It was the Mail wot won it... for Labour

The Daily Mail could start flying the red flag of Labour. No really. Despite the recent tacit agreement made by Daily Mail and General Trust chairman Viscount Rothermere with a Lords committee member that any support of Labour by his papers would be an "extreme act", DMGT chief executive Charles Sinclair writes in to today's Financial Times that his comments to the Lords were, um... a joke. "The editors of our newspapers have the editorial independence to maker their own decisions on such matters," writes an apparently straight-faced Sinclair in a letter today to the FT. He adds that during his and Rothermere's DMGT tenure "the editors of our various newspapers have exercised their judgment in support of Labour as well as the Conservatives on a number of occasions". Sinclair even goes so far as to say that the FT reporters who covered the story "maybe need to work a little on their sense of humour". That's telling 'em.