Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee quotes me today in her piece about the re-establishment of what she calls "the Tory press".
She raises interesting questions by asserting that the preponderance of papers supporting the Conservative party amounts to a "news distortion" that "has been the abiding story of Britain, shaping the history of the last century." She writes: "We have lived with it for so long we forget how far it explains British politics, its rightwardness and anti-EU xenophobia. From birth, the loud noise in the ear of every British citizen has always been the foghorn of the right."
As part of her argument she says that I have compiled figures for the national dailies which show that "76% of daily readership belongs to the right - The Times, Telegraph, Sun, Mail, Express, Star" while "only 24% belongs to the non-right - The Guardian, Independent, Mirror and Financial Times (though the FT has moved rightwards of late)."
I'm sure that people will question these figures, and the claim - hers and mine - about right-wingness. So let's quickly explain the figures first. I calculated them by adding up the readership totals from the latest National Readership Survey. Anyone can check them if they are so minded.
Now to the substantive point. There will be journalists who look askance at claims of the return of a right-wing and/or Tory-supporting press. But I think Polly is broadly correct. Even if some of the papers she names have not embraced David Cameron's Tories, they have increasingly espoused markedly anti-Labour agendas which arguably amounts to the same thing. Unlike Polly, I no longer hold a candle for Labour, having refused to vote for a party that took us to war in Iraq. But I'm never going to vote for Cameron either.
So I have no party axe to grind when I say that it is now blindingly obvious that the daily press is overwhelmingly anti-Labour and, to various degrees, pro-Cameron. In other words, we're back to the situation which, as Polly says, has been the one we've known throughout the last 60 years and more.
This period, in the lead-up to a change of Labour leadership and the subsequent run-in towards a general election, will be crucial to the way Britons vote. I'd lay money now on a Labour defeat because the British press retains the power to create a climate of hostility towards a party. Who can disagree?
