Dear Rupert! What would we do without him? International dial-a-bogeyman, corrupter of the masses. Babies eaten, murdered girls' phones hacked, politicised teenagers harassed. No job too sordid.
Today he turns up in assorted papers in his guise as prime ministerial puppeteer. And it seems the power of this 84-year-old Aussie-turned-American is even more extensive than we feared - stretching even to the Daily Mail, which he doesn't own.
Some of us may have thought that the election battle was between David Cameron and Ed Miliband. Twitter and the blogosphere, however, have come to the view that it's Murdoch v Miliband.
The Tory Press has had a dreadful election campaign. But it's a mite unfair to lay all the blame on dear old Rupe. The Sun has been awful and the Times absurd, but the worst excesses have come from the Mail, followed by the Telegraph, which has today emailed its leader to everyone on its reader database urging them to vote Conservative.
That's the trouble with being a pantomime villain: you get the blame for everything - even sins you haven't committed.

Take Abby the #milifandom tweeter, for example.This 17-year-old has been one of the stars of the campaign. She began tweeting about Miliband a couple of weeks ago to counter the way he was being ridiculed by the Press. Her energetic posts - a mix of  "vote-Labour" messages and criticisms of Murdoch, his newspapers and his alleged influence over Cameron - quickly started a trend that transformed geeky Red Ed into a teenager's sex symbol. 
This was bound to arouse interest beyond Twitter: the Guardian and the Huffington Post wrote about her, the hashtag was a question on Have I Got News for You. 

All of that was fine and dandy, but when Sun reporters went to her home and to her grandmother's home there was uproar. Abby had tweeted that she wasn't doing interviews. How did the reporters get her address when she had never published her full name or whereabouts? Why was her Nan being harassed?
Twitter's outrage knew no bounds. Murdoch and all who worked for him were scum, disgusting, rabid rightwingers, zombies. 
What's more, a Sun reporter "lied" when he tweeted that he had found her from the electoral roll. She was 17 and not registered. The reporters "stalking" her had probably used some illegal or underhand methods to get her address. Any resultant article would surely have been negative.

Then ex-Tory-MP-turned-Sun columnist Louise Mensch decided to pitch in her tuppence-worth from across the Atlantic, suggesting that the entire #milifandom campaign had been orchestrated by the Labour Party and describing Twitter's young heroine as a liar and a disgrace. Tory trolls duly piled in. Very wise move, that, Louise. Very helpful.

Well here's a thing. The #milifandom phenomenon is one of the best stories of the campaign. Abby has an impressive collection of followers applauding her for "standing up" to Murdoch - but her digs at him are almost a sideshow.
The key factor is the way that one girl's engaging and vibrant Twitter personality has managed to reinvent Ed Miliband's public image and show that young people can and do care about politics. 
It's not surprising that the country's most popular paper should be interested. Every paper should have been. All that reporters needed was to establish her identity. 
The Sun is well known for paying for information -  there have been a few high-profile trials that hinged on that habit; it has also been rumbled offering £100 for "good news" stories about the Tories. Did it not occur to anyone that someone who knew Abby, however slightly - someone who goes to the same school, perhaps - might have contacted the paper and offered the information in return for a few quid?
Armed with her surname, it is perfectly feasible that the reporter found the addresses from the electoral roll, even though she is not on it herself.
And if that is what happened, how could the Sun - which ran no story, positive or negative - defend itself? By revealing how it came by the information and betraying its source? Come on.
As journalists, we criticise those who do all their reporting on the phone. Is one knock on the door and a polite conversation out of order? Is it really so terrible to go to the grandmother - assuming the reporters took "No" for an answer and then went away?
After all, Abby herself is proudly tweeting about her evenings/weekends spent door-knocking, presumably "disturbing" some voters in their seventies. Is a request for a newspaper interview more intrusive than asking someone how they intend to vote?

Abby's tweets on the subject are straightforward. She says she is curious to know how the reporters found her address and why they approached her Nan. She specifically says that she is not accusing anyone of harassment. But the mob is in full cry - and Murdoch is back under attack for "setting his hounds" on a "child", for bullying her, for employing scare tactics.
Is that really what he did? Personally?
I doubt it. But that's the trouble with being the baddie. People are ready to blame you for everything.
And so it is with that advert at the top of this post, with Murdoch's figure in front of a couple of Daily Mail front pages over which he has no control. 
What is surprising is that anyone still believes that newspapers have that much influence. The Daily Express gave its readers a direct order yesterday: "You must vote Ukip". Crikey. Even the most partisan papers usually stick to "should" rather than "must". Do people look at the Mail and think "I'd better vote Conservative or the world will end"?

There is no doubt that Murdoch does not want to see Miliband elected and there is equally no doubt that he has passed this message to his editors, who have responded dutifully. But the old man is out of touch and the result has been counter-productive because his papers look ridiculous. 
It's easy to laugh at the Sun and its old bacon buttie photograph, but some of the Times's splashes have also been dodgy. Take the £1,000 bill for every working family that was almost entirely retracted in a small page 2 correction. Then there's today's headline that the Queen will "take control" of the aftermath on top of a story that says no such thing because, of course, she can and will do no such thing.
It's a shame, because the front-end nonsense is bringing bad publicity that overshadows the good journalism on all sorts of subjects to be found inside both papers. 
The Times isn't a rabid rightwing organ that closes its pages to a contrary view. Today's paper has three columnists putting forward the case for Cameron, Labour and the LibDems; its chief leader writer used to write speeches for Tony Blair; there's a huge  "Vote Labour" sign outside the house of one of its star writers; Caitlin Moran has tweeted her support for #milifandom Abby.

Do Sun readers buy the paper for political guidance? Probably not. They are more likely to be interested in the human interest stories inside, the sport, the motoring, the crossword and its generally jaunty air. 
The pity here is that those who shout loudest about the paper tend not to open it. Proudly declaring that they wouldn't have that rag in the house, they prefer to judge it by the front page or on columnists' outrageous comments that have been brought to their attention by someone else.
So those front pages will have done the Murdoch camp no favours. They are unlikely to have convinced anyone to vote Conservative, but they fired up young Abby. And if Miliband takes up residence in No 10 the apt headline could turn out to be "It was the Sun wot lost it". 

To lose the plot once, Mr Evans, may be regarded as a misfortune. To lose it twice looks like carelessness.
The first time was April Fools' Day, which may offer some explanation. It's hard to think of an excuse for today's effort.
When the Daily Star drops the bikini-clad women and the Express the quack cures in recognition of the importance of the Nepal earthquake and avalanche, why is the Daily Telegraph filling its splash space with propaganda and reducing the news to a puff?
This isn't journalism.

19.00 Update Alex Sturdy has done some splendid work on the history of this letter, which he says can be traced back to Karen Brady and Conservative Central Office. He reports that many signatories have asked to have their names removed. 
This is journalism. And you can read it here.
Hats off, too, to Andy Hicks for posting this .pdf properties screenshot, showing the author of the letter as CCHQ (Conservative campaign headquarters).

Week three of the campaign and the parties have finally published their manifestos, the promises on which voters will decide who should run the country for the next five years.
Any thought of balance from our national papers in their overall coverage of the campaign vanished on day one. But SubScribe clung to the wistful hope that when it came to manifesto time, they might at least focus on the policies - even if they then proceeded to rubbish them. Dream on.
Excluding the FT, the only papers that came close to offering their readers the information they needed were the Independent, its little sister the i, and - to a lesser extent - the Guardian and the Times. The others have been little more than propaganda sheets.
We're not talking here about the gamesmanship of leaking the right-to-buy element of the Tory package on the day of the Labour manifesto launch, of an editor's right (and duty) to lead on the story he or she thinks will be of most interest to their readers in preference to the political set-piece. But surely we have a history of offering in some detail the way the parties are selling themselves to the electorate.
Over the past three days, the five main parties that cover the whole of the UK have published their manifestos. The cuttings below speak for themselves, so there is little point in my commenting on what you can see - save to say that this is simply the collection of pages devoted to the manifestos. Some papers will have given further space on the front and inside to other campaign stories, polls, diaries, sketches, leaders, OpEds etc. 
Stephen Glover's piece in today's Mail, for example, is headlined "There's hardly a word I disagree with in the Ukip manifesto..." but the paper shares few of those words with its readers on the many news pages devoted to the campaign. 
The Express, by contrast, is far more concerned about its latest wheeze to keep its dying readership alive (gardening) and the weather, restricting its election coverage to a page or two.
In some instances, as with the first example from the Express, I am showing the whole spread to put the manifesto coverage in context.
Here goes. Prepared to be depressed:

Tuesday: Labour

Voters don't want to know about politicians' domestic arrangements. They have no interest in their wives or their kitchens, according to a ComRes poll published in the Daily Mail today.
We have certainly had a lot of kitchens in this campaign. So maybe it's time to give them a rest. 
The wives are less likely to be left in peace. Newspapers would struggle if they couldn't report on their dress sense, their eating habits and even their opinions. Yesterday, for example, we had Miriam González Durántez accusing the Prime Minister of living in a bubble, and Justin Thornton describing how she fell in love with Ed Miliband.

They had been leafleting together, she told the Mirror. She had put her hand through a letterbox and had it bitten by a dog on the other side. "Ed bandaged me up and I fell in love with him."
This isn't, however, the story that the Mail and Telegraph have focused on today. They are far more interested in Thornton's first encounter with Miliband the previous year.  Here's how she described it to the Mirror's Ros Wynne Jones:

Who is this friend Adrian? Had he been her partner at this dinner party?  What is the point of him to this story?
Why was she furious? Because a man she had never met before - a man who didn't seem particularly interested in her or her choice of conversation - was involved with her hostess friend?
Was she furious with him because he didn't interrupt a conversation about economics to say "by the way, I'm going out with Stephanie". Was she furious with Stephanie for not mentioning the secret relationship? 
Or was she perhaps furious because she thought she might have made a fool of herself by making a play for a man who wasn't available?

The dinner party hostess was, as John Rentoul tweeted yesterday, Stephanie Flanders, who was at that time Newsnight's economics editor. This is dynamite for the Telegraph, which points out that Miliband was then working at the Treasury as a special adviser to Gordon Brown. 
But, rather like that dinner party conversation, the paper finds itself going down a cul-de-sac.  Flanders declines to comment. The Cabinet Office says there is no requirement for special advisers to declare their relationships with journalists [as opposed to ministers and soldiers who must now seek permission before consorting with people practising our grubby trade - but that's another matter]. So that just leaves the BBC guidelines on how it is sometimes  a good idea to declare the political activities of close personal contacts. But the BBC won't tell the Telegraph whether Flanders disclosed her relationship with Miliband, so the story comes to a dead end.

For Andrew Pierce in the Mail, there is a much juicier trail to follow. To him, that West London dinner party in March 2004 "offers a fascinating insight into the somewhat caddish character of the Labour leader".

Who knew (apart from Michael Fallon, of course) that the Labour party leadership was in the gift of Mrs Miliband senior? 
And I may be thick, but I'm struggling to see what is caddish about having a dinner party conversation. There is no evidence that Miliband was flirting with Thornton. Rather, her own description suggests that she was the one who was smitten - a perception reinforced by a biography extract quoted by Pierce:

Pierce is not to be deflected, however. He notes that the "Labour-supporting" Mirror,  "perhaps glossing over what may be seen as caddish behaviour, omitted to mention that the hostess was then Miliband's girlfriend". 
In giving the interview - which appeared under a "simpering" headline - Thornton had clearly been guided by Labour spin-doctors "who wanted to give the impression to voters that her husband was a touchy-feely human being, rather than the soulless nerd that his awkward image conveys on TV". 
Miliband is further attacked as being "ungallant" for having "blurted out" two years ago that Ed Balls had also once been involved with Flanders.  
Pierce then goes on to list three other women with whom he says Miliband had been linked romantically: the daughter of a political economist, an aide to Gordon Brown and a former Times journalist. 
Miliband would have been 36 at the time of that dinner party. Does having three ex-girlfriends by that age constitute a "tangled love life"? 
Of course not. Nor can Pierce really think that. What interests him is the Labour network.  Ed Balls met Flanders at Harvard, when he was 22. His future wife Yvette Cooper was, like Flanders, a Kennedy scholar there. Miliband also went to Harvard. All four had been to Oxford. 
The former Times journalist who once "briefly" dated Miliband also "had a fling" with her then colleague, Tom Baldwin, who is now the Labour leader's chief spin-doctor.
The way the relationships intertwine shows, according to Pierce, "the deeply incestuous and narrow world of the Labour high command". This, he argues, is further demonstrated by links between the other women mentioned and the Labour party, leading him to conclude: 

A deeply incestuous and narrow world, indeed.
Nothing like the Eton old boy network.
Nothing like Cameron's world of "country suppers" with Rebekah Brooks, who once had a relationship with Andy Coulson, who went on to become the Conservative leader's chief spin-doctor. 
Nothing like the Bullingdon Club set of Cameron, Osborne, Boris, Nat Rothschild et al.
Not to mention their fellow Oxford alumnus Michael Gove, who is married to Mail columnist Sarah Vine.
We can all play this game. People tend to mix with like-minded people, to form strong friendships and relationships at university, and to marry within their set. It's called life.
As to tangled love lives: glass houses; stones.

Footnote: All in it together  Pierce, Baldwin, Gove, Vine and Miliband's journalist ex-girlfriend all worked at The Times. So did I. A Blair speech-writer also mentioned in the Mail article still does.

They're off!  Cameron has been to the Palace. Parliament has dissolved. We have a government and a Prime Minister but no MPs. After months of phoney war, the general election campaign proper is finally upon us.
It was tempting to declare SubScribe an election-free zone, but that seemed like abdication of duty, so this is a blog page for occasional random thoughts.
Any parent of a teenager with upcoming exams would recognise my behaviour of the past week: much skimming of source material and even more displacement activity. 
Just as the teenager needs a colour-coded revision timetable, so a blogger needs a logo. There were rosettes to find and fashion. Was the Labour one too big, the Ukip one too low? If the SNP were to be included, what about Plaid Cymru? Oh yes, playing with the Paint tools to extend ribbons, crop and overlay took care of three days, and not a word written. 
Then there were brambles outside to be cut down before their host trees started sprouting, and neglected wooden floors to be polished before the family descends for Easter Sunday lunch. And then, joy of joys, the lovely sticker on the telephone exchange at the end of the road pronouncing the arrival of fibre broadband - which meant a whole afternoon of package comparisons and a for-once welcome conversation with a lady from the call centre.
It's all the Daily Mail's fault. As GameoldGirl has noted elsewhere, it has been in full cry this week and when you add its election coverage into the mix, it's been enough to make any media observer want to shut up shop.

Time was that newspapers reported what the candidates had to say on their news pages and offered opinions on the opinion pages. How old-fashioned can you get? I clearly remember a not-so distant general election campaign where The Times's news coverage was masterminded by one Michael Gove. It would, he declared, be driven by events. Various set-pieces would be prepared, but he would be ever-willing to kill his babies. It was the first time I had heard that expression. That is not the only aspect of the campaign that I remember: another was the establishment in a side office of a little unit whose task was to monitor and audit published news stories to ensure that coverage was balanced.
So there we had a highly political news editor in charge of determinedly fair and open-minded campaign reporting. All sides were also represented in the comment pages. The paper eventually made its thoughts about who would make the best Prime Minister known in a leading article in the closing days of the campaign.
Nostalgia, eh?

This time round most papers had made up their minds long before MPs packed up their pencil cases for the end of term, and five weeks of hustings are unlikely to change any of their opinions. The Telegraph, Mail, Mirror and Sun seem to think their role is not to tell their readers what the politicians are saying, but to tell them what is wrong (or, occasionally, right) with what the politicians are saying.
If Labour wins the election, or comes to an accommodation with one or more minority parties, Ed Miliband will represent Britain in the world. Some - most - of our national newspapers would prefer that that did not happen, but they risk our future international standing by treating any potential Prime Minister so contemptuously. "Red Ed" splash headlines are not a good idea. Nor, indeed, is it wise to call Cameron "Dave" in a straight news story.
SubScribe has been looking most closely at the Mail this week, initially driven by Stephen Glover's "conundrum" that  "so far in the election campaign" no party except for Ukip had mentioned immigration. That was on day two - well into the campaign.

For the first part of the week, the Mail was focused on its "sale of private information" investigation, but it still found time to smear Miliband through Martin Freeman and, unforgiveably, Isis. There was a lot of hypocrisy to be confronted - from Red Ed (zero hours), Freeman (tax avoidance) and Hampstead socialists (everything really). The Labour leader was mocked for shedding a tear over a film about the miners' strike ("mawkish Leftie propaganda") and for suggesting that a future 007 might be a woman ("PC Galore" - which, you have to concede, is a great headline).
The most outrageous bit of innuendo came with yesterday's front-page heading "Runaway Jihadi's father is Labour activist", accompanied by a photograph taken in December of Miliband with Rochdale councillor Shakil Ahmed. Another screaming example of a newspaper reporting something that is true, yet conveying a message that could hardly be described as the truth. 
The story describes Ahmed as a well-respected councillor and there is nothing in the copy to suggest that he has done anything wrong. Yet the presentation encourages the reader to think jihad=bad, Labour=bad, activist=bad, ergo Miliband=bad.  
Miliband is not the only enemy. There have been a couple of pops at the Liberals and the leaders' debate threw up a new villain. A woman who dares to succeed at something beyond home-making and motherhoold, Nicola Sturgeon has now been anointed as the most dangerous woman in Britain.

Nor is the Mail alone in its partisan approach. We have to assume that the Telegraph's front on Wednesday was not intended as an April Fool. But nor was it journalism; it was blatant propaganda. And, like the Mail, the Telegraph has since homed in on Sturgeon as the bogeywoman.
The Express meanwhile produced a series of "Tories good, Labour bad" puffs,  the Sun ran spreads on how Miliband was bad for business, and the Times had "panic" in the markets driving down sterling. Naughty. The markets don't like uncertainty and election campaigns by definition breed uncertainty. Financial experts were predicting in the middle of last year that the pound would fall against the dollar through 2015, and the movement this week had more to do with Andrew Haldane's talk about even lower interest rates than with any fear of Ed Miliband in No 10. Or Ed Balls in No 11.
And don't think there's any less partisanship on the other side of the battle, just fewer papers. But more on that another day.