Sun setting on hypocritical politicians

Watching Labour politicians working themselves into a froth this week about the Sun after it switched allegiance to the Tories has been hilarious.
Harriet Harman told conference she was speaking about something the Sun knew nothing about - women’s rights. Union leader Tony Woodley tore up a copy of the paper, saying it had never supported Labour values.

Newsflash to Harriet and Tony - this didn’t start on Wednesday morning! The Sun has never given a damn about women (unless they’ve got their tops off) or supported worker’s rights. It’s always been the shrill voice of selfish Thatcherism.

But you didn’t hear the Labour leadership dare point out this obvious truth all the time Tony Blair’s sleazy pact with Rupert Murdoch to win the tabloid’s support held firm. The Labour movement has had to hold its nose very tight indeed for the past decade or so to curry favour with Britain’s best-selling paper. Blair, Alastair Campbell and the rest of the New Labour leadership knew this was the equivalent of entering a pact with the devil and they were prepared to do it to win and maintain power.

Anyone doing deals with with tabloid newspapers - whether it’s opportunistic politicians or grubby individuals selling kiss-and-tell stories - is swimming in shark-infested waters. At some point or other, the shark is likely to turn round and devour them. So why make a fuss when it happens? As Neil Kinnock put it, finding out the Sun was backing the Tories was the equivalent of discovering the pope was a Catholic.

That’s why all the huffing and puffing from Harman and others just reeks of hypocrisy. What it says is that it’s OK for the Sun to be sexist and anti-union - just as long as it keeps telling its readers to vote Labour. At least Gordon Brown had the good sense - from a PR point of view - to try to play down the body blow, claiming feebly that it’s voters not newspapers than decide elections.

Murdoch is cold blooded, utterly ruthless, and he only backs winners who will look out for his business interests. It will be interesting to see what price he has extracted from David Cameron in return for backing the Tories.

Cast your mind back to when the Dirty Digger switched support to New Labour in 1997. There were strong calls for newspaper reform and privacy laws to curb the worst tabloid excesses. Blair rode into power with the Sun’s blessing and - hey presto! - it’s business as usual for the papers.

James Murdoch was recently laying into the BBC at the Edinburgh Television Festival, railing about the unfair advantage the state-funded broadcaster has over commerical operations. He makes some good points. The BBC is a bloated bureaucracy, spending money like a drunken sailor - who can forgot that it sent more than 400 people to cover the Glastonbury festival and more than 300 for T in the Park? Any private sector company that sloshed the cash around like that would quickly go out of business.

Has Murdoch senior pressurised Cameron to review the licence fee for the BBC as the price of his support? It will be interesting to see.

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