Best of British

The British tabloid press has taken a pasting in the last few weeks, as it has tried to find new angles for covering the terminal demise of its biggest reality star Jade Goody. Goody's marriage last weekend to her on-off ex-jailbird fiancee Jack Tweed, earned her a reputed £700,000 from OK magazine.

The money will be placed in trust for her children. Almost incidentially, both her illness and the determined, almost superhuman efforts made by Goody and her support team to 'earn' the money for her two young sons future, has successfully resulted in her media-driven rehabilitation from self confessed Big Brother racist to tragic heroine.

The undignified media scrum that has ensued could be construed as distasteful, even intrusive but Goody herself has invited and welcomed the media coverage of her plight, in the hope that her story, will act as a warning for others.

Her media saavy in 'working' with the press, aided by the King of PR, agent Max Clifford and her obvious courage in facing up to the horror of the cervial cancer, which will claim her life, has been attributed to raising record levels of enquiries and general awareness from young women who would have previously disregarded cervial cancer as being something that happened to someone else.

Today's announcement of the death of Conservative Leader David Cameron's six-year old severely disabled son Ivan, has displayed another side of the press. As my Dad has always said, the loss of a child is the one great sorrow which no parent should ever have to endure, least of all in the full glare of the media.

Today's coverage was restrained, a tone underscored by a simple, but poignant tribute from Labour Leader Gordon Brown, who least we should forget suffered the loss of his daughter Jennifer aged only 10 days old. It contrasted sharply with media coverage suffered by John Travolta and his family, following the sudden death by seizure of their son Jett.

The shocking subsequent arrest of 3 people on extortion charges, alledgedly relating to a plot to sell a photograph of the dying Jett taken in the ambulance on the way to the hospital, has shown that the British press are not always the big bad wolves they are portrayed to be.

There is, thankfully a threashold of respect and decency, over which they will not trepass.