"WILL the last person to leave Britain please switch off the light". The Sun's front page quip in oculist high letters, memorably illustrated with Neil Kinnock's head in a light bulb, is now part of newspaper mythology.
For years the pen wielding picadors of the tabloid press had taunted and jeered the Labour leader, presenting him as a boorish, vulgar, windbag of a Welsh boyo. Pinpricks though he claimed them to be, their darts proved poisoned and drained him of credibility far beyond the Sun's working class constituency. The final thrust of the Sun's headline toreadors on polling day finished him and his party's hopes for government.
Was the Sun really responsible for Labour's defeat? Certainly Tory chairman Alistair McAlpine thought so. As the second memorable Sun headline of the 1992 election put it: "It was the Sun wot won it." Those were the good old days when the British press was clearly defined along fault lines of class and politics. In the right hand corner were elder statesman, the Times and the Telegraph, followed by the tradesmen and yeomen of middle England, the Mail and the Express. Shoring them up from below, the huge constituency of the working class Sun. Their respective Sundays followed suit.
IN the left corner the Guardian, Observer and Mirror flexed their socialist muscles but, since the 1950s and the demise of the Daily Herald and News Chronicle there has been no middle rung. At least none has survived. The Sun started on the left in the 1960s but when bought by Rupert Murdoch metamorphosed into the right wing tits'n'bums tabloid we have now.
Today, another brave attempt folded last summer. Meanwhile the new pugilist in the ring the Independent, staggers on although its future as the only truly politically independent newspaper is in increasing doubt.
But the fault lines are shifting. The local government elections in England on Thursday showed the shape of things to come. Far from being roused from their polling by breakfast by editorials exhorting them to up and out and vote Conservative, readers were entertained with more anti Tory whinges than a Labour pamphlet.
The erosion of local power by the Tories since 1979 (83 per cent of local expenditure is now centrally funded), said the Telegraph, had left local government "little more than a branch office of Whitehall". As a result, they concluded, the local elections were irrelevant, simply serving as the most public of opinion polls.
The Daily Mail - 100 years old this month and which, according to media commentator and former Mail foreign correspondent Ann Leslie, "articulates perfectly the aspirations of middle England, especially Mrs Middle England" - was equally blunt. The "cull", it said, would be the voters' verdict on "the shambles over beef, the wobbles over Europe, the broken promises over tax". As for the Sun's comment column, the local elections didn't even get a mention.
So what has happened? According to John Sweeney, presenter of media TV show Spin, John Major has happened and Tony Blair has happened. And whatever the electorate might think, it's not really about beef or Europe. (None of the quality papers advocates getting out of Europe, although only the Guardian, Observer and, interestingly, the Financial Times go along with the full Labour Europackage.) It's about the Tory press's dislike of the poor, hapless Prime Minister who can't even sack people with authority, let alone do anything else.
They loathe the jumped up circus performer's son because he isn't one of them and because he isn't Mrs Thatcher, the sexy mama of British politics who kept her cabinet and the country in line.
THIS is understandable - perhaps for the Wind In The Willows style of broadsheet editors who dream of a return to 1930s Britain, and see their role largely in keeping the stoats and weasels from breaking into the drawing room and helping themselves to the port. But the tabloids? "They loved Mrs T," says Sweeney, "because she was theatrical and dramatic. Major is boring. Tories are boring. And Fleet Street, corrupt and disgusting though it might be, reflects what the country thinks."
So why not dump Major and draft in Heseltine who's one of the chaps and knows how to play to the gallery? The story broken by the Mail on Tuesday of a secret deal made last summer during the Tory leadership crisis should have proved the perfect peg. In return for backing Major, it was claimed, Heseltine was promised the premiership should the local elections prove disastrous.
Major and Heseltine's denials were standard fare. But the press did nothing to fuel the incipient fire. Neither did it bother to attack Labour, whose record in local government is far from ship shape. Why not? The simple answer is because Fleet Street recognises a winner when it sees one and everyone wants to back a winner. Blair is certainly the coming man and, as one journalist put it: "Men with money don't f** with power."
Above the changing menu of editors who run the papers are the press barons. Lords Beaverbrook and Northcliffe may have gone but Lords Rothermere (Mail), Stevens (Express), Cowdry (Financial Times) are still there, not to mention the colonial aristocracy of Murdoch (Times, Sun, etc.) and Conrad Black (Telegraph).
Newspapers are largely exercises in philanthropy and are lucky to break even. Money needs to be made elsewhere. There is money aplenty in television and so, therefore, are the barons. The EU does not look kindly on such pan media control. Britain currently has no such scruples and the barons would rather it remained that way.
Murdoch's cosying up to Blair was cemented early last year with the Labour leader's visit to Murdoch's nerve centre in Australia. Their tacit agreement seemed to follow, if not precisely "I'll scratch your back" lines, at least an understanding not to kick the other where it hurts.
But the coming man is not the only answer. The old Tory/Labour demarcation lines are increasingly blurred - from Europe, through family values to the market economy - and there's little to distinguish the Tory left from the Labour right.
The economy Blair will inherit will not allow for dismantling the privatisation Ferris wheel. Former miners' leader Arthur Scargill's new revisionist party, the last vestige of old style socialism, is ignored by the left wing press as irrelevant. The new editor of the Observer, Will Hutton, is the author of the best selling leftist look at a people friendly economy. Andrew Marr, the Independent's new editor, also a writer, says that under him the paper will be ideas and writing led. He wants to reclaim the moral high ground and to retain the paper's independence, although it is now largely owned by the Mirror Group.
The Express - the diehard paper of the Tory shires - is now co owned by Lords Stevens and Hollich, the former a Tory grandee, the latter a Labour lovey. Their new editor, Richard Addis, is no shirk when it comes to oldstyle family values and it is unlikely that the attack on Tony Blair's wife, Cherie (which back fired on the newspaper), will be repeated. How long the truce will last is anybody's guess.
But there will be no demonising Blair, at least until the general election. After that, the gloves will be off and it will be business as usual.
