Geoffrey Wheatcroft: Paper tigers
Labour politicians shudder when rightwing newspapers attack. But press barons wield less power than they think. Relations between Downing Street and sections of the Tory press, not warm anyway, have turned colder still since the story about the Blair children's extramural cramming.
Labour politicians shudder when rightwing newspapers attack. But press barons wield less power than they think.
Relations between Downing Street and sections of the Tory press, not warm anyway, have turned colder still since the story about the Blair children's extramural cramming. This comes on top of the bitter if wonderfully inconsequential Black Rod row, and the seemingly more important announcement by Rupert Murdoch that he would be telling all his newspapers to oppose entry into the euro.
That enraged supporters of the single currency. And yet, whatever it said about Murdoch's concept of editorial independence, and although Murdoch obviously deserves his position at the top of the latest Guardian Media 100 as the most commercially powerful player in the vast "infotainment" industry, it does not mean that he wields the political influence that he might like to suppose - or that his critics on the left fearfully attribute to him and the other Tory press magnates.
We have recently been told on these pages that the British press has warped the course of events of the past century, notably by hounding Labour: "They brought down Attlee, reduced Harold Wilson to extreme paranoia and kept Kinnock out." This might be comforting for Labour, but is it true? Even if we have a predominantly rightwing, often partisan and brutal press, that doesn't make it all-powerful. All historical evidence suggests the opposite, that newspapers have remarkably little real power to instruct the electorate or dictate policy.
Like Murdoch and Lord Black today, earlier generations of press moguls, Lords Beaverbrook and Rothermere, flattered themselves that they wielded great influence. The reality was that every single cause they took up was a failure. Rothermere's tenderness towards Hitler happily made no difference, and nor did his championing of the more quixotic cause of Hungarian "revisionism" in the 1930s (where he even had justice on his side: the 1920 "Trianon" borders were grossly unfair to Hungary).
In his notorious evidence to the royal commission on the press, Beaverbrook said that he ran his papers purely for the purposes of propaganda. In that case his career was strikingly unsuccessful. In the 1930s he campaigned for Empire Free Trade; in the 1940s he tried to block the postwar American loan; in the 1960s, with his last gasp, he fought against British entry into the Common Market. It was a hat-trick of failures. Again, he may well have been right about the loan, a landmark of financial servitude, but he was still powerless to stop it.
Twice Beaverbrook directly challenged party leaders. In 1930, he and Rothermere formed the United Empire party and one of its candidates defeated the official Tory at a byelection. Baldwin's leadership of the party suddenly seemed shaky. By way of response, as AJP Taylor put it, Baldwin "appealed to the general prejudice against the press lords", denouncing in a famous phrase (supplied by his cousin, Kipling) "power without responsibility - the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages".
The harlots were routed and Baldwin's position was never again challenged. Taylor was an historian with some experience of journalism himself, and he added shrewdly that "the popular newspapers supplied news and, more often, entertainment; they did not direct opinion". Those words are just as valid today. Then, as now, the popular press in a capitalist society exists to sell newspapers, not ideas.
At the 1945 election, Attlee and Labour were harried with venomous unfairness by Beaverbrook in his papers. He also egged on Churchill to give a most unwise broadcast claiming that "socialism is inseparably intertwined with totalitarianism". The next day, Attlee calmly replied, "The voice we heard last night was that of Mr Churchill, but the mind was that of Lord Beaverbrook" - and Labour went on to win its historic landslide.
A little more than six years later Attlee was out of office, but I defy anyone to find a serious historian who thinks that the press brought down his government. It was beset by many, largely self-inflicted, difficulties and internal quarrels, though even so Attlee narrowly won the election in 1950, and then unnecessarily called an election the following year, when Labour could claim that they were robbed (the Tories won the most seats, but Labour won a quarter- million more popular votes).
Nor did a predominantly hostile press stop Labour winning in 1964 and 1966. If Wilson was subsequently reduced to paranoia, that was his problem, in every sense. And it would be paranoid also to think that Labour's failures in the four elections from 1979 could be be attributed to the press. It was the Sun wot won it in 1992? No it wasn't. Admittedly it was quite a feat to lose to John Major in the depths of a recession, but Labour's real problem was John Smith's tax plans - or so Tony Blair has always been convinced.
The idea that the press wields great power has been given colour by Blair's obsequious courtship of rightwing proprietors, editors and commentators but, as with Wilson, that says more about him than about them. Even now it is open to the prime minister to attack irresponsible harlotry, or, come the referendum, to say, "The voice we heard was Mr Duncan Smith's but the mind was Mr Murdoch's."
That doesn't seem very likely, but it's not actually impossible to stand up to media moguls. The Australian prime minister, John Howard (a Liberal, meaning conservative, be it noted), has publicly told Rupert Murdoch what to do in a colloquial phrase, the second of whose two words is "off". It might lack Kipling's orotund grandeur, but it's eloquent enough. What's to stop Tony Blair saying as much? And, if all the evidence of the political influence of the press over the past century is anything to go by, mightn't Murdoch's intervention be the best news the pro-euro lobby could wish for?
Relations between Downing Street and sections of the Tory press, not warm anyway, have turned colder still since the story about the Blair children's extramural cramming. This comes on top of the bitter if wonderfully inconsequential Black Rod row, and the seemingly more important announcement by Rupert Murdoch that he would be telling all his newspapers to oppose entry into the euro.
That enraged supporters of the single currency. And yet, whatever it said about Murdoch's concept of editorial independence, and although Murdoch obviously deserves his position at the top of the latest Guardian Media 100 as the most commercially powerful player in the vast "infotainment" industry, it does not mean that he wields the political influence that he might like to suppose - or that his critics on the left fearfully attribute to him and the other Tory press magnates.
We have recently been told on these pages that the British press has warped the course of events of the past century, notably by hounding Labour: "They brought down Attlee, reduced Harold Wilson to extreme paranoia and kept Kinnock out." This might be comforting for Labour, but is it true? Even if we have a predominantly rightwing, often partisan and brutal press, that doesn't make it all-powerful. All historical evidence suggests the opposite, that newspapers have remarkably little real power to instruct the electorate or dictate policy.
Like Murdoch and Lord Black today, earlier generations of press moguls, Lords Beaverbrook and Rothermere, flattered themselves that they wielded great influence. The reality was that every single cause they took up was a failure. Rothermere's tenderness towards Hitler happily made no difference, and nor did his championing of the more quixotic cause of Hungarian "revisionism" in the 1930s (where he even had justice on his side: the 1920 "Trianon" borders were grossly unfair to Hungary).
In his notorious evidence to the royal commission on the press, Beaverbrook said that he ran his papers purely for the purposes of propaganda. In that case his career was strikingly unsuccessful. In the 1930s he campaigned for Empire Free Trade; in the 1940s he tried to block the postwar American loan; in the 1960s, with his last gasp, he fought against British entry into the Common Market. It was a hat-trick of failures. Again, he may well have been right about the loan, a landmark of financial servitude, but he was still powerless to stop it.
Twice Beaverbrook directly challenged party leaders. In 1930, he and Rothermere formed the United Empire party and one of its candidates defeated the official Tory at a byelection. Baldwin's leadership of the party suddenly seemed shaky. By way of response, as AJP Taylor put it, Baldwin "appealed to the general prejudice against the press lords", denouncing in a famous phrase (supplied by his cousin, Kipling) "power without responsibility - the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages".
The harlots were routed and Baldwin's position was never again challenged. Taylor was an historian with some experience of journalism himself, and he added shrewdly that "the popular newspapers supplied news and, more often, entertainment; they did not direct opinion". Those words are just as valid today. Then, as now, the popular press in a capitalist society exists to sell newspapers, not ideas.
At the 1945 election, Attlee and Labour were harried with venomous unfairness by Beaverbrook in his papers. He also egged on Churchill to give a most unwise broadcast claiming that "socialism is inseparably intertwined with totalitarianism". The next day, Attlee calmly replied, "The voice we heard last night was that of Mr Churchill, but the mind was that of Lord Beaverbrook" - and Labour went on to win its historic landslide.
A little more than six years later Attlee was out of office, but I defy anyone to find a serious historian who thinks that the press brought down his government. It was beset by many, largely self-inflicted, difficulties and internal quarrels, though even so Attlee narrowly won the election in 1950, and then unnecessarily called an election the following year, when Labour could claim that they were robbed (the Tories won the most seats, but Labour won a quarter- million more popular votes).
Nor did a predominantly hostile press stop Labour winning in 1964 and 1966. If Wilson was subsequently reduced to paranoia, that was his problem, in every sense. And it would be paranoid also to think that Labour's failures in the four elections from 1979 could be be attributed to the press. It was the Sun wot won it in 1992? No it wasn't. Admittedly it was quite a feat to lose to John Major in the depths of a recession, but Labour's real problem was John Smith's tax plans - or so Tony Blair has always been convinced.
The idea that the press wields great power has been given colour by Blair's obsequious courtship of rightwing proprietors, editors and commentators but, as with Wilson, that says more about him than about them. Even now it is open to the prime minister to attack irresponsible harlotry, or, come the referendum, to say, "The voice we heard was Mr Duncan Smith's but the mind was Mr Murdoch's."
That doesn't seem very likely, but it's not actually impossible to stand up to media moguls. The Australian prime minister, John Howard (a Liberal, meaning conservative, be it noted), has publicly told Rupert Murdoch what to do in a colloquial phrase, the second of whose two words is "off". It might lack Kipling's orotund grandeur, but it's eloquent enough. What's to stop Tony Blair saying as much? And, if all the evidence of the political influence of the press over the past century is anything to go by, mightn't Murdoch's intervention be the best news the pro-euro lobby could wish for?
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