Media
The Sun comes out in Bournemouth
Published 27 September 2007
Our top-selling daily seems to have taken against Gordon Brown. But does it matter any more what the Sun says?
What did the Sun do on Gordon's big day? As the Prime Minister opened his first party conference in charge, and with the political world agog to know whether he would call a snap election, our top-selling daily devoted its first SEVEN pages to renewing its demand for a referendum on Europe.
On the front page his face was Photoshopped on to an image of CHURCHILL (I'm sorry about all these blaring capitals, but the Sun style is infectious) giving a V-sign, alongside the message: "Brown promised us a referendum in his campaign to become PM. Now he's giving two fingers to Britain."
There followed a TWO-PAGE editorial about the new EU constitution, beneath the headline: "The greatest threat to our nation since World War 2". There was also a poll suggesting that a MASSIVE (all right, I'll stop it now) 81 per cent of Britons wanted a referendum, and that if they didn't get it they would punish Brown at a general election.
Throw in Trevor Kavanagh's gloomy column likening Brown's financial abilities to those of the Northern Rock management, and you had a calculated and vigorous attempt by the Sun to rain on Brown's parade. It was the paper's first really hostile coup de théâtre of the new era - a sort of coming-out - but while Brown's people will not have been pleased by the timing, they can't have been all that surprised.
Six months ago the Sun was in the curious position of being in quiet disagreement with its own associate editor and leading political columnist. Where Trevor Kavanagh disliked and distrusted the incoming prime minister, and was especially critical of his supposed record as a taxer-and-spender, the paper as a whole tended to sit on the fence.
Once Brown was in office, dealing in rapid succession with terror attacks, floods and foot-and-mouth, the Sun seemed to like what it saw, declaring that he'd "come through his baptism of fire with flying colours". When he refused to "cut and run" from Iraq, it applauded; when he condemned public sector strikes, it cheered. (The Sun, like Rupert Murdoch, despises the public sector, even though many thousands of its readers must work there.)
Kavanagh, however, stuck to his guns, consistently painting the Prime Minister as "fiendishly clever", untrustworthy and reckless with our money.
In the past few weeks things have changed. Three issues get the Sun into a state these days - immigration, crime and Europe - and after due consideration it appears to have concluded that Gordon Brown is failing to meet its expectations on all three. So Kavanagh's view is now usually the paper's view, and Gordon Brown is presented as a smirking enemy of Britain.
Does it matter? Or rather, does it matter in electoral terms? It is tempting to revisit the 1992 election and weigh once again the idea that "it's the Sun wot won it", but even if you were to accept Kelvin MacKenzie's braggadocio of then as fact, the conditions today are so different as to make it irrelevant.
The paper's circulation has fallen by a quarter since 1992 and its influence has declined even more (the Daily Mail is far more likely to make the political weather today than any red top). More importantly, the political landscape has been transformed to the point where, though the Sun may have decided that it dislikes the Labour leader, it seems to dislike the Conservative leader just as much. That sort of thing blunts your message.
And if the Sun really did win it back in 1992 it was not by argument or campaigning, but by the relentless belittling of the Labour leader, a tactic that would be problematic today. After ten years as chancellor, Brown simply can't be painted as a political pygmy.
For all that, a prime minister who is so devoted to courting the right that he is prepared to invite Margaret Thatcher to tea is unlikely to give up on the Sun while it still sells three million copies a day, and perhaps that is what should worry us, as it should probably worry all those immigrants and restless teenagers in hoods. What will Brown do, what policy might he adopt, to get the paper onside?
Pretty woman
Print a picture of a woman on a news page, they say, and both more men and more women will look at that page. It's a no-brainer for editors. And if the woman is attractive, the effect is stronger.
I wonder how far this explains the continuing presence of Kate McCann in our papers. She is youngish, fine-featured and blonde, with even white teeth and, these days, something like a size zero figure. Her face, moreover, is always alive with emotion.
So even when there isn't much to write about her she still crops up on the front, not just of the Express, but of the Mirror, the Telegraph, the Times. She must wish sometimes she was ugly, and not the news equivalent of a poster girl.
Brian Cathcart is professor of journalism at Kingston University
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