Ruth Wishart: The new Prime Minister and the press

(I’ll come back to the 1992 exception that proves the rule, bear with me.) Thus the English edition of The Sun greeted the Johnson coronation and its bright new Tory dawn with predictable glee and a Beatles riff. “HEY DUDE!” beamed its splash.

Not so its Scottish stablemate which superimposed the blond bombshell’s coupon on a mock-up of a Toy Story hero. “BOZZ LIGHTFEAR TO INSANITY”, fretted the Scottish Sun, advising its readers that “blundering Bojo” was now the hapless captain of starship Britain.

This particular tabloid has form. Scroll back to the 2015 General Election campaign and you’ll find the London-edited Sun commenting that the SNP were “wreckers”, the Tories were the best bet for millions of ordinary folk, and warning of a Labour-SNP coalition “nightmare”.

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(That particular piece of fake news had wide media currency at the time; one tabloid visual which went viral had Alex Salmond tucked into Ed Miliband’s top jacket pocket in an updated echo of the Spitting Image take on Owen/Steel.) Meanwhile, north of the tabloid border, the Glasgow-based Sun had yet another interplanetary paste-up job: Nicola Sturgeon featured as Leia from Star Wars, hailed as the star of the show, whom voters should back as she was Scotland’s best hope.

Confused? You would be. But arguably only if you were buying two different editions of the currant bun while dallying at Gretna Green. However, as its Scottish political editor noted with unblushing candour: “In the time that I’ve worked at The Sun we’ve supported the Labour Party, the SNP, the Tories. We’ve fought vigorously against the SNP, we’ve supported the SNP”.

Yes, friends, consistency is the watchword. But back, as promised, to 1992, when the Scottish Sun featured its most memorable page one: “Rise Now And Be A Nation Again.”

It was too good to last. By 2007 the front page was dominated by a hangman’s noose in the shape of the SNP’s famous clootie dumpling symbol. Vote SNP and put Scotland’s head in the noose, it warned.

Meanwhile, also in 1992, the southern brethren were doing something uncle Rupert never usually agreed to – trashing the man widely thought to be en route to No 10.

Then again, they had spent the previous five years mounting ever more hysterical attacks on Labour leader Neil Kinnock, culminating in an election-day splash with his head inside a lightbulb. “If Neil Kinnock wins today will the last person to leave Britain please turn out the lights.” It was The Sun Wot Won It, it bragged the next day.

Yet pollsters have long argued the toss about whether the media matters a jot when it comes to making up our minds for us. It’s difficult to believe it doesn’t have an impact, especially with people who gain their fix from just one newspaper, print or online.

The Telegraph, for whom Boris Johnson penned a very lucrative column until last week, has been lavish in its support and praise, doubtless salivating at the thought of a new “golden age” of insider scoops.

This particular broadsheet has been sadly emblematic of the breakdown of the once essential demarcation line between news and comment. A byword for serious news in its heyday, The Torygraph’s journey from rigorous reportage to shoving the Boris bandwagon culminated in last week’s shameless front-page cheerleading.

Mind you, the image it deployed, Boris simultaneously snapping his cod salute while deploying his strange thumbs across rather than up, suggests there may still lurk a Telegraph sub who hasn’t had his humour gene surgically removed.

Boris Johnson’s previous journalistic employers/colleagues have been rather less flattering. Former Telegraph boss Max Hastings – whom his worst enemy would scarcely accuse of being a swivel-eyed lefty – suggested that the new PM wouldn’t recognise the truth if he met it in an identity parade. Ouch.

Boris Johnson's previous employers haven't all been glowing in their praise of him

Times columnist Matthew Parris, who, lest we forget, was a Tory MP in a former life, found new ways of expressing contempt in The Spectator, once edited by the new PM. “Colleagues know he’s no good, know he’s a cold-eyed scoundrel. They require no persuading of his inappropriateness to lead a nation through difficult times.”

Parris was also heartbroken over Tory friends who had succumbed to the siren call of ministerial office, casting aside their own stated belief that the new PM was the kind of chap to give personal morality a bad name.

But the Conservative Party has always benefitted from an overwhelmingly pro-Tory press. And Labour leaders have historically sought to counter this in-built bias by naked attempts to befriend the enemy.

Thus was Rupert Murdoch assiduously wooed by Tony Blair and the latter got his reward with an endorsement at the 1997 General Election. Cynics might suppose that this was not the result of Murdoch’s Damascene conversion to socialism-lite so much as a pragmatic belief that the taxi for Major was already en route.

Gordon Brown’s social bromance with then Daily Mail chief Paul Dacre ended less well, with that mass-selling tabloid continuing on the path of rightwardness and ultimately becoming the principal cheerleader for Brexit.

One can only imagine Dacre’s chagrin when his successor, Geordie Greig, attacked the hardline Brexiteers for being a plan-free zone.

Or, as former Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger put it in a recent lecture, The Mail under Greig “has stopped behaving like a punch-drunk old bruiser lurching around in search of a brawl. Instead, it feels like it might be ready to be part of a broader, calmer conversation about the future.”

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Time will tell. But any future breadth is unlikely to embrace the centre-left. Greig’s Mail was happy enough with last week’s touchdown of blond ambition in No 10 to reprise that odd snap of Johnson in Eric Morecambe mode alongside a massive headline exhorting May’s successor to “BRING US SUNSHINE”.

Readers of The Express have been on a very particular roller coaster over the past few years, with their tabloid of choice backing Labour in 2001 and Ukip in 2015 in temporary aberrations from its slavish devotion to the Tory cause.

Then again, its adherents may not have the state of the body politic foremost in their thoughts.

In recent years the Express specialisation has been serial obsessions leading to months of front pages devoted variously to the disappearance of Madeleine McCann and the circumstances surrounding the death of Diana.

So immersed did it become in alleged plotting that for a while it became known in the trade as the Daily Princess.

“They call him Britain Trump”, boomed The Donald in his latest porkie following Boris’s accession to the Westminster throne.

Curiously, the arrival of a known liar and fantasist in the White House has given a huge boost to many US newspaper circulations and subscriptions. Perhaps UK editors eagerly await their own Boris bounce on this side of the pond.