Friday 13 June 2008

The East Riding: Unlikely, But Overdue, Graveyard Of Rupert Murdoch

Rupert Murdoch's influence is massively overrated, and his intervention in the latest by-election is a splendid opportunity to rid this country's political life of him once and for all.

Just how many people on the Henry Jackson Society/Euston Manifesto Group circuit are on Murdoch's payroll? And now he is even finding a way (which he will, foreign national or no foreign national) of bankrolling those great intellectuals' preferred candidate for a seat in the Mother of Parliaments, Kelvin MacKenzie. They must be very proud.

Most Times and Sunday Times readers have no idea that they are buying Labour-supporting papers, and would switch to the Telegraph if they ever cottoned on. However good Sky News might be, hardly anybody watches it. No one ever bought the News of the World for the politics.

And as for the Sun, half of its readers always did vote Labour, while most of the other half had already decided to do so a period of years before it followed suit (or, indeed, before anyone other than political anoraks had ever heard of Tony Blair) in order to preserve its privileged access to Ministers.

There are all sorts of excellent reasons to vote for David Davis. They include that his victory would kill off, once and for all, the Murdoch Myth in Britain. And once it has fallen in one country, in how many others might it collapse rapidly thereafter?

6 comments:

  1. Kamm pretends to be a Times columnist, but he isn't really.

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  2. David, i hope you can dispel the rumours sweeping Westminster that the BPA has suffered a number of key resignations over your decision to back Davis. Many BPA members are horrified by the prospect of the party's first major decision is to back a Conservative neo-con MP. Surely this is just mischief making by those opposed to the BPA.

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  3. Word is that Kelvin's got cold feet. Or, "no balls" as he would say.

    Most people read the Sun backwards - for the sports coverage rather than the editorial line.

    But we can expect the Murdoch press to be printing pictures of terrorism victims without their consent (like they did on the eve of the 90 day vote) and digging up stories about Davis' personal life that are of no consequence (during a previous Lib Dem leadership contest, they outed Simon Hughes by rifling through his rubbish to find evidence he'd called a gay chatline).

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  4. Davis a neocon? Have you read his resignation speech? If we'd backed MacKenzie, now that would have been a story.

    I know, Charlie, I was truly shocked at the outing of Simon Highes.

    Actually, I wonder who the Sun's preferred candidate for Lib Dem Leader was. Since only Lib Dems could stand, it seems rather academic to the Sun.

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  5. Hughes was talking social justice, so perhaps that's why he had to be taken down. Now the neoliberals are hegemonic within the LibDems - progressive taxation policies have been axed.

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  6. As deserves to be much better-known than it is.

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