The end of the right wing press

Inside the paper was a list of Conservative candidates to vote for: in the end, relatively few of them managed to get in. The 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 last month was remarkably similar. Keir Starmer was obviously popular with the public and obviously going to become prime minister. Still, the once all-powerful Mail just couldn’t bring itself to get on board.

The Sun, on the other hand, did what it did last time; it pinched its nose and backed the winner. There was less enthusiasm in 2024 than there had been back in the 1990s, but we’ll come back to that later. In the meantime, there is an important question worth asking: now the right is out of power for the first time in 14 years, what will happen to its supporters on Fleet Street?

The Telegraph and assorted tabloids ran 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 kept plummeting, and they just weren’t the titans they were a few decades ago. The emperor has now lost his clothes, as the Tories are not only in opposition but seemingly miles away from winning an election again.

Does this mean that the tabloids’ 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,” he said. “He used the media, for instance, as a means of making public announcements, which 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’d even reached Downing Street. Back in 1995, he and several of his key advisers flew to Australia to give a presentation to some senior Murdoch executives, as recounted in Stick It Up Your Punter, the history of the Sun newspaper. Murdoch ended up backing Blair, and their 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 (and The New European’s editor-at-large). Starmer, on the other hand, relies more heavily on Morgan McSweeney, who was never a newspaper man. The Labour leader did suspiciously agree to drop Leveson 2, but his relationship with Fleet Street may not be as close as that of his predecessors.

Still, it doesn’t quite mean that we’re out of the woods. Tory papers aren’t solely influential because of their closeness to the government of the day. There is an ecosystem at work in Westminster that will always favour right-leaning publications.

Steven Barnett, a professor of communications and media reform campaigner, argued that we shouldn’t expect meaningful change purely because Labour is now 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.”

TV channels and radio stations tend to lean heavily on whatever gets written up by newspapers, both directly, in the form of paper reviews, and more broadly, as stories will often get discussed on air by guests. 

The reasons why they do this are quite obvious: broadcasters do not usually 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 easy truth is that there are more right-leaning national publications than left-leaning ones.

To one side are the Guardian and 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 concluded, “what they’re doing is helping to amplify those publications which 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 McKenzie bragged that it was “the Sun wot won it”, he’d only managed to convince 45% of his readers to vote for the Conservatives. Did that lead to a meaningful change in their editorial lines? That’s an easy one to answer – we wouldn’t be here today if it had.

Really, the only silver lining we can look to is the fact that the Tory tabs are increasingly out of touch with public opinion. Mail supremo Paul Dacre would often claim that he and he alone spoke for middle England, but it isn’t clear that’s 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, who 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 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.

The Telegraph has decided to react by becoming ever more strident, but this is not a long term strategy, especially if Kamala Harris wins in the US later this year. Stripped of politicians in power willing to enable their fits of pique, papers may well find that times are changing, and they cannot remain in denial about it any longer.

The hope, then, is that Starmer does not replicate Blair’s mistake, by inflating the importance of publications whose reach is exaggerated by those who choose to pander to them. 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 this 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.