‘Mondeo Man’ Was a News of the World Reader
Tony Blair was right to court Rupert Murdoch. It was his job, reckons Tom Harris. Pity Gordon Brown was useless at it.
10 Jul 2011, 20:54
Mondeo Man has deserted Labour
Too many Labour activists breathed a sigh of relief when Gordon walked up Downing Street as Prime Minister for the first time and promised a new way of governing. Well, we certainly got that, I suppose…
Tony’s close relationship with News International was never viewed by Labour activists with anything approaching approval. When he and Alastair Campbell flew thousands of miles to court Rupert Murdoch, they held their noses and kept (most of) their criticism to themselves. When The Sun backed Labour in three general elections in a row, their view was “Well, so what? We were always going to win anyway.”
And when, inevitably, after Gordon had been in charge for 27 months, The Sun switched its support to David Cameron, Labour conference had a field day. Unite general secretary Tony Woodley delighted delegates by ripping a copy up in front of the cameras. Harriet confidently sneered at the newspaper’s “News in Briefs”, where daily nuggets of wisdom about national and world events are placed in the mouths of young women wearing very, very few clothes and whose photographs appear on page three. Oh, how the delegates laughed!
After all, this was a red top, a tabloid! What need did the People’s Party have for tabloid newspapers, for goodness sake?
As I wrote in my own blog at the time:
Labour should be very careful about how we respond to The Sun‘s decision to abandon support for our party.Snobbery towards those who read tabloids has never been far below the surface of certain members of the Left. Which is why an electoral endorsement from, say, The Guardian, has always been viewed by some as more important than one from The Sun. Such an attitude is, of course, completely bonkers given the relative readerships of those organs. When we went in pursuit of “Mondeo Man”, the fabled and important swing voter whose support would decide the outcome of the 1997 election, we were happy to accept his choice of car; we were less keen to know about his choice of breakfast reading of a Sunday morning.
I’m not at all sure that the “well, it’s a rubbish paper anyway” is an appropriate response, given how grateful we were for their support over the past 12 years.
And attacking a newspaper for its journalistic standards can easily be seen as an attack on its readership. And a lot of people still read The Sun.
And for “people” read “voters”.
The reason Blair courted Murdoch is because he recognised that after 18 years in opposition, we needed every advantage we could possibly get in the upcoming election. Blair wooed Murdoch because as leader of the Labour Party it was his job.
That snobbery – towards those who work on red tops as well as towards those who read them – has become unpleasantly obvious in the last week. The appalling decision by Murdoch to close the News of the World was utterly unnecessary and cruel, but was typical of the kind of dramatic gesture a corporation like News International is capable of – and can afford.
Having called for a boycott of the paper since the latest disgraceful revelations about phone hacking, some of the Left were left in a strange predicament. Had the boycott been successful, it may have closed the paper down. But now the Devil Incarnate Himself had closed it down, sacking everyone associated with it. Aren’t we supposed to oppose Murdoch when he does this sort of thing? Closing the News of the World was our job, not his!
Labour’s going to have to accept that persuading a formerly hostile newspaper or news organisation to switch support to us is no less acceptable or necessary than persuading their readers – in other words, those who voted for our opponents – to do the same.
Expressing our long-contained antipathy to the tabloids was one symptom of the death of New Labour; losing the 2010 general election was the other.
Still, at least we managed to do that without the support of The Sun, eh…?
Comments (6)
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Surely part of the reason New Labour achieved so little in 13 years (and I do not think it achieved nothing) was that because it simply hewed to the basically Thatcherite lines coming from News International.
I would rather have a Labour government (conservative) than a Conservative government, but what I really want is a proper Labour government.
The basic corruption at the soul of New Labour can be seen in how many - Hutton, Mandelson, Blair etc. - have been willing to either rally to the Tories or just go out and make soul-corrupting amounts of money.
10/07/2011 21:56Sorry, but this seems to me wrong on almost all counts. It seems to accept the myth that Murdoch's (or anyone else's) newspapers affect election results, an idea carefully fostered by Murdoch and Co. but for which there's not the slightest evidence. It's likelier that the old rogue reads the opinion polls and backs whichever party he thinks is going to win. Wooing the Sun entails multiple compromises with one's principles, anyway for Labour: preferring the endorsement of the Guardian is perfectly rational for a party of the centre-left. Expressing contempt for the unscrupulous, muck-raking, privacy-wrecking, life-destroying, cold-hearted, law-breaking, politics-corrupting, bullying and reactionary tabloids is not a tactical error but a duty, and failure to do so for fear of losing the support of the Dirty Digger or making an enemy of him is cowardly and contemptible. To equate recognising the toxic effects of the tabloids on our national political conversation with insulting or alienating their readers and losing their votes is just an intellectual conjuring trick with no basis in reality.
10/07/2011 22:50Politics ought to be about leadership and courage, not sucking up to overweening media moguls in search of their dubious and fickle favours. Nothing remotely 'snobbish' about that!
I understand what you are getting at. Yet surely you can see that what Murdoch, Brooks and Coulson oversaw/sanctioned/commissioned - we do not know yet which verb is most appropriate - was itself nothing less than a foul insult perpetrated by them on their very own readers. Done in pursuit not of truth, but of profit. The points made by Paul and Brian above are apposite. The fear of insulting Mondeo Man is itself perilously close to suggesting that such motorists are incapable of discerning gutter sniffling behaviour when they see it. You didn't mean to say that, did you?
http://dontbuythesun.co.uk/site/521/billy-bragg-never-buy-the-sun/
10/07/2011 23:32Dan - No, I didn't mean to say that! In fact, my point was the reverse - that Labour (or any other party) dismiss or patronise tabloid readers (or Mondeo drivers) at their own risk. In fact, although I was motivated to write this because of events at Wapping, it's not really about the NI crisis - it's intended to be a warning to Labour about being snobby towards voters who read tabloids. There's an awful lot of them and why the hell shouldn't they read them anyway?
11/07/2011 00:07Tom - So basically you're simply trying to divert attention from the dire situation in which Brand Murdoch currently finds itself. Well, why didn't you just come out and say so, for heavens sake!
11/07/2011 10:40Surely Mondeo Man was a Mail on Sunday reader?
11/07/2011 11:51