ABSTRACT

This book aims to explore the validity of these competing claims as it examines the role of the popular press in British politics since 1940. Its main body is divided into five extended chapters, each representing a different phase of political coverage. The first chapter is concentrated around

explores the virulent anti-Labour hostility of the emerging popular press in the inter-war period. But the rise of a centre-left popular press from the 1930s meant that, by 1945, the popular press remained individually partisan but was collectively more politically balanced than ever before, a pattern that continued throughout the post-war Labour governments between 1945-1951. Chapter 2 takes up where the previous one left off to explore Labour’s treatment in the years and months prior to the 1964 general election, an occasion which formed the high-point for the party of a more general trend after 1951 towards a reduction in individual press partisanship. Chapter 3 begins by examining the early origins of the breakdown of this trend with the dramatic end of the Wilson government’s press honeymoon from 1966 onwards. But its main focus suggests that it was only really from 1974-1979 that an overwhelmingly partisan right-wing press gradually emerged. Chapter 4 moves on to chart how the party’s electoral and political failures between 1979-1992 were accompanied by a more relentlessly hostile press coverage than at any time in the post-war era. In particular it explores the above controversy surrounding the 1992 general election and suggests that there is some truth in the claim that it was ‘the Sun (in alliance with the other Tory-supporting tabloids) wot won it’ for the Conservatives. The final section then analyses the reasons behind the astonishing transformation of New Labour’s treatment in the tabloid press between 1992-1997. It demonstrates how, in both the latter election and 2001, it was Blair’s New Labour party – but not social democracy – that gained more support from the right-wing press than ever before.