Oh dear, Mr Brown. You just couldn’t help yourself, could you? Still, I don’t entirely blame you. After all, Tony Blair started it.

Yep, with the world going to hell in a handcart, Mr Brown decided this week to take a break from pouring over Economics for Dummies to comment on the more pressing matter of Jade Goody’s wedding.

I am not for one minute saying that the situation in which Miss Goody – terminally ill with cervical cancer – finds herself is not terribly sad. It is. Of course it is. And I’m not one of the people who is going to jump all over her for selling the rights to her wedding. That money will go to give her children the kind of opportunities she never had. And who would deny any mother that?

But has Mr Brown taken time out to pass on his sympathies to any of the thousands of other women suffering as she is? There are, afterall, more than 2,000 new cases of cervical cancer diagnosed each year in the UK.

Of course he hasn’t. But then they haven’t been on the telly or in the redtops.

Mr Brown expressed his sadness for Jade during a monthly news conference at Downing Street.

On Friday the PM decided to comment again after it was announced her finance Jack Tweed would be allowed to have his curfew altered so he could be with Goody on their wedding night.

The curfew was granted to allow Tweed to complete his 18 month jail sentence – imposed for assaulting a teenager with a golf club – at home rather than in prison.

You wonder if Mr Brown’s Ministry for Justice would have been quite so accommodating had Goody and Tweed not been tabloid fodder.

I’m sorry for the reality check, but Goody is famous for basically being an ill-educated woman exploited by the makers of the worst example of tabloid television. She should not be famous. She has displayed no talent for anything at all.

Politicians certainly should not be falling over themselves to attach their names to her tragedy simply because they know it will get them mention in a story which doesn’t contain the word ‘Incompetent’ in the headline.

But Mr Brown’s shameful opportunism – and as I say, it was Mr Blair who started this cosying-up-to-the-celebrity-pack nonsense in the first place – pales when compared to the self-righteousness of the tabloids who so vilified Goody following her exit from the Celebrity Big Brother house.

One tabloid’s website now encourages its readers to “send courageous Jade your messages of support”.

According to it’s editorial, “We all know her as the bubbly, funny girl who was never strong on geography”.

The word letters B, R, A, V and E must be worn out on keyboards across redtop land.

Compare that with, for example, a Sun editorial following the BB race row with Shilpa Shetty.

They said, and I quote: “Jade Goody went into the Big Brother house appearing to be simply a fun-loving working-class girl canny enough to have made millions from her 15 minutes of fame. It was all a meticulously manufactured lie.

“She has left the house with her true personality laid bare – a vile, pig-ignorant, racist bully consumed by envy of a woman of superior intelligence, beauty and class.”

I’ve struggled to think of an articulate concluding line here. But I think the ones above speak for themselves.

By Dave Burrows