“There is a terrible danger that the British people, drugged by the seductive mantra ‘It’s time for a change’, are stumbling, eyes glazed, into an election that could undo 1,000 years of our nation’s history.”
This is what the Daily Mail scrawled across its union jack-clad front page the day before the general election. They knew a Labour majority was coming, and they knew it was going to be big. Still, they couldn’t help but hide in the comfort of their own hysteria. If nothing else, they had to try.
Inside the paper was a list of Conservative candidates to vote for: in the end, relatively few of them won. The Labour landslide was overwhelming, and the Mail had been ignored.
In May 1997, Tony Blair walked into 10 Downing Street, where he would remain for over a decade. What happened in July was remarkably similar. Keir Starmer was obviously popular with the public (though own goals and tough decisions in Labour’s early days in power have dented that) and he was obviously going to become prime minister. Still, the once all-powerful Mail just couldn’t bring itself to get on board.
Neither could the Daily Telegraph. “The interventionist and high taxing years of the 1970s will return with a vengeance,” its leader column warned on election day. “Only a vote for the Conservatives can avoid this fate.”
Meanwhile, its excitable columnist Allister Heath told readers: “The UK is about to enter a nightmare much darker than anyone realises”, and predicted that Britain would soon become “a left wing one-party state”.
The Sun, on the other hand, did what it did in 1997; it held its nose and backed the winner, despite months of relentless attacks on Labour and its leader by its outgoing and incoming political editors, Trevor Kavanagh and Harry Cole. Even in its endorsement, the paper showed far less enthusiasm for Starmer than there had been for Blair, but we’ll come back to that later.
In the meantime, there is an important question: now the right is out of power for the first time in 14 years, what will happen to its supporters on Fleet Street?
Is the sound and fury exhibited over the winter fuel allowance, the Starmers’ wardrobe and Sue Gray’s salary going to get even louder and more furious? Or it is a cry of anger and despair in recognition of the new, much-reduced circumstances of the Conservative Party, which they have supported so slavishly for years? And therefore, at their own reduced circumstances – falling circulations, money from digital failing to plug the gaps and the country unmoved by their attacks on Labour?
The Telegraph, Mail and Sun ruled the roost for a long time, because their people were in government and their relationship with those governments was a symbiotic one. This influence successfully hid the fact that their sales figures were plummeting.
The emperor has now lost his clothes, as the Tories are not only in opposition but also seemingly miles away from winning an election again – even one that is likely to be held four and a half years away.
Does this mean that the right wing media’s reign of terror is over? Well, it depends on who you ask. Peter Oborne, who wrote for the Spectator and the Express during the New Labour years, believes that it’s all down to the way Starmer plans to engage with the press.
“Papers were already in decline under Blair, but he embraced the press as part of government,” said Oborne. “He used the media, for instance, as a means of making public announcements that previously would have gone to the House of Commons. The Sun would automatically be given the important news. It was a conscious choice by Blair.”
This relationship was built long before he had even reached Downing Street. Back in 1995, he and several of his key advisers flew to Australia to give a presentation to senior Murdoch executives. Rupert Murdoch ended up backing Blair, and the New Labour honeymoon was a lengthy one.
“Blair dedicated himself to cultivating the right wing press. I was really shocked,” Oborne said. “I would be invited quite often into Downing Street just to speak to the prime minister. Why was he not governing the country, rather than talking to a pipsqueak like me? I just didn’t get it.”
As a result, the right wing press was able to retain its stranglehold on the national discourse. Thankfully, Oborne continued, “My impression is that Starmer does not have this slavish fascination, and this desire to groom the press generally, whereas it was a core feature of Blair.”
He does have a point: it is striking that Blair’s closest adviser was Alastair Campbell, a former journalist. Starmer, on the other hand, relies more heavily on Morgan McSweeney and Gray, neither of whom has ever worked for newspapers.
Over the summer, the Labour leader did suspiciously agree to drop Leveson 2, the second part of the inquiry into the behaviour of the British press, but his relationship with Fleet Street seems unlikely to be anywhere near as close as the one Blair had. This might explain the rough ride given to the government in recent weeks; others will argue that the wounds have been largely self-inflicted.
But anyone connected to Labour who thinks the Tory papers can simply be ignored is kidding themselves.
Yes, they may sell far fewer copies than they once did, the media landscape may be far more crowded, and many of their friends may be gone. But they weren’t influential in the past just because of their close relationship with Downing Street. There is an ecosystem at work in Westminster that will always favour right-leaning publications.
Steven Barnett, a professor of communications and campaigner for media reform, argues that we shouldn’t expect that to change just because Labour is in power.
“You go into any broadcast studio and the first thing you see is presenters looking at the day’s newspapers”, he said. “These things matter.”
“Journalists tend to follow journalists, and broadcast journalists in the UK still tend to be quite slavish about looking through the day’s newspapers and seeing what’s being said and following that line of thinking,” Barnett added.
TV channels and radio stations tend to lean heavily on whatever gets written about, both directly in the form of reviews of newspaper stories, and more broadly, as those stories will often get discussed on air by guests.
The reasons why they do this are quite obvious: broadcasters do not have the manpower to do all their reporting themselves, and getting talking heads to argue about whatever was in the Telegraph that morning is cheap. Another truth is that there are more right-leaning national publications than left-leaning ones.
To one side are the Guardian, the Mirror and this newspaper; to the other, the Mail, Sun, Telegraph and Express. If, say, a BBC panel were to discuss the news of the day, as they often do, then they will by definition spend more time on issues covered by the right than by the left. It doesn’t matter who is in government when that panel happens; the imbalance remains the same.
As Barnett said, “what they’re doing is helping to amplify those publications that are losing readers, certainly in hard copy, but still carrying the kind of influence through the airwaves that they had 30 years ago.”
It doesn’t really matter that readership figures have gone down and down again over the past few decades. As long as the printed press dictates what gets discussed on air, it will keep being all-powerful.
Optimists who point out that many right wing papers now have more Labour-voting readers than Conservative ones should also be careful. Back in 1992, when John Major won a majority and Kelvin MacKenzie bragged that it was “the Sun wot won it”, he’d only managed to convince 45% of his readers to vote Tory. Did that statistic lead to a meaningful change in their editorial lines? Not a chance.
Really, the only silver lining we can look to is the fact that the Tory tabloids are increasingly out of touch with public opinion. Daily Mail supremo Paul Dacre would often claim that he and he alone speaks for middle England, but it isn’t clear that this is still the case.
“It is extraordinary that we have one of the biggest Labour majorities in generations, and when you look at the British Social Attitudes data, we still have a country that is, by and large, quite redistributive, quite social democratic, that doesn’t mind the idea of public spending within reason, is actually quite tolerant, including on things like immigration, and yet you have a press which is pretty much out of line with all of this,” Barnett said. “We don’t have a press that reflects the general sense of where the UK is at.”
It is hard to predict what this will mean in practice. As Adrian Addison pointed out in his book Mail Men, “the Daily Mail is a business, and it’s in the business of selling newspapers”. As their older, more reactionary readers keep dying out, they will have to find a way to build a new base for themselves. It may be nice to still have outsized influence in Westminster, but that won’t pay anyone’s salaries.
Similarly, hedge fund manager Sir Paul Marshall may have pockets deep enough to have helped launch GB News and to now own the Spectator, but it isn’t clear what his long-term strategy will be. The new right movement, shaped by shrill conspiratorial thinking and endless controversies, may be radicalising some on the fringes, but it is unlikely to ever truly become mainstream.
It does seem to be succeeding in yanking the Overton window to the right on a number of issues, but what will the plan be in two, five, 10 years, especially if Kamala Harris wins in the US later this year? Stripped of politicians in power willing to enable their fits of pique, these media organisations may well find that times are changing, and remaining in denial about it would have them consigned to irrelevance.
The hope, then, is that Starmer does not replicate Blair’s mistake of inflating the importance of publications whose reach is exaggerated. We often say to children that if you ignore bullies, they will go away. That tactic wouldn’t have worked with the right flank of Fleet Street for a long time, but they are now mere shadows of their former selves.
Their views are also no longer shared by the so-called silent majority they relied on for so long. It is unlikely that the election result will make them change their ways: instead, it is up to everyone else to decide that they can safely be ignored.
