British National Newspapers and the Blair Government. Part I: The Easy Ride, 1997 – 2001

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Notes

¹Nessheim, 349 – 81.

²E.g. by Geoffrey Wheatcroft in his entertaining book-length “obituary”, The Strange Death of Tory England. The hardcover edition was published before the Tories began their slow recovery under Michael Howard. The author added some “new material” to the paperback edition which appeared a few months later, but stopped well short of conceding that the obituary was premature.

³ The Times did not go tabloid until 2004.

⁴See e.g. Rawnsley; Seldon, ed., passim.

⁵Margaret Scammell and Martin Harrop, “The Press Disarmed,” in Butler and Kavanagh, 157.

⁶In The Times, Simon Jenkins called the PM's “forces of conservatism” speech “a shameless hotchpotch of clichés, platitudes, bromides and stocking fillers”, while Matthew Parris characterised it as “pure Billy Graham” (29 September 1999). In aGuardian article on the same day (“Tambourine man's promise of salvation”), Simon Hoggart compared the speech to a revivalist meeting.

⁷Butler and Kavanagh, 3.

⁸When a change of government was on the cards, The Times advised its readers to vote for Eurosceptic candidates, irrespective of party.

⁹According to Paul Routledge's biography, it was largely Mandelson's achievement that a majority of national newspapers continued to support the party.

¹⁰TheGuardian leader writer, who thought it “lacked intellectual coherence”, went less far than Hugo Young, who called it a mixture of “gobbledegook and platitude”. TheIndependent wondered whether the PM was showing signs of “a debilitating condition known as Majoritis”, and thought that “Mr Blair's efforts to establish a personal credo by reconciling ‘old’ and ‘new’ veer[ed] into unintentional comedy”. TheTelegraph said that “the usual platitudes … failed to do the trick”, and theMail spoke of “the perils of spin”. The Sun thought the speech was full of “hot air” and “empty catchwords”, and warned the Prime Minister against substituting “spin” for substance.

¹¹By contrast, the Independent thought the speech might have been a sermon delivered by the Vicar of St Albion. In theGuardian, Hugo Young made the same point: “Mr Blair seemed like his Private Eye nemesis, the trendy, passive-aggressive vicar … [attempting] to be all things to all men”; “Labour was new. But it was also old. The ‘new’ was ‘necessary in order to “renew” the old’. History is good: ‘We love British history, Britain's cultural heritage.’ But change is also good.”

¹²Rawnsley, 375.

¹³On the Mirror front page, “Bridget Hague” made the following Diary entry: “June 7, 2001: Nightmare! Told we're going to be left on shelf AGAIN!!”

¹⁴This included the Tory “big beasts” who were held chiefly responsible for the fall of Mrs. Thatcher.

¹⁵During the 1997 campaign, an alliance had been forged between New Labour and the third party, the latter being inevitably short-changed by the first-past-the-post system. Since the landslide victory meant that Labour could govern without Lib Dem support, electoral reform was quietly dropped from the agenda.

¹⁶A MORI poll published in The Times showed Labour on 45 per cent and the Conservatives on 30 per cent. The Telegraph Gallup Poll had Labour on 48 per cent, as against 32 per cent for the Conservatives.

¹⁷ The Times, 5 June 2001; 7 June 2001.

¹⁸ Sun, 28 May 2001.

¹⁹The main MUSTs were a working health service, with more nurses, doctors, and equipment; reduced class sizes in secondary schools; a modern transport system; more police on the beat and tougher policies on crime.

²⁰Butler and Kavanagh, 163.

²¹ Daily Mail, 2 June 2001.

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Ragnhild M. V. Nessheim

Ragnhild M. V. Nessheim is Associate Professor (Emeritus) of British Civilisation Studies, Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages, University of Oslo, Norway.