Britpop Keith: Keir Starmer thinks he has to get The Sun on side because he's trapped in 1995
Like one of those dads who refuses to move on from the Weller feathercut, the Labour leader's media strategy is stuck in a kind of noxious nostalgia.
In High Fidelity (2000), Stephen Frears’ movie adaptation of Nick Hornby’s 1995 novel — which was published in 1995, smack bang in the middle of the Britpop era — the protagonist Rob says, in one of his many monologues about women who had to endure him: “Some people never got over Vietnam or the night their band opened for Nirvana…”
The right-wing of the Labour Party and the journalists that came up with them — many of them transplanted from the corpse of the Melody Maker to become broadsheet columnists — never got over the ‘90s. Like men in their fifties who refuse to ditch their Weller cuts after being exposed to The Jam at too tender an age, a large part of the Labour Party is convinced that singing the old songs is the only solution and that their frontman must always be a Blair tribute act.
And Labour’s current frontman Keir Starmer, while he tends to resemble a photocopy of a photocopy of Morrissey, desperately wants Anthony Blair impression to land. As he attempts to convince the world that he’s “just Keir”, the instruction to “just call me Tony” echoes in the background.
This morning on Call Keir, his monthly act of debasement before LBC’s Nick ‘Austin Allegro’ Ferrari, a cavalcade of callers, and an audience largely comprised of cabbies, Starmer was asked by Ian from Liverpool:
I’d like to ask, as a lifelong Liverpool supporter, why, Sir Keir, did you write an article for The Sun newspaper the other day? Surely that’s not going to gain you any support across the north west…
Nick Ferrari put the question in context:
I think this was around party conference time. And of course to remind some listers, I know you know, Ian, but The Sun effectively lost Liverpool with its coverage of the Hillsborough tragedy in which it made some headlines that I don’t wish to repeat.
Sir Keir, it was a surprise to see you pop up in The Sun…
Starmer replied:
Ian, don’t for a minute think that I would condone that coverage. I think pretty universally that was rightly condemned. But it is very important as leader of the Labour Party that I speak to as many of the public across the whole of the United Kingdom and that includes those that read The Sun. And the only way I can speak to them is to write in The Sun.
Ian, I respect your strong held views on this, I really do. But my job as Leader of the Opposition is to be utterly focused on the next election. And that means I must get the Labour message across to as many people as possible. We’ve made huge changes to the Labour Party in the past year and a half.
It’s very important that I’m able to communicate that to people. Because if I can’t demonstrate that change it makes the next election that much more difficult for us.
Asked by Ferrari if he would write for The Sun again, Starmer gave a rare simple answer: “I would do, yeah.”
For all his professed respect for Ian’s position — which has about as much value as those World Cup coins they used to give out at Esso garages — Starmer was disingenuous in his answer. The key line is “… and the only way I can speak to them is to write in The Sun.”1
On March 18, 1997, the day that The Sun splashed with the headline The Sun Backs Blair2, the paper sold around 3.8 million copies every day and was the UK’s biggest newspaper.
In May 2020, The Sun — along with its more expensive Thesaurus-owning sibling The Times — stopped publishing its circulation figures. The following month it was announced that after being the country’s biggest selling newspaper since 1978, The Sun had been eclipsed by The Daily Mail.
By June 2021, in part because of the impact of the pandemic, News Group Newspapers, the News UK subsidiary that publishes The Sun and The Sun on Sunday — the rapidly cobbled together Sunday successor to The News of the World — wrote their value down to zero. News UK has effectively concluded that the titles will never return to growth.
The Sun maintains its influence for three reasons: 1) It’s still a mouthpiece for Rupert Murdoch 2) it’s front pages are included in paper reviews and its stories drive broadcast coverage and 3) nostalgia. The Sun of the Kevlin MacKenzie-era was such a (toxic) force in British culture that it’s still treated as important. And, therefore, its readers are still seen as an important demographic.
But in March 2020, the last time The Sun’s sales were made public, it has less than 1 million daily readers. News UK executives will and do argue, like its Chief Operating Officer, David Dinsmore — a former Sun editor himself — did when the circulation figures went private, that:
News UK is a multiplatform business with brands that reach more people than ever before via mobile, web, apps, video, radio stations and podcasts, alongside print" and it wants to focus on its total audience.
That’s the reason Murdoch has invested so much in radio (Talk Radio, Times Radio and Talk Sport) and has pinned a lot on the forthcoming Piers Morgan-fronted TalkTV. After selling his stake in Sky, he knows that his print brands are waning in influence and while their online reach is growing it doesn’t have the punch of any of those ‘classic’ front pages.
Despite the figures, Starmer and his advisors still fear The Sun and believe that they must get Murdoch on side for their T.Blair Allstars tribute act to the main stage. And the recent eruption of ‘sleaze’ stories makes them feel that turn is coming. But that’s a misreading and a misremembering of history.
Tony Blair became Labour leader in July 1994. That August, Murdoch used an interview with Der Spiegel to signal that he could see himself supporting Blair, knowing that his comments would be picked up by the UK press beyond his own outlets. He told the magazine:
Only last year we helped the Labor government in Canberra. I could even imagine myself supporting the British Labour leader, Tony Blair.
The next month, Murdoch, Blair and their wives met in a private dining room in London alongside Gus Fisher, then-Chief Executive of News International.
As I wrote yesterday, Murdoch claims he has never asked a Prime Minister for anything, but what happened in September 1994 is instructive; Murdoch didn’t ask Blair for anything at their dinner but during seperate meetings with Fischer, Blair and his team were told what “issues of mutual interest” were on the table.
By March 1995, the press was being briefed that Labour’s plans in government would not force Murdoch to sell any of his media empire. And in July 1995, Blair and his retinue flew to Hayman Island in Australia for a News International conference where the future Prime Minister made a speech and Murdoch praised his “courage”.
In his pompously-titled memoir A Journey, Blair writes:
The country’s most powerful news proprieter, whose publications have hitherto been rancorous in their opposition to the Labour party, invites us into the lion’s den. You go, don’t you?
In the same book, Blair calls Murdoch “an enigma” and says he “came to have a grduging respect and even a liking for him”.
Back in January 1994, Peter Mandelson — later to turn to Jeffrey Epstein for advice on belts… among other things — wrote in The Daily Mail that:
If Murdoch cannot be beaten — and there are many who believe that his media holdings need to be cut down to size — we should encourage more British media companies to grow, compete, and give Mr Murdoch a harder run for his megabucks.
27 years later and Rupert Murdoch is still being allowed to amble for his money, with rampant access to government ministers, including the Prime Minister, and the Leader of the Opposition begging for his love.
Sadly for Keir Starmer there’s no chance that Murdoch and his current wife Jerry Hall will have a child for him to act as godfather for as Blair did for one of the mogul’s daughter’s with Wendi Deng. And while there are echoes of the 90s in 2021’s sleaze scandals, I don’t think the outcome will be the same.
As I recently wrote for Byline Times, the tabloids’ “sleaze” stories in the 90s began in earnest after John Major’s “back to the basics” speech at the Conservative Party Conference in 1993. Had Major played ball with Murdoch more — something he was not willing to do — there’s a chance that the deal with Blair might not have happened. Feeling certain that another term for Major was a threat to his business interests made Murdoch turn.
Keir Starmer can’t give Murdoch anything he can’t already get from Michael Gove — his former employee — or Priti Patel — who dined privately with him and was a guest at his wedding.
While The Sun, Times and Sunday Times may be manouvering to see Boris Johnson out of Number 10, it’s not because they want to see him replaced by Starmer. Rather they’ll opt for a more ‘stable’ Conservative.
Blair faced a Sun with more than three times as many readers, a younger Murdoch, and a media environment without YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Starmer is operating in an entirely different world but is still stuck to the notion that it might be The Sun wot wins it for him. It won’t be. And while he cannot avoid talking to the paper, every time he writes an editorial for it or holds the paper in a photo op for one of its campaigns, the joke is on him.
A common riposte to criticisms of Starmer writing for The Sun is to say, “Diane Abbott did it too.” Yes, and I think she shouldn’t have.
The picture was a photo of Blair holding a copy of The Sun with the same headline mocked up on it but featuring a different photo of himself.