Training | 2009.11.12
Politicians should stop sucking up to the tabloids | Alexander Chancellor
It makes them look unprincipled and probably won\'t help them win elections either
Is power finally draining away from the old capofamiglia? While his rottweiler, the Sun, spent the week savaging the British prime minister, Rupert Murdoch made what sounded like a rather pathetic confession of impotence. "The editors in Britain have turned very much against Gordon Brown, who is a friend of mine," he said in an interview with his Australian television network. "I regret it."
Is it conceivable that any of Murdoch\'s editors would ever knowingly do anything that he might regret? Hitherto, it certainly wouldn\'t have been. But the old man in New York is now not the only Murdoch to whom these lackeys feel they must defer. Rupert\'s son James is the man on the spot, running News International in Britain, and he has recently been flexing his muscles. Not only has he taken to publicly denigrating the BBC Trust and the media regulator, Ofcom; he is alleged by Lord Mandelson to have done a deal with David Cameron by which the Sun has agreed to switch its support from Labour to the Conservatives in return for political favours Cameron will bestow on Sky television if he comes to power.
Be that as it may, the Sun has now turned on the leader of the Labour party with its traditional cynicism and brutality. I am no fan of Brown, but the sight of his letter of condolence to Jacqui Janes over the death in Afghanistan of her soldier son Jamie made me warm to him for the first time in ages. It was the clumsiness, the bad handwriting, and the obvious strain that had gone into this stilted effort that I found particularly touching. And I am glad to say that most people seem to have felt the same, for an opinion poll on Wednesday found that 65% considered the Sun\'s coverage "inappropriate" and 48% said they were better disposed towards Brown as a result.
"Bloody shameful" was the Sun\'s frontpage headline about Brown\'s supposed "disrespect" to Janes with his "gaffe-strewn note". But what really is "bloody shameful" is the way the top people in both main political parties (excepting Mandelson) suck up so cravenly to the Murdoch empire. You might expect Brown, with nothing more to lose, to excoriate the Sun for its contemptible behaviour in his regard; but instead he just pleads for understanding and telephones Murdoch in America with an appeal for help (though a fat lot of good that will have done him). You might also expect Cameron to show some decency and let it be known that in this particular circumstance his sympathies lie with the prime minister; but having so recently secured the Sun\'s backing, including, remarkably, even the support of that Eurosceptic newspaper for his reneging on a "cast-iron" promise of a referendum on the Lisbon treaty, he is not going to do even the tiniest thing that might jeopardise this.
Meanwhile, imitating the Sun\'s crude personalisation of its anti- Labour campaign, the Daily Mirror has contrived unconvincingly to blame Cameron for its tabloid rival\'s "shameless exploitation of a mother\'s grief". "We hope David Cameron is proud of his puppetmasters and their snide political games," was how it ended an editorial on Wednesday. And yesterday, parallelling the Sun\'s condemnation of Brown for failing to bow his head at the Cenotaph, the Mirror published another editorial accusing Cameron of "exploiting the war dead" by having "a set of staged publicity photographs" taken of him looking grave and humble in the Westminster Abbey Garden of Remembrance.
If politicians yearn for public respect, a better way of getting it even than submitting honest expenses would be to stop kowtowing to newspapers such as the Sun and the Mirror. Not only does this make politicians seem weak and unprincipled; it may not even be of much benefit to them. With their declining circulations and loosening hold on their readers\' affections, the power of the tabloids to swing elections is increasingly in doubt. The first party leader to tell them to go and get stuffed may well be the one that the country most takes to its heart.
A blow for \'poppy fascism\'
On Remembrance Day, I turned on the television to watch the Channel 4 News, and there was Jon Snow looking perfectly normal in every respect but one: he was wearing a poppy in his lapel. It is three years since Snow caused controversy by refusing to wear a poppy on air. He said then that he was always being asked to raise awareness of a cause by wearing its emblem on television – an Aids ribbon, a Marie Curie flower, and so on – but always refused because "I do not believe in wearing anything that represents any kind of statement". "Additionally," he went on, "there is a rather unpleasant breed of poppy fascism out there – \'He damned well must wear a poppy!\'."
So what has now persuaded him to yield to this "poppy fascism"? It could be that this year, as he presided on Remembrance Day over a television debate about the war in Afghanistan, in which relatives and comrades of dead British soldiers took part, he couldn\'t face the thought of the media furore that would inevitably have followed any suggestion of lack of patriotism on his part.
Or maybe he had had a genuine change of heart – in which case, I think he should take another look at his collection of hideous, horizontally striped ties and ask himself if they, too, might not be looking somewhat dated and not quite in keeping with the times in which we live.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]/alexander-chancellor-tabloids
