Britain’s Got Talent star Susan Boyle has now left the Priory, where she ended up last weekend after displaying “erratic” behaviour. The police were called following an incident at her hotel; she was taken to the clinic shortly afterwards where she was treated for “exhaustion”. It seemed that Boyle, 48, who has learning difficulties that were caused when she was deprived of oxygen during birth, had finally cracked.

Her trajectory, as everyone knows, was extraordinary: one moment a lonely, homely spinster from a Scottish village, who’d never had a job and spent years looking after her elderly mother; the next, a massive global hit: millions of views on YouTube, championed by Oprah Winfrey and Demi Moore, stalked by the world’s media. There has never been a plainer example of “ordinary” people projecting their “ordinary” desires onto someone who is perhaps even more “ordinary” than they are - the kind of people whom no one looks at twice in the street.

For them, Boyle was an especial heroine but her appeal was broad: she reminded people of fairy tales, of miraculous transformations, of parables about the meek: suddenly, we could all see beneath the larval exterior to the bee-yoo-tiful wings beating underneath. I cried when I first watched her on YouTube. Boyle, who never asked to embody anything, spoke to a very deep, inchoate longing in people which I suppose, sappily enough, is to do with truth, perseverance, inner beauty and redemption through art.

And then, inevitably, it all went wrong. Someone decided that a good nickname for Boyle was “the hairy angel”, as though she were a Victorian freakshow exhibit instead of a woman who, like millions of others in this country, doesn’t much bother with tweezers and is perhaps a stranger to the Hollywood wax. Over a few short weeks - Boyle’s first appearance on BGT was on April 11 - the public, in the public’s strange and revolting tricoteuses-like way, decided they’d had their fun and it was now time to give her a good kicking.

Why? Oh, you know. Because she didn’t seem grateful or ’umble enough, because she wiggled her hips, because it was Tuesday . . . the usual. Because they could.

Boyle’s public unravelling started after Piers Morgan, one of the show’s judges, on whom she appears to have developed a crush, praised someone else’s vocal performance. It ended – for now – with the Priory. This led to everyone pointing fingers at evil television producers, who should never have “allowed” an ordinary person to go on TV, despite the show’s entire raison d’être being to find talent among ordinariness.

I’m no more comfortable than anybody else with the sight of someone falling apart in public, whether they’re Boyle or in the Big Brother house, but, frankly, those people will always find a way to sate their ambition which is To Be Famous. The ambition may be pitifully naive, but who are we to say, “Sorry, you can’t. You’re banned. You’re too mad/fragile/weird.”

Let’s be honest: the deification and then vilification of Boyle were both carried out by the public - a public increasingly keen on mass bullying. The internet has changed everything and that includes the nature of fame. Unfortunately, those who wish to be famous haven’t quite picked up on this: they still believe that only a couple of mean gossip columnists and intrusive photographers can harm or upset them: tomorrow’s chip wrappers.

Actually, no: not any more. Even our nastiest tabloids’ most vitriolic bile is a caress compared with the stuff that exists online. As for chip wrappers: on the internet, the insults, the abuse, the obscenities are there, a mouse-click away, for eternity.

I’m not suggesting that Boyle sat in her hotel room googling herself, although it isn’t outside the realms of possibility: she is exactly the kind of ninny (I mean that nicely) who would think cheers and claps meant everyone liked you and who thought she would combat her homesick-ness by having a little look at what people were saying, just to cheer herself up.

It wouldn’t have worked. Social networking sites were awash with otherwise apparently nice people making incredibly personal remarks about her appearance and less nice people making unfunny jokes about the kind of sex (brutal, humiliating) that would best suit the virgin Boyle.

There were whole discussions on other websites - thousands of them - about how “weird” she was, about “hating that bitch” and so on. What is striking is the casual breezy tone: say something appalling about a fragile human being in one sentence, tweeting about your supper the next. Casual contempt and bile, dished out cheerfully by complete strangers who, if you didn’t know better, you might easily mistake for violent schizophrenics.

That’s what has changed. There is no longer any distance between “fans” and famous people. They’re right there, in your face - millions of little claws waiting to pull you apart and share out the entrails within seconds of you displeasing them - displeasure that is as likely to be provoked by your dress, or your facial expression, as it is by you making some sort of contentious or provocative pronouncement. Fame is now subject to attack by anyone who has access to a computer. That’s a lot of meanness. I remember how mad everyone thought Michael Jackson was for living in isolation at his ranch, Neverland. Increasingly, total isolation seems to be the only way to go if you are famous.

Fame, which I don’t expect anyone has ever found especially easy to live with, has entered a new age. It was never for the fainthearted, but the career requirements have narrowed even further: if you want to be famous, you have to be made of metal. No heart, no brain, no soft underbelly. Otherwise, you’re walking wounded.

Like Boyle, who is said to be “much better” after five days in the Priory. I wouldn’t count on it. She’s just another toy we broke and chucked in the rubbish. I bet you saw the picture on this page and thought, “urgh, more Susan Boyle”. See? Deified, vilified, pitied, chucked. Whether Britain has got talent is arguable, but its stocks of compassion seem to be running low.

+ Archive documents released by the BBC show that George Orwell, who was employed by the corporation during the second world war, had such an unattractive mockney voice that his superiors tried to take him off the air.

Meanwhile, it was reported last week that Danielle Snelgrove, 18, from Salford, had been told by her employers to go to John Lewis to learn how to speak to customers properly. For “properly”, read “without an obvious regional accent”.

“I’m proud of where I come from,” Snelgrove said and promptly quit.

My friend Lynn Barber has a theory that some of the best writers have ridiculous speaking voices and are thus only comfortable expressing themselves on paper. Herself the child of an elocution teacher, she writes in her brilliant memoir An Education (it’s out next month and the best thing I’ve read in ages): “I am left with this terrible legacy - my accent. It is the classic elocution accent, homeless and inauthentic, an accent that screams ‘phoney’ the moment it opens its mouth. It is by far the most repulsive thing about me and I notice that people meeting me for the first time are often taken aback.”

Changing your accent is like using tinted contact lenses: pointless, odd and everyone can always tell.

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