"It's The Sun Wot Won It" was how Rupert Murdoch’s finest, in a page one full-frontal, analysed John Major's victory in the 1992 general election. This was the latest in the Sun's history of brilliantly impactful headlines—cheeky, in words of one syllable, hitting you in the eye will a roll-your-own, crude concept of something which you might otherwise regards as serious.
That front page said a great deal about how vulnerable the working class are to inducements to grievously abuse their power to make urgent fundamental changes in society. It also contributed to the delusion.So persistent among the press, that it can influence—even decide—the outcome of elections. This delusion must profoundly boost the egos of the press barons and the editors and the cynical hacks who write up those items and compose those artistically misleading headlines. Perhaps that is what encourages people like Murdoch and Conrad Black, and before them Robert Maxwell, to shell out millions to buy the papers.
There are, however, obvious flaws in this concept. To begin with, the press in this country overwhelmingly supports the Conservative Party so if the voters always voted as the papers advised the Tories would never lose any by-elections and there would never have been any Labour governments to pick up where the Conservatives had left off and Winston Churchill may well still be prime minister. Not that it would matter if he were, except to the morticians, because the notion that the lives of people who have to work for their living are affected in any significant way by which party they elect to try to control capitalism is just another of those stories in the papers which should not be believed.
On your bike
The most recent example of the news papers kidding themselves that they control large political issues was in the fight for the leadership of the Tory Party though this time they were primarily attempting to influence the rather small electorate of Tory MPs. The greater— and certainly the more popular—part of the Tory press were firmly opposed to Major. The Sun, wot done it for Major in 1992, has now decided that he "has loser written all over him. He is damaged goods". A screaming page one headline drove home the point that Tebbit had come out against Major: "On Your Bike, John." The front page of the Daily Mail was devoted to a cartoon of a sinking liner—the Torytanic—and the advice: “Time To Ditch the Captain." In what preens itself as the quality press the Times and the Daily Telegraph were keen for a change, with the Telegraph condemning Major as unlikely to alter his policies so "as to give the Tories a realistic prospect of winning a general election". There is no equivalent in elections to the Trades Description Act, but if there were disgruntled voters would have had grounds of complaint about this apparent exposure as an incompetent wimp of the man the press were urging us to vote for so recently.
Only the Daily Star, the Daily Express ("the voice of reason in a cacophony of extremist nonsense") and the Financial Times supported Major but their combined circulation is little more than half that of the Sun by itself. So it turned out that the press campaign had little effect on what is surrealistically known as the most sophisticated electorate in the world. (Anyone who has observed Honourable members prancing and preening before the electoral hoi polloi in the lobby or behaving like empty-headed disruptives in the House must wonder why they call themselves sophisticated, but never mind.). Although the Tories voted to keep Major there were enough who did not support him to make a significant body of irritants which must be eager to exploit his problems in the future, with or without the approval of the press.
Losers
What decides how an MP votes in a leadership election is whether the leader is a vote-winner or a loser. That was why the Tories ditched Heath and then Thatcher. The voters did not reject Thatcher, she had led the Tories to victory in three successive elections but by 1990 enough MPs were convinced that the Iron Lady was corrosive of their majorities to overthrow her. She said it was a funny old world and she wept real tears as she left DowningStreet but someone should have told her that this was politics. If the Tory press had been asked they might well have wanted to keep Thatcher, who had seen off Callaghan and Foot and Kinnock not to mention General Galtieri and a few hundred Argentinean sailors on the Bclgrano. But reality—the Tory confidence that they are the great election winning machine—intruded in the persons of the men in grey suits and, whatever the papers said, her time had come.
However loud the Tory papers screamed, Major won because he was the safer bet while Redwood could not reassure enough Tory MPs that their majorities would endure and flourish with him as leader. It was, in other words, not the papers but the MPs—fearful, ambitious, calculating—wot done it.
Ivan
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