I HELPED out with a little bit of media training a few weeks ago. It was a different way to spend a few days of well earned leave.

Ten hours a day for seven days in an alternate reality newsroom was certainly a Busman’s Holiday.

I’ll keep the details vague out of necessity, but it was abroad and was in large part about role-playing in a large exercise. In the jargon being simulated press or SIMPRESS.

This kind of complex exercise is designed to train senior figures from all walks of public life in how to deal with the increasing demands from the media, both social and mainstream.

A team of print, broadcast and social media journalists will be assembled to sit alongside the exercise, put those being trained through their paces and drive the storyline along with breaking news, interviews, background reports, radio and TV bulletins and of course, simulated social media.

One small part of this particular exercise was a press conference where a senior figure faced a hostile press corps - local, national and international.

It may only be an exercise, but in preparation for real life, these people are put through the wringer and boy, do they know it.

One part of my role in the conference was to ask a politically sensitive question as a journalist from the Herald in Glasgow (ironically a sister paper to the Bournemouth Echo.)

I pressed this high ranking figure on a controversial point and whether he had a message for the people of Edinburgh which had suffered a terrorist atrocity weeks earlier - in the scenario.

He did not answer the question, changed the subject, moved on to someone else and then left the press conference.

There was a very good reason why he couldn’t give me straight answers and I knew that perfectly well.

But even so I wasn’t about to let the matter drop and anyway, whoever said life is fair - especially public life.

A few minutes later I tackled him again after he had completed a one-to-one television interview and had probably thought his ordeal was over.

I shouted out to him, in much the way us political hacks call out to some hapless politician entering or leaving Downing Street and ask: “Are you going to resign minister?”

I said: “You have no message for the people of Edinburgh then?”

He stopped about 20 yards away, paused, turned on his heels and came up to me.

“Yes, I do have a message,” he said and proceeded to deliver a few well chosen words, a perfect response given the constraints on him.

If he had not answered, one of the damaging stories in print and social media would immediately have been his (apparently) uncaring, non-response.

No answer was not an option.

I was reminded of this incident last weekend when Sir Christopher Chope was in the middle of a media firestorm over the upskirting issue in Parliament.

We do not need to rehearse the sequence of events, they are well known.

Sir Christopher is not on Twitter and left Parliament last Friday oblivious of the social media (and mainstream) uproar that was already engulfing him.

After speaking to upskirting victim Gina Martin and her lawyer and explaining his objections to the process rather than the principle of the legislation, he thought all was well.

The veteran MP compounded the problem by keeping his head down for 24 hours because someone told him it was the best thing to do.

He was not well served with help like that.

He was persuaded the best thing to do was to talk to his local paper, which he did on Sunday morning.

Better late than never of course.

If there was ever a time that no comment was a viable route in a media crisis, it isn’t now.

Sir Christopher has found that out to his cost.