At precisely this point in the electoral cycle that led to Tony Blair’s first term as prime minister, the leader of the Labour party flew halfway around the world to meet Rupert Murdoch on Hayman Island, off Australia’s Queensland coast. Then, as now, Britain was two years away from an election the Labour party seemed destined to win. Then, as now, Labour had been out of power for a very long time indeed: 16 years then, 12 years now.
Hayman Island was a moment of history, acknowledged as such by Blair in private and subsequently in his memoirs: “I could feel [as we left Australia] we were in with a chance of winning the Sun’s support.” He was right. The tectonic plates moved fast inside News Corporation. Andrew Knight, hugely influential on the board, played a primary role completing the switch, as did Murdoch’s old friend Irwin Stelzer, a young Rebekah Wade (now Brooks), Les Hinton – moved from the US to oversee a more civilised regime in London – and Peter Stothard, who as editor of the Times was the man who actually invited Blair to Hayman.
Murdoch also needed a left-of-the-aisle editor to steer the Sun away from two decades of Tory support. That new editor was me. I was then the 34-year-old deputy editor of his New York Post. One Monday morning my phone rang and I was told to get on Concorde.
But that was then. What of now? How can Keir Starmer navigate the treacherous waters of the British press as he seeks to sail the Labour ship back to No 10? It won’t be easy. Everything has changed but, in some senses, absolutely nothing has changed at all.
Let’s look at what has changed. When Murdoch and Blair shook hands on Hayman, Google was still three years from startup; there was no mass internet, no smartphones; Mark Zuckerberg was 11 and would not set up Facebook until 2004; Twitter did not tweet until two years after that.
The influence Murdoch wielded was real, palpable and red in tooth and claw. His power was unmediated by social media; he could promise the earth and deliver the Sun – and everything else News Corp then controlled. And the papers were so much bigger. These days the Sun’s paper sales figures are no longer published, but they are thought to be below the Daily Mail’s 805,000. Back then, the Sun’s audited sales were at 3.8m copies and the Mail’s at 2.3m: unbelievable power.
But other things haven’t changed. Power in the British media is a strange thing and the press remains potent, critical to our body politic. Tabloids influence through social media, turning what was an existential threat into a disseminator – they hugely influence broadcast media. They influence because they are the loudest voices in the room and because what they shout is brilliantly crafted by brilliant people.
But Brexit has pushed the editorial teams at the Mail titles, the Sun, the Telegraph, the Express titles and elsewhere into a world far to the right of the one I occupied – and it is a world that will never, under any circumstances, back Labour.
There is no point doing deals and no deals will be offered. If you control Fox News, as the Murdochs do, then doing a deal with Starmer is off-brand and so last century. But neither can Labour afford to ignore the press, or belittle it, or look down its nose at it.
Soon we may see encouragement from these papers towards Starmer – but he should not mistake that pragmatism for a change of heart. He has to be smart. He needs to see the Brexit press for what it is: a sworn enemy, a hostile force.
Remember the fate of Gordon Brown, who was first blessed by Murdoch and Jonathan Rothermere’s Daily Mail and then attacked, bullied and finally ritually sacrificed by the Sun in September 2009, on the day of his speech at the Labour conference.
I will never forget that day. I helped Gordon prepare his speech in the morning – as a friend, not an adviser. By the evening my old paper had hijacked conference – shipping thousands of copies of the paper into its own News International drinks party – and humiliated him in a room full of members of cabinet and rival editors.
There are lessons here. The press only has power if it has you in the first place. Gordon was vulnerable because he had become close to Rupert, Les, Rebekah and before that myself – he was always decent and proper, he did not deserve his fate. The moment a Labour leader accepts the blessing of these papers he becomes their prisoner.
So should Starmer shun the editors?
Not at all. He still needs to go to see them, drink their warm wine, shake the hands, smile and ask after their families. Journalists remain great company and great people. It is necessary to know the media, have friends there, but it is important to remember who they are and who you are; it is important for there to be a separation of powers.
And that’s the point really: separation of powers. Over the past 20 years the political and media elites have become so close, so intermingled that the lunatics took over the asylum. We had a journalist in No 10 and it was journalists who enabled Brexit. It did not end well.
But times are changing now. For Starmer, the British press will always be hostile. He is not paranoid, it really is out to get him. But there is a noble honesty in that conflict, so long as he retains a distance.
Indeed, the prize dangling in front of the Labour leader, almost within grasp, is not just to win power. It is to become the first prime minister to win power in the modern era without the endorsement of the great newspaper barons.
Imagine that? A Labour PM who has done no deals. A Labour PM who is free.
David Yelland was editor of the Sun 1998-2003
