The Guardian is getting distinctly testy with Sinn Fein/IRA, for which it used to burn the occasional candle. Is this a sign of its rebranding as an establishment newspaper?

Even in demotic Britain a murdered earl constitutes a good story, and a better one still when the suspect is his estranged wife who happens to be a former call-girl. The newspapers have had a feast. But I am not sure that anyone has drawn attention to the illustrious ancestors of the evidently charming yet somewhat rackety 10th Earl of Shaftesbury. The 1st Earl fought with the royalists in the civil war, jumped ship to the parliamentarians, and was then one of 12 commissioners who invited Charles II back to England. He tried to exclude the Catholic Duke of York from the throne, exploited the fictitious "Popish Plot" allegedly uncovered by Titus Oates, and was tried for treason, but acquitted. He is "Achitophel" in Dryden's great poem.

The 7th Earl (1801-85) was a very different kettle of fish - a high-minded, deeply Christian philanthropist responsible for piloting successive factory acts (1847, 1850 and 1859) through parliament, and for achieving the ten-hour day. Readers may be amazed to be reminded that this Lord Shaftesbury was a Tory whose reforms were on occasion opposed by radical Whigs. The famous abolitionist William Wilberforce was also a Tory. Whatever we may like to think, not all 19th-century Tories were beastly reactionaries.

The republican movement is supposed to have its home in the left-wing press. Is this entirely true? Whenever the Prince of Wales puts a foot wrong, which tends to be quite often, the Daily Mail likes to torture him. I should mention that, during his recent difficulties over his marriage arrangements, I wrote a column in that paper that was not entirely supportive. But the Mail has long been a thorn in the prince's side. What is new is the attitude of the Daily Telegraph. It followed the Mail in believing that the Queen's refusal to attend the prince's civil wedding at Windsor Guildhall could reasonably be interpreted as a snub. It then carried a leader which chided Prince Charles. Let me say, as a moderately close student of the Daily Telegraph over the years, that every previous editor of the paper would have found a way of defending the prince to the hilt. I am not suggesting that the present editor, Martin Newland, is a closet republican.

He merely takes the shockingly novel line that the heir to the throne is not always right. If the two newspapers of Middle England can no longer be counted on to offer unquestioning support, the royal family must truly be in some difficulty.

I was amused to see, in the recent edition of the Spectator (for which magazine I used to write a column), Douglas Hurd laying into the Daily Mail. Lord Hurd may, or may not, dislike the paper, but he was undoubtedly put up to write the piece by a man who genuinely loathes the Mail. I mean Boris Johnson, editor of the Spectator. Boris believes in the sanctity of politicians' lives. Though it was the Sunday Mirror which not long ago broke the story of his extramarital affair, the Mail ran with it quite enthusiastically, thereby deepening the dislike that Boris had already conceived for the paper. Whether it is prudent for an ambitious, rising Tory politician to be so at odds with the most powerful right-of-centre newspaper, I will leave others to decide.

Lord Hurd's general thesis is that in recent years journalists have become much more powerful and politicians less so. Is this really true? Journalists certainly think they are much more important than was the case 25 years ago, and many politicians go along with this view. Grand journalists are also richer than they used to be, but it is a vain illusion for them to suppose they have acquired real power. In the end it is politicians who enact laws and take us to war. We merely write about it.

There is another trend in the press that has been intriguing me. The Guardian has always burned an occasional candle for Sinn Fein/IRA. Yet in recent weeks it has been distinctly testy with the organisation, first for its alleged involvement in the £26.5m Belfast bank robbery, and then as a result of the murder of Robert McCartney by an IRA gang. On Monday the paper led with a story about "the people's revolt" against the IRA. Is this evidence of the rebranding of the Guardian as a more centrist, establishment newspaper? Meanwhile the Telegraph, which used to be obsessed with Northern Ireland, has grown rather bored by the subject. It has been much less interested in the people's revolt.

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