As he took the podium of the White House press room for his first televised press briefing yesterday morning, Tony Snow surveyed the tightly packed crowd, flanked by a dozen television cameras hovering feet from him, and said: "I feel so loved."

That moment usually does not last long for White House spokesmen, as his predecessor Scott McClellan discovered. Armed with a coffee cup and masked by television make-up, Mr Snow, a former Fox News presenter, brought a new, idiosyncratic style to the daily briefing that had regressed to an arid showcase of administration talking points.