Labour v News Corp
Union chief Tony Woodley made conference perfectly clear what he thought of the Sun
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By Matthew Champion. |  |
Wednesday, 30, Sep 2009 12:38
Labour pays the price for flying too close to the Sun.
By Matthew Champion.
Yesterday Gordon Brown positioned himself at middle Britain in his speech to the Labour conference, but hours afterwards he finally lost the support of the biggest newspaper in the western world.
"Labour's Lost It", the Sun blared this morning, pledging its support for the Conservatives after losing faith with the prime minister.
Full story: Union boss rips up Sun at Labour conference
Calculated to inflict maximum damage on Brown after his blockbuster speech to conference, the switch of allegiance after backing Labour for three elections seems misguided for coming before the Tory conference has even begun.
Tory chairman Eric Pickles said he had been told the "good news" by the party's head of communications last night. The Tory head of communications is Andy Coulson, former editor of the News of the World, the Sun's sister paper.
This morning's Sun headline has strong echoes of 1992 and 1997. With Labour leader Neil Kinnock lording it in the opinion polls the Sun went on the offensive the day before the election with the man who would be prime minister trapped inside a light bulb. "If Kinnock wins today will the last person to leave Britain please turn out the lights."
The following day, after John Major won more votes than any Conservative party leader in history, the Sun welcomed the new government with the front page splash "It's The Sun Wot Won It".
It was a very different story five years later, when the Sun backed Tony Blair's opposition six weeks before the election.
Today Brown was forced to shrug off the loss of the Sun and potentially its 7.5 million plus readership from a circulation of more than three million.
"The British people will decide the election, not a newspaper," he said during a whirlwind tour of breakfast TV this morning.
"I think people really want newspapers to report news and they expect them to do so."
The prime minister may have known of the Sun's impending defection weeks ago, but rumours still swirl around Brighton that the decision wasn't given the final go-ahead until it was certain any mention of a live-televised debate was being 'dropped' from his speech.
On the eve of the prime minister's address many websites, including this one, included reports that he would agree to a series of three televised debates with David Cameron and Nick Clegg in the lead up to the general election.
Any mention of the debate was conspicuous by its absence yesterday, but the party leadership is denying that anything was dropped.
"I've no idea why Nick Robinson said that last night," business secretary Lord Mandelson told inthenews.co.uk last night. "We'll come back to it, it's not for today."
This line was repeated almost word-for-word by the prime minister this morning, when he got caught up in an increasingly bad tempered interview with Sky News political editor Adam Boulton.
Repeatedly pushed on the issue, Brown said it was not an issue of "not making my mind up".
"There is a time for that but it's not now," he said. "You are trying to make it a political issue, advertising it every day."
Boulton kept up the attack on the PM under the pretence that he actually believed the only way for him to discuss policy was in a series of debates screened on News Corp's Sky.
"You're sounding a bit like a political propagandist," Brown accused his interviewer, adding that personality 'obsessed' Boulton.
The warning signs have been there for all to see for a long time.
Yesterday culture secretary Ben Bradshaw fired a rebuttal of sorts to Rupert Murdoch's son and apparent heir at News Corp after he compared the BBC to a totalitarian government.
"No, Mr Murdoch, we do not believe that profit is the only guarantee of independence," Bradshaw said.
"We will never sacrifice the BBC on the altar of free market dogma."
Boulton and co's attempts to engineer the prime minister into a debate that would make UK political history is akin to holding him ransom; the broadcaster threatened to represent him with an empty chair if he turned them down.
Now that the Sun has dropped its support for his government, Brown will feel less beholden to appear.
Maybe he decided that he was no longer prepared to have his politics dictated by a media mogul and his empire.
Maybe the Sun and Sky would have turned on the prime minister even if he had agreed to do the debates.
Maybe Brown is paying the price for 12 years of New Labour allowing Murdoch to dictate its political agenda.
What's certain is that Brown's middle Britain mission just got a whole lot harder.