Ministers are public people. That is their uniqueness. What they do is speak for the state. They may be parents, and they may be viewers, but these are secondary characteristics, which may add to their claim to be human beings but can be distractions from their main function.  When reacting to public events, they deserve attention only in their public role. Faced in the last week by two challenges to their capacity for speedy judgment - those swift uncalculated words that tell so much - they responded by exposing some pretty sinister instincts among those who command the British public realm.  This is not a party point. The degeneration that has unfolded under Mr Blair builds on that which was well developed under Thatcherism. Maybe it's characteristic of governments everywhere. But seldom has there been such a revealing mismatch of responses, such a woeful reaction to two events that had in common the fact that television encompassed them.   In the case of Brass Eye, the programme satirising anti-paedophile hysteria, ministers put on display their incorrigible capacity for intervention. They seem to be incapable of shutting up, or of observing the elementary rules that might entitle them not to, and this film could of course not be allowed to pass. David Blunkett sent word from his holiday that he was "dismayed" by the programme, which he had not seen. One of his deputies, Beverley Hughes, called it "unspeakably sick", again without having seen it; and, when challenged 24 hours later by Jim Naughtie, was defiant in her determination not to see it, even though sending for a video might have been considered a prudent manoeuvre if   she was to go on braying about the scandal of it ever being shown.   Tessa Jowell, the culture minister, was a little more careful. She saw the programme, but plainly failed to see its point, and found another way of saying that it should have been stopped. As secretary of state, she was alive to the danger of direct censorship, but spent yesterday putting the arm on the Independent Television Commission to perform that task instead. Why hadn't the ITC stopped the show being repeated? she whinged. There ought to be a law. There needed to be a system whereby the censor intervened quickly, if enough complaints clocked up. She would be urgently inventing such a system. This must stop. And so on.   I thought the programme was a failure. The satire was too deeply embedded in the shock effect to make much sense. Some stupid personalities were conned into appearing on it. But it had a point, which survived many levels of scrutiny at Channel 4. Is the volume of viewers' complaints to be the touchstone for acceptability? If it is, a mere 2,500 complaints out of a viewership of some millions, though large by historic standards, surely ask a question about the rights of the silent majority. Above all, this is nothing to do with ministers. The worse the programme, the more important it is to remember that point, if we still believe in a television regime that aspires not to take the state-controlled public-private monopolies of Silvio Berlusconi as its model.   In any case, these interventions seem to be very selective. Confronted by pictures of unparalleled police brutality from Genoa, ministers did not react so fiercely. They seemed to be not at all shocked. Neither as viewers nor as parents did they have anything to say to the evidence before their eyes that young people, including quite a lot of Brits, were systematically beaten up by various branches of the Italian state apparatus.    Conceivably it was excusable for Mr Blair to react as he did to the opening scenes of this encounter, which happened while he was still in Genoa. In saying that he supported the Italians' efforts to stop the G8 meeting being wrecked, he made a necessary case for peaceful international diplomacy. But then things turned brutally unpleasant from the other side, with credible statements by innocent British people that at least deserved the status of evidence to be believed or refuted.   At that stage our prime minister, as far as I have traced, said nothing. Our foreign secretary, after a two-day delay, came out with the bloodless assertion that the Italians should inquire into what happened, and the promise that, if the victims could marshal a case against the carabinieri who had beaten them black and blue, it would be forwarded to Rome.   The premise at work here is a long way from the assumption that lies behind the onslaught on Brass Eye. One set of images, sight unseen, attracts ministers' maximum intolerance. The other, featuring criminal behaviour by another government, achieves only their acquiescence. Peter Hain, the one minister who talked about "the over- reaction from the police" in Genoa, soon had the ground removed from under him by Mr Straw. The state fell over itself not to be appalled, even conditionally, by what had palpably happened in Genoa: the beating of non-violent protesters by a quasi-fascist police force. On the other hand, it was ready with instant condemnation of a television programme it had no locus to attack.   Is television to be free of government control, or is it not? Ministers set the rules of ownership and create the regulatory regime. Ofcom, which is about to take that task, will be one of the most powerful public bodies in the country. But ministers   should legislate, then withdraw. When Chris Smith was culture minister, he found such restraint impossible. He was forever interfering, especially with the BBC. He thought nothing of telling them to lay off the costume dramas in favour of more gritty television, or exploding with rage over the supremely unimportant issue of the scheduling of the nightly television news. He talked about liberty in one breath, and challenged it in the next.   The Blunkett-Jowell intervention over Brass Eye is in the same spirit. It speaks for a ministeriat that thinks it must say something about everything, especially when the tabloids are baying. It can't see any social imperfection, such as a tasteless TV programme, without reaching for a new law to deal with it. To say it cannot recognise irony or satire is perhaps to offer counsel of unreasonable perfection. But to charge this collective governmental spirit with dislike for other people's freedom, whether as creators or receivers, is to say no more than the tedious, deadening, sanctimonious truth.   Yet the spirit has a darker side. Swift to intervene in what does not matter, it's unwilling to recognise what does. I have no doubt Mr Blair sincerely believed in Genoa that his duty was to defend the Italian authorities. But then the evidence changed, and neither he nor Straw could summon a single heartfelt phrase of indignation on behalf of their own citizens with a prima facie case against Berlusconi's government. For this was diplomacy not paedophilia. In that arena, state power is quick to recognise its own. Where there was caution there should have been fire, and where there was fire, caution. Such are the priorities of a government that finds it easier to rage against paedophilia than defend the freedoms of its citizens abroad, when television stakes out the ground.