Heading into the 1992 election, polls pointed towards a hung parliament. The Sun turned up the heat on election day with a front page asking: ‘If Kinnock [the then Labour leader] wins today will the last person to leave Britain please turn out the lights.’ The Tories duly won the election with 42% of the popular vote, leading Britain’s best-selling title to boast: ‘It’s the Sun Wot Won It’.
Within two years Labour had a new leader, Tony Blair, and a totally new approach to the right-wing press: appeasement, not confrontation. Blair immediately went on a charm offensive to make peace with proprietors like Rupert Murdoch who were, in turn, equally keen to impress on Blair the need to scrap Labour’s manifesto commitment to an investigation into media concentration by the Monopolies and Mergers Commission (which, naturally, the party agreed to).
History repeating?
Are we set for a re-run of this story and is there any truth to the idea that Murdoch has ‘won it’ again for the Conservatives?
