Both Stephen Glover in The Independent and Peter Wilby in The Guardian muse on the critical media coverage of Gordon Brown's government. And both can't see it getting any less harsh in future. Why?
Glover writes: "There are several causes. The relative absence of convinced Brownites in the liberal media; the alleged cack-handedness of his media team; the rise of a plausible Tory leader; and the accident-prone nature of Mr Brown's administration... the gloomy lesson that Mr Brown might draw is that he will face a more uniformly hostile media than ever did Tony Blair."
Wilby writes: "Will the press ever restore the support it gave Brown in the summer?... I don't think so. Blair had a narrative: the man who would completely transform Labour, freeing it from its collectivist past. Rightly or wrongly, the press bought it, and only the Iraq war provided a substitute narrative. Brown didn't have a narrative, but the press has been allowed to create one: the man who is too introverted, indecisive and uninspiring to govern competently."
