Murdoch: Who Cares?

Who cares whether the Murdoch Press is about to opt for what remains of the Tories? Like Margaret Thatcher, Rupert Murdoch is massively overrated.

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.

Cocooned in Wapping, Murdoch's London operation might sincerely believe that Cameron has a following outside the area where his party already holds most of the seats anyway. But he hasn't. So let them transfer their allegiance to him, as they long ago transferred their affections.

There are all sorts of reasons to want Gordon Brown to lose the next Election, but they all depend on the existence of a better alternative, which the Tories simply are not: they are neither better nor, in any politically meaningful sense, an alternative. And the constituency map is such that they cannot possibly win, no matter what, ever again.

So, if it must be Brown, then let it be Brown in the teeth of Murdoch, killing 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?