Elements of a possible proof: of the five members of the UN Security Council (admittedly an out-of-date group if considered as the world’s main players), the US, the UK and France all have or should have charismatic leaders adapted to the media. This is true most obviously of Barack Obama, whose personality and family captured – and still to a degree captures – the enthusiastic approval of large parts of the US and (even more) foreign media. It is also true of Nicolas Sarkozy, who since the beginning of his political career has paid huge attention to cultivating the media and his image in them – to the point of wholly reversing his country’s leadership’s traditional insistence that the media stay out of their private lives, broadly defined.

The addition of should have is to accommodate the UK’s Gordon Brown: he isn’t charismatic/media friendly, and that’s a major reason for his lack of appeal, and the lack of attention paid to his governing abilities. Peter (Lord) Mandelson gave an extended and amusing comment on this – there's no airbrushing Gordon Brown like David Cameron did. It's sometimes difficult to hairbrush Gordon Brown... Look, you know he's not a sort of TV personality. He's not sort of Terry Wogan or Des O'Connor in the way that some people see David Cameron. Gordon Brown is actually a rather more authentic figure than that ... – in the BBC1 Politics show on Sunday (31^st January). What Mandelson is doing there is one of his familiar high-wire acts: seeking to establish Brown as someone better than a TV-friendly politician: a kind of obeisance to pre-televisual values from one who, as much as any other figure in contemporary British politics, sought successfully to make New Labour friendly to the media, above all television.

Of the other two – Russia is a half-way house, as it is a very partial democracy. Vladimir Putin, the real leader, has at times projected himself – successfully – on the media: and the media’s evolution has so developed that they are largely servile. However his power and strength comes more from institutions – partly from  Russia’s Choice, the part which he nominally leads and which is a gathering of those who will support, and they hope benefit from, his power; partly from the still potent force of the secret services; and the lack of development of civil society.

China remains a party-governed state – though there may be signs that it’s grasping for a more media-charismatic leadership style – as the appearance of the deputy premier, Li Kequiang, at Davos last week might show. For the moment, though, the Party is more important – embodying, at least to the outside world, collective leadership and the rightness of the one road.

Some other leading leaders – Angela Merkel – retain support from still-powerful parties, and can enjoy some residual deference from the media, especially towards their private lives. But that may be temporary. The exception at the other extreme is Silvio Berlusconi, who has modelled his leadership and his party on media availability – indeed, on his command of the media.

Some of this isn’t new: the need, or attempts, to command or at least insert messages into the media in order to bolster ruling, or would-be ruling elites is very old: on a broad definition, Pericles’ famous funeral oration praising the democracy of Athens (in Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War) would count in this – and it was made in the fifth century BCE. What’s evident now is the continuing decline of the party and the continuing centrality of the news – and not just news – media to achieving and sustaining power: the insertion, or enfolding, of politics and political personalities in more and more spheres of the media, from cookery programmes through chat shows to conventional political programmes and coverage.