Was It The Sun Wot Won It In 1997?

There was a very interesting programme on Radio Four yesterday morning, about the relationship between Tony Blair and Rupert Murdoch. It stuck, I regret to say, to the old line about Murdoch's political importance in Britain. In fact, despite (like the Sun) the de facto editorship of Alastair Campbell, not only do I doubt that many Times readers are Labour voters, but I suspect that most of them would buy the Daily Telegraph instead if they ever suspected that the Times were a Labour-supporting newspaper.

But that doesn't really matter: what matters is the only too successful transformation of Times readers into Blair-thinking people, even if they actually vote Tory and imagine themselves to despise Tony Blair. This has now had a very dramatic effect on exactly its intended target, namely the Conservative Party.

As for the Sun, half of its readers always did vote Labour, and most of the other half had resolved to do so a period of years before the Sun changed its own line (and a period of years before anyone other than political obsessives had ever heard of Tony Blair), which it probably only did in order to prevent a haemorrhage to the Daily Mirror if it had been daft enough to advocate the re-election of John Major in 1997.