The television moment that could help change the future of Britain

It strongly suggests there are limits to the power of a deeply hostile press, which could influence the outcome of a euro vote

If nothing else, the past two weeks have underlined the Power of the Press. Newspapers and not politicians drove this drama. It's hard, on the face of it, to recall a period when it has been clearer that the media can leave opposition politicians standing when it comes to making life a misery for a head of government and those around him. Which prompts an obvious conclusion. If the press can perform like this on a story whose details are hard to follow, which has little or no impact on the lives of its readers, and which is free of truly ideological content, what would happen if it was an issue which some of the most powerful papers in the land actually cared about? The single currency, for example? How can Tony Blair even think about launching a euro referendum now?

And yet that may be precisely to misunderstand the significance of the climax in the now hugely dysfunctional relationship between Number 10 and some newspapers which was reached on Tuesday night. As a coup de théâtre Cherie Blair's statement was pretty well without a parallel. It will be – and already has been – endlessly analysed, dissected, deconstructed. Repeated endlessly on every network, it will figure in reviews of 2002, Christmas quizzes, quotes of the year, Have I Got News For You, Roy Bremner, till we – and no doubt Mrs Blair herself – are heartily sick of it. And yet the danger in all this is not of overestimating its importance, but of missing the point altogether. For this was more than just showbiz, though there were certainly elements of that. It may yet prove to be a moment of fundamental importance to modern British politics.

Whatever the hard questions left unanswered by the content of Mrs Blair's statement – and there are several – it served its purpose. It wasn't so much that she attacked her press tormentors head on. She didn't. There wasn't even an acid aside about them. What she did was to appeal over their heads, and with spectacular success, to a live television audience. She persuasively invited the public to consider the story on her terms rather than theirs. And in doing so, I suspect, made even unsympathetic viewers wonder whether the press coverage had really been proportionate to the offence – in the process transforming the climate in which the story will rumble on.

It may seem fanciful, wacky even, to draw lessons from this event for what still promises to be the most important decision the Blair government will take in this parliament. But it strongly suggests that there are limits to the power of a deeply hostile press to influence its outcome. That wasn't how the Blair administration used to see it. It was a given for much of the first term, for example, that because of the Daily Mail's hostility to euro-entry it wouldn't be possible to win a referendum without the support of the Murdoch press, or at least The Sun. But quite a lot has changed since then, not all of it this week.

On Tuesday, as the Cheriegate story was trundling ominously like a rollercoaster towards its perilous peak, the Foreign Office made an announcement of signal importance. It was that Britain would allow from 2004 – a good deal sooner than, say, Germany – the same rights of free movement to citizens of the 10 countries about to join the EU as to those in the existing members. In other words Britain's borders would now for the first time be wholly open to immigrant workers from Eastern Europe. While anti-immigration lobbyists have predictably reacted in hostile fashion, the move has been enthusiastically supported by both the CBI and the TUC, both of whom are a little more sensitive to the realities of labour markets.

What's interesting about this is not that it has caused a great fuss but that it hasn't. Especially since it comes on the eve of the European summit which will seal enlargement of the EU. And which, if Britain, among other countries, gets its way, will finally agree the date for Turkey to begin the negotiations on accession which it would be emphatically in the interests of Europe and the wider world to grant her. It's true that beside six pages on the Cherie affair, the Daily Mail found room for a prominent – and pretty balanced – story about the announcement on movement of labour yesterday on page 10. But it did not even figure in Prime Minister's Questions yesterday, Iain Duncan Smith still preferring to focus on the Cherie affair.

The decisions which will be taken in Copenhagen this weekend are incalculably more important to the ordinary lives of Britons than anything which flows from Mrs Blair's unwise, even reckless, entanglement with Peter Foster. And the evidence suggests that if European issues were getting more of the attention they deserve, it might be possible to have a rather saner debate on them than anyone might have imagined until recently. Reaction to Tony Blair's exceptionally pro-European speech last month – in which he went out of his way, among many other things, to praise the role of a strong Commission – was strangely muted. So was that to Valery Giscard D'Estaing's recent interim blueprint, complete with increased majority voting and a European constitution, for what the European Convention might come up with next year, compared with the outcry that might have provoked five years ago.

The question is not so much whether, in the context of a euro referendum, that sane debate can be carried out in the columns of an implacably hostile press. Rather, the question is whether it needs to be. For what Tuesday demonstrated was actually not so much the power of the press as that of television. And the more hysterical the press coverage in a euro referendum, the more people are likely to turn to television, which anyway will be forced to provide fair coverage to both sides, largely unmediated by editorial opinion.

This isn't at all to deny that the Blairs may have suffered real and lasting damage from the past two weeks (how much the polls may quickly show), much less to deny that Mrs Blair unnecessarily left the press with a pretty wide opening. Indeed the story won't be over if there are yet more disclosures. Nor is there much to say for the paranoiac claim that the euro has really been the primary target of the press's onslaught. If that were so, the pro-euro Mirror would hardly have joined the fray with such enthusiasm. And of course there are many other factors which could yet stop Mr Blair achieving his ambition of euro entry – not least the possible opposition of his Chancellor.

But if Mrs Blair's appearance on television on Tuesday night, from a far from unassailable position, can help to turn round a story like this, there must be lessons for elected politicians arguing a case they passionately believe in. No, the anti-Blair press would not be humbled by a Blair victory on the euro. And even if it was going to be, it would be an insane reason for calling a referendum. But Mrs Blair's moment on Tuesday night is a reminder that they are not the only show in town.

d.macintyre@independent.co.uk