The Sun King

Here's an intelligent and thoughtful article by David Aaronovitch - who writes regularly as a commentator for The Times newspaper.

Now I don't know David Aaronovitch, personally.

I would say he's not an anti-Labour in any way - more of a natural Labour supporter, if anything - but prepared to speak his mind and speak out against hypocrisy within any political party - of the left or the right.

I never had any truck with the News of the World - which pulled a few good scoops admittedly although without ever adding much to the credit side of UK journalism - in my opinion anyway.

I'm not a fan of The Sun either, I have to admit - but I could say the same thing about the Daily Record and The Mirror group of newspapers - which have behaved as  sycophantic cheerleaders for the Labour party - for many years.

Without a word of complaint from Labour, it has to be said - just as there was no complaint from Labour when News International gave a favourable press to Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.

So I think David Aaronovitch has hit the nail squarely on the head - No Murdoch, no Thatcher, no defeat - makes no sense.

The Left believes it was The Sun wot won it

Murdoch is still blamed for the Catastrophe of Thatcher. Without him, the workers wouldn’t have voted Maggie in

After the Milly Dowler phone-hacking revelations last July, and before a single piece of evidence had been heard by the House of Commons Media Select Committee, I believe that the Labour MP Tom Watson had decided what he wanted the committee’s conclusions to be.

How could it be otherwise? His book, Dial M for Murdoch, was published this week to coincide with the publication of the committee’s report and begins by asserting — without qualification — that News Corporation has exerted “a poisonous, secretive influence on public life in Britain” and has “used its huge power to bully, intimidate and cover up”. So rapid was the book’s publication that elementary errors of fact, such as the claim that the BBC’s political editor, Nick Robinson, worked for Sky, remained unchecked and uncorrected.

When Mr Watson forced through the committee the line that Rupert Murdoch was not “a fit and proper person” to run an international business, he went far beyond what the evidence to the committee had indicated. As his Labour compatriot Jim Sheridan volunteered to the BBC on Tuesday night: “It was inconceivable that he [Rupert Murdoch] didn’t know about it [phone hacking]. Yes, we didn’t have the evidence to suggest that that was the case, but it’s clear that in the public’s eye this was unacceptable.”

When the first headlines appeared on Tuesday quoting the committee’s contested conclusion, Mr Watson may have thought that he’d brought about one of the most unlikely victories in recent history — the triumph of the Left over one of its greatest institutional enemies. It was his work that allowed Ed Miliband to say yesterday that “the Murdoch spell has been broken”. Rejoice! Rejoice!

What for my friends and comrades on the Left was, or is, the Murdoch spell? Latterly it referred to the idea that Labour leaders were forced away from their natural inclinations for fear of what “Murdoch” would say or do to them. With News International selling a third of the newspapers in Britain, Labour people were supplicant at Rupert’s feet for fear of suffering the fate of Neil Kinnock. They dared not endorse left policies, dared not be nice about Europe, dared not attempt any decent radicalism lest Jeremy Clarkson and Trevor Kavanagh were set upon them.

It may be that Mr Watson was particularly sensitive to this possibility. He was famously a spear carrier for Gordon Brown, attempting to organise a putsch against Tony Blair in Brown’s favour in 2006. But Mr Brown was the most assiduous Murdoch-courter of any prime minister, before failing to win the endorsement of any News International newspaper in 2010.

When I met a person very close to Mr Miliband shortly after his election as Labour leader, I was told that part of his strategy was to try to remove the institutional blocks to the advance of the Left in Britain. One of the most important of these blocks was Rupert Murdoch.

It is hard to overemphasise the particular place in the demonology of the British Left that is occupied by the Murdochs. For many of us the Catastrophe of Thatcher was utterly unexpected. Even after her first victory we had expected a fairly fast return to the postwar consensus. We had been certain that the British people, and especially working people, would turf Mrs Thatcher out. Instead they kept voting her in.

There were two explanations for this, as there are for all long-term political failures: we wuz wrong or we wuz robbed. Many went for the latter. And why had the famous C2s, skilled workers, so perversely gone for Mrs T? Because they bought The Sun and the News of the World — once centrist papers and now, under Mr Murdoch, Thatcherite. Mr Murdoch had “peddled” poison to the people. He had alienated them from their true champions, which would have been us. No Murdoch, no Thatcher, no defeat.

This was a dominant left narrative until Tony Blair became Labour leader and said, in effect, “we wuz wrong”. But the Thatcher years, with the miners strike, the enemy within, market triumphalism and then Mr Murdoch’s smashing of the print unions at Wapping, was terribly wounding for the Left. As if that wasn’t bad enough for them, Murdoch’s success coincided with and epitomised what was happening in popular culture . In 1986 a renowned topless model was deployed by The Sun during the print dispute at Wapping under the legend “Samantha Fox has joined up and is pointing her bazookas at the enemy lines”. Over 30 years those bestselling papers (and then their websites) filled up with soap opera and adultery and our TV screens shimmered with flesh.

The ethical vacuity of the whole tabloid world (I particularly loathe its ”monstering” of unlucky targets), its intense competition and the size and complexity of News Corporation combined in deadly fashion to create the current opportunity for the Tom Watsons. Branching out from the revelations of widespread illegality in certain parts of News International, and the subsequent cover-up, it has become possible to level almost any charge at any part of the organisation. Politicians claimed to be subjected to (unspecified or anonymous) threats and blackmail. Rebekah Brooks was a mafioso. “Corruption” was widespread “throughout News International”.

Those of us who work for The Times know that such exaggeration comes close to outright falsehood. I understand perfectly how this sounds, but I’ll say it anyway: this newspaper is the best run and most collegiate of any media organisation that I’ve worked for, and I’ve worked for a few. Mr Murdoch, therefore, is eminently fit enough to run us. As for TV, Uncle Rupert, as none of us call him, bought a loss-making satellite operation in the 1980s and, against the background of derision and opposition, turned it into BSkyB. He believed in it, invested in it, made the losses and came through. Is he fit to run it? The question is almost ludicrous.

Rupert Murdoch didn’t and doesn’t actually change big policies. Tony Blair — a convinced European — was not swayed by News International’s Europhobe inclinations. And credit, if any is due, for not joining the euro more properly lies with Gordon Brown than with any Sun editor.

Despite that, I myself have no quarrel with the long march of accountability through the various corridors of power, however uncomfortable. I welcome it. But I would prefer it to be led by people who are not associated, as Tom Watson is, with attempting the “rehabilitation of old-style trade union fixing and activist stitch-ups”, as Tony Blair said in his memoirs. Such politics was all, said Mr Blair, “great fun for those who like that sort of thing”. But the thing is, most of us don’t.