WRITE yourself into the story. I wonder if this journalistic adage was bip-bopping around the ex-junkie synapses of Will Self, the self-styled bad boy of English letters, prior to his fateful boarding of a British Midland flight from London to the West Midlands last Thursday, joining the footsore regulars of the General Election hack-pack as they dogged John Major on the Tory campaign trail?

For ''Write yourself into the story'' was one of the founding tenets of the New Journalism movement, a neo-hippie school of American magazine repor-tage which arose 30 years ago in the wake of such hired wordslingers as Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer, Hunter S Thomp- son, Gay Talese, Joan Didion, and George Plimpton.

As practised by an eagle-eyed observer, the process meant a journalist could take his readers with him straight to the pounding, blood-red heart of whatever event he was trying to cover. To a riotous rally of Hell's Angels. On the road across California, dispensing fresh LSD with the then-newly-invented drug's chief disciples.

In dull newspaper columns assembled by the wrong hands, however, it merely translates into lazy, egocentric grandstanding - for, alas, most journalists who these days insist on writing themselves into stories seem unaware they have to find a story first. Indeed, the New Journalism's guiding principle has of late declined to a point where it means celebrity interviewees being mildly discomforted by wannabe-celebrity interviewers, and columnists who tediously list all the quotidian things they can't do in the vain belief this will establish a bond of humanity with the little folks who aren't columnists out there in Readerland.

At its most irrelevent, a journalist's drive to write himself into the story will provide an eye-catching title which has little to do with the facile essay accompanying it - as will be attested by those millions who fell for the come-on explicit in P J O'Rourke's How To Drive Fast On Drugs While Getting Your Wing-Wang Squeezed And Not Spill Your Drink.

At its saddest, it will lead you straight to Will Self. Media-frenzy has accompanied the fact the novelist - aged 361/4 - was sacked on Wednesday by his erstwhile paymasters at the Observer for alleged drugs shenanigans while covering John Major's tour of West Midlands factories.

Rather lamely, considering his oft-trotted-out tales of teenage dope-smoking and a period of heroin addiction, Self was yesterday denying any mid-air drugs abuse. Indeed, instead of bashing out a rip-snottering treatise called something like Eight Miles High Over Walsall: My Fear And Loathing In The Tory Supremo's Little Boys' Room, Self was yesterday issuing a pious statement via his solicitor in which he expressed fear the whole hoo-hah was ''detracting from the real issues of the election''.

As, of course, it has.

So what actually happened last Thursday? Causing much mirthful speculation amid his journalistic fellow-travellers, first on a 737 jet and then on a bus, Self kept disappearing into the toilets. Maybe Self has a prostate problem. Maybe the prospect of writing yourself into a story alongside John Major - thus inviting odium from right-thinking folk - induces bowel-churning fear.

Or maybe, in the wider journalistic scheme of things, it's simply too hard for Self to be an unobtrusive observer in the proper traditions of the New Journalism. He is, after all, 6ft 4in tall; gaunt of fizzog; tattoo'd, and the proud possessor of effloreate sideburns as big as your average Colombian cocaine plantation.

But, as this is a General Election story, we're left with more questions than answers. Questions such as: has anyone, anywhere ever read and enjoyed one of Self's novels? What political insights did the Observer think it was going to get from its restaurant critic, a man who once mistook the turnip he was eating for a potato?

And oh aye - do you think recent events will make oor ain Irvine Welsh want to troll round after Alex Salmond?