicians to survive a personal mauling by the press (Jeffrey Archer has risen from the dead more times than Dracula) it is unusual. Cecil Parkinson had the most promising of political careers ended when an affair, and child, with his secretary Sara Keays became the stuff of tabloid headlines – a fall from grace made all the more humiliating by a brief return as party chairman and conference warm-up act to William Hague in 1998. More recently Robin Cook was well able to survive the news that he had informed his wife of his intention to divorce her by fax. But Ron Davies saw a serious lapse of judgement on Clapham Common turn into a terminal lapse of political fortunes – although one wonders if becoming Welsh first minister might not have been as bad! (It is interesting to muse how Gladstone, with his penchant for "saving" members of London's prostitute community, would have fared in the age of personality.)
• As the media has become more and more interested in the personalities of politics there has been less and less time for, or interest in, covering the policies. For much of her time as PM Margaret Thatcher managed to ride both horses. An indelible part of her public persona was the conviction politician who could express her policy intentions clearly and concisely – just the way an impatient media likes them. But while this combination arguably carried Thatcher to victory after victory, it would ultimately lead to her demise as hubris (the poll tax and rampant euro-scepticism) overtook her and the age of personality claimed another victim. Blair attempted to solve this conundrum by combining the policy with the personality while eschewing the political. He sought to be associated with all the major policy initiatives of his government while reciting the third way mantra of the need to move beyond the old left-right dichotomy. In the early days this wholesale commitment to the age of personality brought success after success: at a stroke “education, education, education” would improve, he had "24 hours to save the NHS", the blight of unemployment would be lifted from the land. Tony Blair, as the personal embodiment of New Labour, was the national panacea. The media were in thrall and the opposition couldn’t catch up because, in the age of personality, where the media is the referee in the zero-sum game of momentum acquisition, New Labour was winning. 
• While it may be the case that there are no permanent friends or perpetual enemies in politics, it is certainly true that in the age of personality politics offers up no constant media favourites. Blair's cult of personality has rather lost its lustre of late. The Sun, that most famous of New Labour converts, appears to have had enough of Saint Tony for the moment, and The Mail's support was always predicated on its own agenda of rage. Media whim has resurrected William Hague's "dead parrot" and offered him momentum; New Labour's ideological fig leaf, The Third Way, has withered under media gaze.
• Consider who the genuine personalities are in the Cabinet today. Blair, Brown, Mowlam, Mandelson, Prescott. The rest are faceless automatrons. The same is true on the Conservative bench. Hague? Widdecombe? Portillo? Yes, but the rest? Not. And what of the others? Charles Kennedy’s makeover from TV personality to serious politician is underway – how successfully it remains to be seen. 
• If I appear a little negative about politics in the age of personality, the news is not all bad. The mass media may have brought us the age of personality, but it is up to us what we do with it. In this new age the media can bring us a war live on TV and break important news around the world in seconds. In many ways we are a more open society with the tools to be better informed now than at any time in our history. On present evidence the age of personality has gone some way towards trivialising politics. But if we are willing to engage with it rather than merely react to it, we will have found another plane on which to explore and shape our politics: the age of personality can make policies and ideas easier to transmit, rather than just easier to camouflage. In a (relatively) open society where we can engage and disengage with the political scene at will, we have only ourselves to blame when we elect politicians because of winning smiles or easy manners. Perhaps we should learn the lessons that the Women's Institute seems eager to teach us.