Words Dept.: entry

It’s easy to buy into the Sun’s rhetoric that by not backing Labour at the next election, as it will officially announce tomorrow, the paper will somehow guide public opinion in favour of the Tories. You can almost sense the “Sun wot won it for Dave” headlines now.

I’ve just watched the Sun’s political editor George Pascoe-Watson turn in a deeply self-important performance on Newsnight, in which he suggested hacks at the halfwit’s comic had “warned” Labour over what they saw as policy failures and gave the Government a “last chance”. He seems to think it is perfectly natural – and even desirable – for tabloid journalists to boss elected politicians around, which is, when you think about it, plainly stupid.

The whole story about the importance of which political party the Sun does/doesn’t support (currently the lead on Sky News) is disingenuous for two reasons. Firstly, the paper is only ever going to back the winner at a general election, so what’s actually happened is not that the paper has withdrawn its support but instead that it has finally realised, some months after everyone else, that Labour has no chance of winning. Secondly, in a more pluralistic internet age and in the context of a general pattern of declining circulation, whatever it thinks or doesn’t think is quickly, and thankfully, becoming pretty much irrelevant.