When Tony Blair announced his intention last September to leave office within the next 12 months, this newspaper encouraged him to make a series of speeches in which he would reflect on what he had learnt in Downing Street. We contended then that this could be a positive exercise for politics and public discourse more broadly. He did take that advice and the lectures that have emerged have invariably been stimulating. His successor should look closely at them.

In his address on the media and public life yesterday, Mr Blair was similarly thoughtful. He conceded that new Labour in its earlier days had devoted “inordinate attention to courting, assuaging and persuading the media” and that this had probably been a mistake. In other words, his administration spun like tops at the expense of the Government’s credibility. He defended himself, though, by noting how hostile the media coverage of his party had been in the 15 years or so before he assumed its leadership.

His primary assertion, nevertheless, is that the relationship between media and politics has become too adversarial, with journalists stoking cynicism in the political process. This had taken place, Mr Blair mused, less because of some deliberate plot than because astonishing technological progress had created “constant hyper-activity” on the part of the press, marginalised formal political institutions such as the House of Commons, driven a tendency towards hyperbole and produced a disturbing blur between news and comment.

In some aspects of his analysis, the Prime Minister protests a little too much. His attempts to use the media were at least as intense as his efforts to respond to its demands. He was not a victim. It was not adverse media coverage of the Labour Party which kept it from power in the era of Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock but the reality that the party then was on the wrong side of far too many important issues. It was only when it overhauled its political philosophy, not its media strategy, that Labour became a credible outfit.

Mr Blair’s wider critique, however, has much to commend it. The scale of change within the media over the past few years has been extraordinary. This has been positive in many but not all respects. It has hardly prompted a culture of humility. There has been a democratisation of content but this has come with a hint of the mess of postmodernism. It can lead to a collective stampede that is frequently an unattractive spectacle. The press should be more willing to admit that most politicians enter public life out of a sincere desire to improve the lives of their fellow citizens and that they often have to make decisions with less time and less information than they would wish. None of us is perfect in this respect.

Mr Blair is on his strongest ground when asserting that news and views are too regularly cross-fertilised. Objectivity should always be the ambition of news even if the meaning of objectivity is inevitably subjective. The tendency of some so-called serious newspapers to act as viewspapers would have profoundly negative effects if universally followed. Journalists are right to hold politicians and companies to account, but journalists should not be afraid of being held to account themselves. Readers are intelligent and thoughtful, and hardly able to be fooled by an individual article or an individual politician, but if the traditional media exist as a separate, self-serving universe, then the distance from readers will grow and the size of the audience will shrink.