The Setting Sun?

If Gordon Brown sends that the way of the News of the World - and after the last week, who would bet against anything at all? - then what, exactly, will pay for The Times and the Sunday Times? What will become of Rupert Murdoch's Oliver Kamm, as I urge everyone to think of him before seeking to reproduce here or anywhere else any of his or his cultists' tired fantasies about me, Neil Clark or whoever?

On which note, there is apparently an attempt in certain circles to bracket the undoubtedly reprehensible, but hardly earth-shattering, behaviour of Johann Hari with the doings of News International. Rich beyond Croesus on at least two grounds, namely the invocation of Rupert Murdoch's Oliver Kamm on the matter of interference with one's enemies Wikipedia entries, and the identity of at least one of the participants.

Hari has not helped his cause by his Andy Hayman-like profession to be unable to see the problem. But, for all the many aspects of his writing that are certainly obnoxious to me, the removal of a commentator who has recanted his support for the Iraq War, and who provides an articulate social democratic critique of the Coalition's neo-Blairism, would be far worse for media plurality, either than Rupert Murdoch's now inconceivable acquisition of the rest of BSkyB, or than the fall of any one or more of his remaining newspapers.

For British media are currently no more pluralistic than British politics, and following the victory of Ed Miliband even less so. Three men all saying exactly the same thing are not manifesting pluralism merely because they happen to be wearing three different colours of tie that inspire the purely historic, tribal allegiance of different sections of a shrinking active electorate. And however many newspapers all saying the same thing are not manifesting pluralism merely by having different mastheads that inspire the purely historic, tribal allegiance of different sections of a shrinking readership.