Over the past few weeks or so the Sun newspaper has celebrated its 50th birthday with a series of public relations measures designed to illustrate its colourful history and ongoing commitment to the rich fabric of British life. There was the vote for the most popular front page, the launch of the special £1MILLION Sun Readers charity fund and a trawl back through the “biggest showbiz exclusives” of the last 50 years.
It is slightly disingenuous to insist that the Sun is celebrating a half century. More accurately the paper  is 55 years of age – emerging  as it did in 1964 from the ashes of the Mirror Group’s Daily Herald. What is really being celebrated is its launch as a tabloid by Rupert Murdoch, who bought the title for £600,000 in 1969.
What cannot be disputed, though, is its impact on British journalism and by extension, British life. The birth of the tabloid Sun ushered in a period which saw mass market newspapers move to the political right with a decrease in the coverage of “serious” news issues. This was allied to, if we are to believe the testimonies of various Murdoch employees, an increase in proprietorial interference in editorial decisions.
As Chippendale and Horrie make clear in their wonderful book, Stick it Up Your Punter – the Uncut Story of the Sun Newspaper, readers were promised something very different from the new Sun in 1969. The first edition printed on 17th November of that year, was heralded with banner headline in the previous Saturday’s paper, which proclaimed, REACH FOR THE NEW SUN:
“The most important thing to remember is that the new SUN will be the paper that CARES.  The paper that cares – passionately - about truth, and beauty and justice”.
The paper that cares about people. About the kind of world we live in. And about the kind of world we would like our children to live in.”
Right here is the tone that it has sought to adopt ever since. It’s inclusive, for and of the people and interested in truth and justice.
And also, importantly, “beauty”- which was to manifest itself in the creation of the page 3 girl, who first appeared topless with nipples visible in November 1970. It’s perhaps amazing to think that, even though the Sun still features glamour models in various stages of undress, the topless images lasted as long as they did, with the final bare breasts appearing as recently as 2015.
But sales of the new Sun began to rise almost immediately, as the Daily Telegraph reported, and under the editorship of Larry Lamb the Sun was selling 2 million copies a day by 1971 - gradually fighting its way to outsell the Daily Mirror in 1978, with 4 million copies a day.
It’s fair to say that, despite its best efforts to portray itself as the nation’s super, soaraway favourite with “lashings of fun” the paper has always been overtly political.
1979 the Sun urged its readers to vote Conservative and thus began a relationship of mutual support which continued throughout the next decade. Most of the British press gave open and widespread support to a wide range of policies adopted by the Thatcher governments of the 1980’s but it was the Murdoch owned press, however, (The Times, Sunday Times, News Of The World as well as the Sun) that was her closest ally. In fact it’s fair to say that Murdoch used his substantial media concerns in this country to support the Prime Minister, while his companies received direct benefits as a consequence of policy decisions taken by her government.
In the various wars that the UK has been involved in, the Sun has been unflinching in its support for the armed forces. During the Falklands conflict, for example, it was jingoistic, utterly one sided, juvenile and inflammatory. It was the paper that ‘backed our boys’ as it tried to recreate the Dunkirk spirit. There were single word headlines – INVASION! -  There was the infamous and heartless GOTCHA! which reacted to the sinking of Argentine battleship the General Belgrano. There were three word headlines which made war sound like a trip to the swimming baths – ‘IN WE GO!’ -  and a tireless capacity to report war as a series of adventures and high jinks.
Not only did the Sun support Thatcher, it has also gone to great lengths to denigrate leaders of the Labour party. Jeremy Corbyn, as was the case with Ed Miliband before him, gets a torrid time , but  as I’ve noted before , Michael Foot was particularly vilified in the 1980’s. Constantly criticised for being outmoded and shambolic, he was mercilessly lampooned for his decision to wear a donkey jacket to the Cenotaph on Remembrance Day (when he wore nothing of the sort – it was, in fact, a smart coat chosen by his wife Jill). This most principled of leaders was completely unsuited to running an election campaign in 1983 against the sophisticated Thatcher media machine and a particularly feral Kelvin Mackenzie-edited Sun , which asked, incredulously: “Do you seriously want this old man to run Britain?” The clear fact is that the modern day Sun sees Corbyn as Foot’s rather more dangerous spiritual successor.
It’s never been a stranger to controversy either and its most shameful episode is undoubtedly the coverage of the Hillsborough disaster.
On April 19, 1989 four days after the disaster occurred, The Sun printed its “THE TRUTH” edition (left), where its front page alleged that Liverpool fans had stolen from the bodies of the victims, urinated on “brave cops” and, in a particularly appalling piece of fantasy which I quote in full, alleged that:
In one shameful episode, a gang of Liverpool fans noticed the blouse of a girl trampled to death in the crush had risen above her breasts. As a policeman struggled in vain to revive her they jeered: “Throw her up here and we will **** her.”
Chippendale and Horrie describe the atmosphere inside the newsroom in the Hillsborough era under the editorship of Kelvin Mackenzie.
It was a place, they write, of terror – where the editor’s personality dominated to such an extent that even though there were grave misgivings about the accounts of what happened at Hillsborough (none of the allegations, of course, were attributable) journalists felt intimidated and powerless to object to the terrible smears.
The legacy of the Sun’s Hillsborough coverage is more easily quantifiable. Despite seemingly heartfelt apologies in 2004, 2011 and again in 2016 where an editorial offered the people of Liverpool an “unreserved and heartfelt apology that is profound, sincere and unambiguous”, the Sun remains largely unsellable on Merseyside. As Roy Greenslade has written, “spontaneous outrage turned into a long-term boycott.”
It should be remembered, though that it remains Britain’s top selling tabloid and that the paper has led some very worthwhile charity campaigns through its 50 years. There’s the £350,000 raised for cot death research in 1991, or the Change for Kids drive in 2002 which saw more than £1million donated to the NSPCC. The current venture is the “You're Not Alone” suicide prevention campaign.
All this notwithstanding, the truth is that the Sun, as is the case with the rest of the newspaper industry, is negotiating a period of decline. Though it may boast of being the most read newspaper and website in the country with “33.3million adults now reading The Sun every month” the long term truth in terms of newspaper sales is gloomier. In 2014 daily sales slipped below the 2m mark and current sales stand at 1.3m.
The key for the Sun now (and for all the print media, come to that) is maintaining its identity and adapting to modernity as the market dwindles. The turmoil of the phone hacking scandal and the Leveson inquiry into the ethics and standards of the press, did not, against some predictions, hasten its demise. It is nowhere near as strong and influential as it once was, but it is still there – leading its competitors and infuriating the many critics.

​Victoria Derbyshire’s BBC current affairs programme on Tuesday morning included an item by Catrin Nye on “deepfake” videos. They can be defined as when artificial intelligence technology (AI) is used to merge created material onto already existing footage. Thus, there is the opportunity to present content that never actually happened; people can be made to look like they are saying and doing things that they did not do or say.
So, as created by AI think-tank Future Advocacy, we saw footage of a created version of Boris Johnson enthusiastically endorsing the Prime Ministership of Jeremy Corbyn and a created version of Corbyn state that he “urged all members and supporters of the Labour Party to back Boris Johnson to continue as our Prime Minister”.
Throughout the feature, Future Advocacy explained their artifice and Stephen Fry was moved to tweet that, “this kind of thing will only get more and more accurate, less and less detectable. Lip-synch issues will be ironed out… be afraid, wary, worried, vigilant, determined: follow and support @FutureAdvocacy.
 I wrote here about deepfakes a few weeks ago and I’m inclined to agree with Fry on the serious issues we may face in the not so distant future. That said, I’m also increasingly aware of how incredible actual political communication has become without their presence.
During an almost surreal start to the election campaign period a week ago, we were treated to the spectacle of former Labour MP’s Ian Austin and John Woodcock endorsing Johnson over Corbyn while recent Tory cabinet minister David Gauke said on the Today programme that there were are “a lot of traditional Conservative voters who feel politically homeless. Many of them will vote for the Lib Dems…and they are right to”.
Then yesterday I saw the Conservative’s first party political broadcast, heralded on its website as “Boris Johnson’s hilarious election advert”.
Loosely modelled on Vogue magazine’s conceit of having various celebrities (on video) being asked 73 questions by disembodied unnamed interviewer, we see Johnson amble amiably around what is presumably Tory HQ, fielding questions as “hilarious” as “Fish and Chips or roast dinner?”
I imagine for those unfamiliar with the Vogue style that it is all highly discombobulating. In response to the question, “what’s the most surprising thing you’ve found about PM?” Johnson replied, arm waving, “I was pretty incredulous the other day when I found I couldn’t actually get a Thai curry to deliver to Number 10….security was too tight”.
This is patently ridiculous but is also indisputably part of Johnson’s manufactured style. Performances such as this draw attention away from policy scrutiny. As Dominic Lawson wrote in the Sunday Times last week, you can call Johnson’s attitude and behaviour many things – arrogant, entitled and even amoral. But it has a “primordial appeal to voters impatient with the inertia of politics as usual”. The Tory strategists who believe this to be true depend on the media in general to concentrate on their leader’s personality traits and idiosyncrasies – which they believe play well with the electorate.
It’s clear from opinion polls that a significant proportion of voters also appear to see Johnson as a man of action, free from the constraints which bedevil ordinary politicians and a man made to “get things done”. That is the important thing – not the evidence which suggests that in reality nothing at all has really been done. Perhaps Lawson is right, Johnson is a proven liar…but a trusted leader.
 

Despite the fact that the General Election campaign did not officially start until Wednesday with Prime Minister Johnson’s visit to the Queen and the dissolution of Parliament, it’s fair to say that for the Conservative party in particular it has been a miserable week since the date of polling was announced as December 12th.
It remains to be seen if Jacob Rees-Mogg’s appearance on LBC radio’s Nick Ferrari show on Monday will be electorally damaging, but one thing is for certain – if the Labour Party is seeking to reposition the Tories as the “nasty” party, out of touch with the concerns of the ordinary voter and seemingly contemptuous of the lives and aspirations of those less fortunate than them , then they are being aided in that endeavour by the actions of senior Conservative members .
Responding to Ferrari’s request for a response to the assertion that the Grenfell Tower tragedy was caused in part by issues of race and class, Rees-Mogg’s response included the contention that:
 “The more one’s read over the weekend about the report and about the chances of people surviving, if you just ignore what you’re told and leave you are so much safer. I think if either of us were in a fire, whatever the fire brigade said, we would leave the burning building. It just seems the common sense thing to do.“
Perhaps the key phrases, here are “either of us” and “common sense”. Is Rees-Mogg trying to say is that he and Ferrari would have made different decisions because they possess the common sense that the victims lacked?
This is certainly the way that the remarks were interpreted by most commentators and politicians. Sam Gyimah, the former Tory MP and now Lib Dem candidate for Kensington and Chelsea , told the Guardian that the comments were “insensitive and disgraceful” while Karim Mussilhy, whose uncle died in the fire, told the same newspaper:
“People like my uncle couldn’t leave the tower even if they wanted to and [he] was told on several occasions firefighters were coming to get him. He took comfort in that. Did he not use his common sense?”
“They are still detached. They are still clueless.”
Though Rees-Mogg later apologised saying, “I would hate to upset the people of Grenfell if I was unclear in my comments“, he was unfortunately defended by his colleague, Andrew Bridgen. In an interview with Evan Davis on BBC radio 4, Bridgen stated that his extremely “compassionate and intelligent” very good friend had meant to say that he would have left Grenfell and therefore ignored Fire Service advice. Here is the following exchange.
Davis: But in a way that is exactly what people object to, which is he is, in effect, saying: ‘I wouldn’t have died because I would have been cleverer than the people who took the fire brigade’s advice.’
Bridgen: (pause and audible sigh) But we want very clever people running the country, don’t we Evan? That’s a by-product of what Jacob is and that’s why he is in a position of authority. What he is actually saying is that he would have made a better decision than the authority figures who gave that advice.
And though Bridgen also, inevitably, later apologised for his own remarks the entire sorry episode provides further ammunition for those who seek to describe the Tory party as aloof, uncaring, self-serving, knowingly arrogant and economical with the truth.
All of which are adjectives which may well be used by detractors to describe the actions of the Welsh Conservatives in their handling of the controversy around Ross England, who as the Western Mail reported, was due to stand for the Conservatives in the Vale of Glamorgan in the 2021 Assembly election but was suspended last week. England was suspended after details emerged of a rape trial in 2018 at which he was a witness. The presiding Judge on the case accused England of “sabotage” and causing the trial to collapse through deliberate attempts to highlight the sexual history of the victim. Though Alun Cairns has now resigned as Welsh Secretary over allegations about how much he knew about the affair, the air of dysfunction that hangs over the Welsh Conservatives may take a while to dissolve.
Then there are the actions of Conservative Party Headquarters who edited an appearance of Labour’s Sir Keir Starmer on GMTV to give the impression that he was unable, or unwilling, to answer a question on Brexit. The minute long video, which appeared on social media, ends with Starmer looking forlornly at the camera after being asked by Piers Morgan: “Why would the EU give you a good deal if they know you are going to actively campaign against it?”
In the actual uncut footage, Starmer answers the question posed – Morgan himself later tweeted:
“You doctored the end of the clip you originally put out, to make it look like @KeirStarmer had no answer to my question. In fact, he answered immediately. You could have had plenty of fun with that interview anyway – why fake it?”
“Why fake it?” is a valid question. Perhaps it’s because, as Jim Waterson, the media editor of the Guardian, states, there is very little to be lost by parties peddling lies and deceptive information in an overall competitive environment where the ultimate objective is to get attention and coverage. It may also be a calculated risk that if and when this material is called out the news cycle, in this 24/7 hyper culture of story after story, will have inexorably moved on.
Which is why we should all welcome the creation of the @factcheck team at Channel 4 News who will be examining and reporting upon all the major claims made by political parties during the campaign. There’s also BBC’s Rory Cellan Jones and Faisal Islam’s Facebook Election Ads project which invites members of the public to send them the ads they have received via social media for critical inspection.
As I suggested might happen last week, the Labour party has begun its campaign by highlighting the perceived inadequacies and ineffectiveness of the mainstream media. On Monday, a video was posted online featuring Jeremy Corbyn sitting on what looked like a living room sofa, speaking directly to camera. In the short film, Corbyn describes his appearance on Andrew Marr’s BBC Sunday show. He was asked about a range of issues, which was “fine“. What was not so good was that Dominic Raab, who followed him, was asked nothing about allegations against Boris Johnson made in that morning’s Sunday Times. Corbyn seemed to imply that the Conservatives and the BBC were in cahoots. “This is how the establishment works“, he said, “they close ranks. They put privilege first.” This seems to me an obviously dangerous move to make which not only seeks to undermine trust in the BBC but also, clearly, suggests that the Corporation is deliberately acting against Labour.
In another video, Labour’s Momentum representative, Ash Arkar, appeals directly to Labour’s younger supporters. There’s a plan to defeat the right wing media, she says. The billionaire press barons are all against us and “we can’t exactly rely on the mainstream press for support“. The key is real people sending in their messages of Labour allegiance. Make a selfie, suggests Arkar, post it online, spread it about. Likes, she says, turn into votes.
Whilst this last assertion does seem like flippancy without basis what is incontestable is the fact that the parties of all persuasions are launching into their digital campaigns with gusto. It also may be, given the experiences of Rees Mogg, Bridgen et al, that party strategists begin to limit politicians’ appearances on conventional media. They are obviously having trouble in controlling the narrative.
What can’t be controlled are politicians’ unerring ability to waylay the best laid plans. With the shocking resignation of deputy leader Tom Watson on Wednesday evening and the tour of broadcasters undertaken by former Labour MP Ian Austin yesterday, where he explicitly criticised Corbyn and amazingly advised the electorate to vote Conservative, all Corbyn’s delight at the travails of the Tories will have vanished.
Just a few days into this most remarkable campaign and the main parties are doing more harm to themselves then to each other.

So here we are, then. Prime Minister Johnson has his heart’s desire – after months of a volatile and dysfunctional premiership characterised by lost Commons votes, broken promises and in party fighting there is to be a general election on December 12th.
But if we were to look back nearly 100 years to 1923, and the last General Election to held in December, a superstitious Conservative party member may have cause to worry about some intriguing parallels.
In 1923, Tory leader Stanley Baldwin, who had only been in office a matter of months, needlessly decided to call on election on Trade Tariffs for imported goods. In the event, though the Conservatives won the popular vote with 38.01% of the turnout and 258 seats, they actually lost 109 seats whilst Labour, under Ramsey MacDonald, and the Liberals, under Herbert Asquith, won 191 and 158 seats respectively.
As Alison Campsie wrote recently in the Scotsman, this was an election which took place with great interest from foreign powers. She quotes William Thomas Morgan, who stated in the American Political Science Review, in 1924:
“Not only were the results of the British national election of last December momentous for the British people themselves, but it may be doubted whether any other election in the country’s history ever excited as much interest in foreign lands.”
Until 2019, we may well argue. But the result in 1923 was a hung Parliament, with the Liberals agreeing to support MacDonald – leading to the first ever Labour government. Whether Liberal Democrat leader Jo Swinson would be willing to support Jeremy Corbyn in similar circumstances is obviously open to question but she’s bullish about the possibility of winning many seats. She told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Wednesday:
“This is a volatile time in politics. Nobody needs to look at received wisdom, or what’s happened in the past. Our polling show that we are within a small swing of winning hundreds of seats, because the political landscape is so totally changed by what has happened in our country post-Brexit.”
And even though officially the election campaigns cannot really begin until the dissolution of Parliament some time next week, Labour has been quick out of the blocks. A video message posted on social media on Tuesday evening reprised Corbyn’s conference speech where he promised to “unleash the biggest campaign of people power we’ve ever seen in this movement and in this country.” It’s an upbeat affair – the people of Britain are unbreakable, poverty isn’t inevitable. As in 2017, the Labour party is “for the many, not the few”.
As the campaign gets underway, it will be interesting to see if Labour persists with the same approach. As I noted in 2017, “for the many and not the few” became the deliberately optimistic soundbite as the party utilised Facebook, Twitter and YouTube whilst their overall use of social media was strategically astute. Obviously aware that any dialogue with the print media was never going to be fruitful, Labour moved physically into its traditional heartlands while investing time and money online. For the most part in the last campaign, Labour eschewed the negativities that we have come to expect from modern political communication and instead accentuated the universal benefits of a Labour government.. That said, if Wednesday’s Prime Minister’s Questions are anything to go by, then Labour will seek to emphasise the perceived inadequacies of Johnson at every opportunity. Lord knows there’s plenty of ammunition.
I don’t think there will be a sustained attempt to bring the mainstream media onside. It’s far more likely that Corbyn will instead seek to convince the electorate that the days of press power and influence are limited by Labour’s plans to “stand up to the powerful and corrupt billionaire tax exile” newspaper owners. More than this, there will be a concerted attempt to demonstrate how out of touch the media is with the general public. In the video message posted hours after the vote for a General Election, Channel 4’s Jon Snow was seen in a clip saying with certainty after the last election: “We the media, the pundits, the experts – know nothing.”
And of course, the usual newspapers – The Sun, Mail, Express, Times and Telegraph – will all seek to seek to vilify Corbyn and his shadow cabinet, while the traditional Labour supporting titles – Guardian , Observer, Mirror – will most likely attack the Tories without being too supportive of Corbyn. Several of their columnists will, I suspect, write opinion pieces anticipating how the top team will change when defeat comes.
Whilst Labour will do all they can to make sure the campaign is about more than Brexit, the right wing press will insist, Corbyn’s unsuitability aside, that it’s the only issue in town. Consider the front pages the morning after the election was announced. Amidst a background of brightly coloured fireworks, the Sun proclaimed, “NEW YEAR’S LEAVE” with the assertion that “we can get Brexit done” by Jan 1st. 2020, “the first day of the rest of our lives”. Just above a picture of the PM’s head appeared the assertion, “PM IS OUR ONLY CHOICE” see pages 2,4,5,6,7 and 10.
As far as the Mail was concerned, Christmas was coming early. A cartoon of Santa’s sleigh being driven by Johnson adorned its front page along with a picture of a shifty looking Corbyn. The text read: “At last Boris wins election date – and he’s leading the polls. But with the Lib Dems and Brexit party threatening Tory vote in key seats, the stark warning…DON’T LET THE GRINCH STEAL YOUR CHRISTMAS”.
If there’s one thing we can take for granted though, it’s the fact that the Commons will look significantly different when it reconvenes in January. In an indication of how divisive Brexit has become and how the viciousness of the modern political process has taken its toll, over 50 MP’s are not seeking re-election including Ken Clarke, Amber Rudd, Nicky Morgan and Pontypridd’s Labour MP, Owen Smith. Citing “personal and political reasons” in his resignation letter Smith has long been in disagreement with his Party leader. But I’m sure that many will agree with the  sentiments of Jo Stevens, the Labour MP for Cardiff Central, who paid tribute to Smith on Twitter. She wrote: “Very’ very sad to see this. A good man with Labour values in his heart and soul. Huge loss to us in Parliament and to Ponty.”
It’s going to be a long few weeks.