There won't be commissars at the Telegraph but
New Labour may punish its enemies in the press
STEPHEN GLOVER
So the day is over, the fight is done. As I write this I have no idea as to the size of New Labour's overall majority. Is it 100? Or 150? Or 200? Only you know, dear reader. But if it is enormous, all but the most pig-headed Labour supporters can surely see that there is a danger of a one-party state. And, of course, one of the characteristics of oneparty states is that they control the press.
I am not suggesting that there will be New Labour commissars sitting in at Daily Telegraph leader conferences. Not yet, at any rate. But the party is likely to flex its muscles in another way. During this campaign it has perfected a technique it employed throughout the last parliament — that of refusing to engage with its critics.
New Labour did not let the comic Rory Bremner on its campaign buses. It similarly tried to exclude the novelist and self-publicist Will Self, though perhaps more forgivably in view of Mr Self s drug-taking shenanigans during the 1997 campaign. With James Naughtie often out of the way on the Today programme's slightly tiresome battlebus, the floor has been left to the more steely John Humphrys, who gave Tony Blair and Yvette Cooper, a junior health minister, a nasty going over. Last week New Labour refused for a time to allow any of its ministers to appear on the programme. Mr Blair declined to give an interview to the Daily Telegraph, presumably because of its critical editorial line.
Let us imagine another whacking majority. New Labour will continue to help its friends in the media, of whom there are many. I caught a whiff of this when I travelled on the party's battlebus last week. Some of my journalistic colleagues had been on the bus for the duration, and whatever tendencies they might once have had to criticise New Labour had been whittled down. Mr Blair's more bizarre campaigning stunts were cheerfully indulged. On one occasion the media minders organised a quiz for the journalists on the bus, with a prize of a bottle of wine. All very cosy. What happened here can serve as a paradigm for much of Fleet Street.
But there remain some misguided souls who have not yet taken the Labour shilling. These risk being exiled to the Siberian salt mines after the election. They are not all clustered in the same media organisations. For example, I doubt that Alastair Campbell, the Prime Minister's press secretary, will ever lay out the red carpet for the Daily Minor's Paul Routledge. The Mirror may be supinely proLabour, but Mr Routledge is regarded as a curmudgeon. Equally, although the BBC is generally seen as sympathetic to the cause, a few of its journalists such as Mr Humphrys are regarded as off-limits. Throughout the media there is a healthy sprinkling of independentminded journalists who may find their calls not being returned by Mr Campbell and his staff.
Two newspapers in particular will not bask in the approval of No. 10 — the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail. Already even Telegraph lobby journalists who are broadly sympathetic to New Labour (there are one or two of them) are finding their access reduced. The Daily Mail is no longer the favourite reading of the Prime Minister, and commentators who complain that his first and greatest wish is to please the editor of the Daily Mail are way out of date. New Labour is just about to discover that it can win a huge victory without the Mail, and that is bound to lead to a certain amount of swaggering. Of course, it is always open to the editors of these papers to row towards New Labour on the basis that, with a five-year stretch in front of them, there is no point in loitering in an inlet. But from what I know of them I don't foresee any huge change of heart. Indeed, during the coming months, when the Tories may again be indulging in their now traditional ritual of self-immolation, these two papers may constitute the chief opposition to New Labour.
I could get on my soapbox and say that it would be profoundly undemocratic, as well as foolhardy, for Mr Campbell to freeze out two newspapers that between them have nine million readers. So it would be. And yet I'm not unduly alarmed. Maybe it is partly because I am a columnist, and columnists can bang on in any circumstances. It is far more vexing for reporters to be denied access though, even if they are, the more enterprising ones will find a way to get their stories — perhaps from more sympathetic members of the Cabinet who do not exactly toe the Downing Street line. But my main reason for being relatively serene is that I am counting on New Labour to foul up sooner or later on the basis that all governments eventually do. In that case most of the rest of the press is bound to become more adversarial. The barrage may begin when Mr Blair announces that he wants to take Britain into the euro.
Which brings me to the Times, which on Tuesday predictably endorsed the Labour party for the first time in the paper's history. Its essential argument was that Tony Blair is the natural heir of Margaret Thatcher and has the added advantage of having a human face.
Two weeks ago I pointed out that the Times no longer thunders against the euro. For much of the campaign it has barely noticed it. The issue was addressed at the end of Tuesday's long leader. The paper's line was that the euro is a less pressing concern than it was in 1997. This is because 'for practical and political reasons a referendum is unlikely to be possible in the next parliament'. But even if the paper was wrong about this, it was 'confident that the euro can be defeated in any plebiscite'.
I wonder whether it will live to regret these sentiments. For it seems more likely than not that there will be a referendum during the next five years, and it is perfectly possible that New Labour will win it. If that happens, the paper will have lent its support to a party that will have brought about something which, it told us in 1997, was the least desirable outcome imaginable in British politics. Either those boys at the Times are not thinking straight, or they dislike the euro much less than they used to.
The polling organisation MORI has consistently suggested a bigger Labour majority than the other pollsters. Two weeks ago in the Times MORI indicated a Labour lead over the Tories of an enormous 25 per cent. Last week, after a change in methodology, MORI's figure was reduced to 18 per cent, but it was up again to 23 per cent in a poll for the Sunday Telegraph. ICM, by contrast, has consistently suggested much smaller Labour majorities. In Wednesday's Guardian it had Labour's lead at 11 per cent. The difference in terms of the number of seats is huge. MORI and ICM can't both be right. This is a subject to which I will return when we know the result.
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