Despite Blair's complaints, the Mail still supports new Labour
Published 20 December 1999
Media - Ian Hargreaves
Last month, in the week in which news of the Downing Street pregnancy became public, the Prime Minister gave an interview to the Observer.
The paper, naturally, had no objection to giving Tony Blair another platform from which to denounce Ken Livingstone. What stood out was a single paragraph in which the PM said out loud what his courtiers often say, namely that new Labour gets a raw deal from the press.
This is how he put it: "All my life the left press has always bought the agenda of the right. Look at papers such as the Telegraph and the Mail - they are on song for the Conservative Party straight down the line. They know exactly what message the Tories want to put across and that message goes driving right through their papers."
It was a complaint the PM delivered personally over lunch at the Guardian a few days later and which has been much amplified in private by the Downing Street communications machine. Officials point with envy to the passionate adulation Margaret Thatcher received from papers such as the Sun, the Mail and the Telegraph in the 1980s.
By contrast, says Downing Street, look at today's left-of-centre papers. In the Guardian, Hugo Young is as likely to be in anguish at new Labour's failings as its triumphs. The Mirror's political hard man, Paul Routledge, is old not new Labour. And so on.
Provoked by this sense of injustice, Downing Street has now sanctioned a semi-official fightback against the Daily Mail, which is the subject of regular monitoring reports by Gerald Kaufman, the obliging chairman of the Commons' culture, media and sport committee.
Yet Downing Street's analysis is not just inaccurate, it is also damaging to Labour's prospects. In the first place, it rests upon a false comparison with the 1980s, when Thatcher divided the country and the press into savagely opposed armies. Doesn't Third Way, "big tent" politics stand for a different world - a politics of inclusiveness, where confrontation is considered a last resort, not an opening gambit?
This new politics is popular because it correctly reads the mood of these relatively prosperous times. The press, responding to the same mood, is also less factionalised; indeed, it is less political than at any time in my working life, which works hugely to Blair's advantage. The once-Tory papers go as gleefully for the blood of Michael Ashcroft and Jeffrey Archer as for "Two Jags Prescott" or, for that matter, Vanessa Feltz or Posh and Becks. The Sun, although hostile to the euro, supports Blair and pronounces the Tory party "a dead parrot". Its political editor says in private that the paper will back Blair at the next election.
The centre-left papers certainly have their bolshie gang - Nick Cohen in the Observer, Larry Elliott in the Guardian and Paul Routledge in the Mirror. But they also have their Blairites: Jonathan Freedland in the Guardian; Andrew Marr (Observer/ Express) and David Aaronovitch and Donald Macintyre in the Independent.
Roy Hattersley is a perfect illustration of the political promiscuity of the age: he finds editorial hospitality from Canary Wharf to Kensington. The Guardian, the Independent, the Sun, the Mirror and the Observer are all now edited by men whose main interest in life is not politics.
Only the Daily Telegraph sings an unwavering true-blue note, but it is hard to construe this as a disadvantage for new Labour. And yes, I mean only the Telegraph.
The Mail has not, according to my careful reading, altered its basic position of curmudgeonly support for new Labour. Paul Johnson, one of the Mail's columnists, has denounced Blair as a fake, but this position would be recovered were the Blairs to resume their occasional lunches at the Maison Johnson.
When, the other day, the Mail's deputy political editor swung a boot at Alastair Campbell below the headline "Is Blair's bully boy losing his touch?", the piece savagely concluded that Campbell is "a rather nice man . . . and hugely capable".
True, the Mail makes mischief for ministers in trouble, but no more so than other papers, and even with Judge Kaufman in session its editorials continue to offer support for the PM and his "iron chancellor". Nor have Kaufman's accusations about the inaccuracy of the Mail's news reporting yet scored a direct hit.
All that has happened in the 32 months since Labour's landslide is that the press has returned to its default mode of preying upon weakness. Meanwhile some papers have started, albeit too cautiously, to resist the more blatant attempts by Campbell's team to make fools of them.
One such incident occurred on the eve of the last Labour conference, when the Mail, which has wept in the wilderness for two decades about the decline of marriage, was conned into carrying a front-page story that Blair's speech would finally deliver the overdue tonic. When, instead, Blair delivered his attack on the "forces of conservatism", the Mail felt entitled to retaliate.
What the PM ought to conclude from his review of the press is that he has very largely succeeded in confusing his party's once implacable foes into coverage that, to an astonishing extent, goes "beyond left and right" and so supports in a fundamental way his political project. He disturbs this confusion at his peril. But if he wants to pursue his campaign for truth in communication, he should look on his own side of the Downing Street doorstep.
The writer is professor of journalism at Cardiff University
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