George Bush is a man of prayer. Chances are, then, he'll have been down on his knees quite a few times this week, asking God to make the pictures of his visit to Britain good ones. Remember when Dubya's da got sick in the lap of the Japanese prime minister? Or the time Neil Kinnock was doing that seaside walk with his wife, and slipped on his arse into the water?
Neither man's political career was ever quite the same afterwards. That's why George W will be looking to take home nice smiling pictures of him with the Queen, him checking out Buckingham Palace and Westminster Abbey, him being popular and much-travelled in Britain.
Then when next year's US presidential election rolls round, he'll stitch all that into his campaign video. If the protesters get to him, his opponents will use that. Which of them will be keener to use the picture of Dubya shaking hands with Prince Charles is still up for debate. Of course the American presidential election is a full year away, while our exciting campaign is roaring into its final lap. Or should that be put-putting? So faltering, in fact, you'd sometimes wonder if the media weren't in some sort of conspiracy to keep things catatonic.
Take Tuesday morning. If you'd started listening to Good Morning Ulster at 7am, you'd have had to wait a full hour and 20 minutes before you heard the first mention of an election. Well, at least our election – before that we got Arnie Schwarzenegger's swearing-in speech in full.
It was approaching 8.30am before we heard from, who was it, David Ervine or some other small-party person trying to sound optimistic in the face of impending annihilation. Zzz-zz.
Later in the day, of course, the Trimble-Robinson roaring match occurred and the tea-time TV programmers fell on it with delight. Having recorded every changing shade of David's florid face and every bantam-cock twitch of Peter's grey head, the commentators declared that the confrontation was all heat and no light. It was nothing of the sort. The clash made two things squeaky clear. One, that UUP backroom boy Stevie King – oops, that should be Dr King – Dr King has told David Trimble he must add a street-brawler dimension to his political persona, and David has done his bidding. And two, the encounter showed beyond doubt that it's all up with Ian. As Peter Robinson was leaping forward to try and take the verbal bullets for his master, the camera swung back to show us the Big Man himself, the Pentecostal gulderer who, in his prime, could bring a bullock to its knees with his roar. He was stooped, white-faced and bewildered-looking. Big Ian, bewildered? For better or worse, the baton has passed in the DUP. Take a bow, Dr Stevie – you got your picture.
The two nationalist leaders had their TV confrontation two days earlier, on the more refined Politics Show. For reasons known only to some brain-bruised producer, presenter Jim Fitzpatrick sat on a stool while Gerry Adams and Mark Durkan stood in front of him like two naughty schoolboys. No, don't tell me why they did it like that – even if the Angel Gabriel said to do it that way, it still looked daft.
Not much heat or light in this one – most of the air time was taken up with the two men interrupting each other. During the more audible intervals we learned that Gerry Adams doesn't like Alex Attwood and wouldn't vote for him, but then we knew that, and we learned that the SDLP is against electoral pacts with Sinn Féin and would rather nobody voted for them, but we knew that too.
Visually, it was hardly a contest. Adams looked relaxed and good-humoured (an extraordinary performance, given that his father was ill in hospital at the time), Durkan big-eyed and tense. Durkan is the better phrase-maker of the two, even if he needs time to craft his bon mots before giving them a public outing; this time, though, it was Adams's casual 'Mark even heckles himself' that hit home hardest.
But earlier in the week, the SDLP leader produced an unforgettable one-liner, probably the best of the campaign so far. He declared that Sinn Féin might be considered by some to be the prodigal son, but they needn't think he was going to play the part of the fatted calf. A truly clever verbal twist – although if you were an SDLP canvasser, would you want voters to be harbouring a mental image of your leader with a stick stuck through him, turning slowly on a spit?
A mean old, visually-deadly game, politics.
