Susan Boyle is on her way to the Priory clinic today, just another shattered victim of our obsession with celebrity.

Earlier in the weekend, Gordon Brown had this to say: "I hope Susan Boyle is OK because she is a really, really nice person and I think she will do well."

It's the latest prime ministerial intervention in celebrity. During her dying days, Jade Goody was treated to his approval, when he praised her determination "to help her family". A while earlier, he had claimed to wake up to the Arctic Monkeys every morning, a fact most people treated with considerable disbelief.

None of this chimes particularly well with his insistence Britain had started to overcome celebrity, just before becoming prime minister.

Keen to highlight his superiority over Tony Blair, the then-chancellor said: "I think we're moving from this period when, if you like, celebrity matters, when people have become famous for being famous."

If only that was true.

This country has developed an increasingly unhealthy relationship with celebrity. We have always built people up to knock them down, but we now appear to be doing it with a ruthless speed and an utter indifference to their mental state.

Watching Boyle appear on Britain's Got Talent over the weekend was a case in point. After a week of newspaper stories about her increasingly deranged behaviour, she appeared fragile and vulnerable. Her expressions were nervous and indicated a desperation to please, while her mannerisms came across as odd and jolted.

She was, for all to see, just another victim of the celebrity machine. It sucks them in, uses them, and then spits them out: used and worthless.

Some of the blame can be placed on the format of reality television. Big Brother set the tone a decade ago, when it filmed people in an enclosed space for days on end and forced them to vote against each other, before the audience themselves chose who got kicked out. Then talent shows, heavily reliant on a judging panel made up of, ironically, thoroughly talentless but hugely vindictive narcissists, sealed the deal.

Contestants were ushered on, so the audience could bask in the stream of vitriolic unpleasantness emitted from the judges. Gone was politeness, or caring for people's feelings. Cruelty and sneering were in fashion.

But it's not just the format. We are responsible as well. Our obsession with celebrity has now reached a kind of tipping point. Even the expenses scandal was thought appropriate for celebrity fixes, with Esther Rantzen and other D-listers quickly cited as replacements for MPs. What on earth would make us think they would be any less greedy, or incompetent? What possible reason could there be to presume such a thing, unless the country has gradually come to the conclusion that 'celebrity=good', as a form of a priori reasoning.

Broadsheets and glossy celebrity mags seem to live a world apart, but they are in fact two sides of the same coin.

As we become increasingly disillusioned with politics, we turn to the empty world of celebrity to distract ourselves. But in this world, somewhere, are real people. They have feelings, and hopes and aspirations. They are very much like you and I.

When we package them up and sell them - much as Boyle was constructed as a fairy story character - and then ruthlessly tear them down, we damage them. And we also damage ourselves.

When the television shows and magazines and newspapers allow people to talk to others this way - calling Heather Mills a 'slag', for instance - it has a direct effect on the way people treat each other in society.

Children take their cue from those on television, and what they read. And adults, in a slower, less obvious way, do the same.

This isn't a cry for a more family-friendly, Mary Whitehouse style censorship campaign. It's just a request for a little less cruelty, and a little more compassion, in the way we treat the people who enter the news agenda.

David Cameron hasn't made it part of his 'Broken Britain' agenda, even though the two facts are intimately connected. Gordon Brown will only discuss celebrity to jump on the latest bandwagon.

A real political leader would challenge our views, and try to forge something a little healthier. Both for the celebrities, and for Britain.

Ian Dunt