It Was the Sun Wot Lost it!!

Yesterday Trevor Kavanagh (67), veteren Sun journalist, wrote this hysterical piece predicting riots in the streets of London if the voters were to defy the Sun and support anyone but Dave. If you don't do what we tell you, says the Super Soaraway Sun, Greek style chaos would ensue.

But, you know what?.... the people defied Trevor and the Sun. They refused to be bullied into electing the Conservatives, and they refused to be rushed into buying the whole Cleggmania package and they gave us a hung Parliament.

So, amid all the political furore about who will do deals with whom, and what shape a new Parliament will eventually take, one development is in danger of being missed: the print media is one of the big losers in this election.

Seven national papers supported the Tories, two supported the Lib Dems, and only one, The Mirror, supported Labour (two if you include the Mirror's Scottish sister, The Daily Record), but theTories failed to get a majority, and the Lib Dems failed to get any improvement in their vote. Given all the media support of the Conservatives and the supposed unpopularity of Gordon Brown, this is a massive failure of the political influence of the UK press.

But this situation was not entirely unpredictable: in February, when the Sun ran a campaign against Brown on the way he wrote and addresssed letters to bereaved relatives of military casualties, the resultant pressure on Brown was viewed as illegitimate and massively unfair. The paradoxical outcome was that Brown got a huge sympathy vote, his personal ratings improved and the beginning of the Labour recovery in the polls was established. The Sun's attacks were counter productive, producing the opposite effect to the paper's intentions.

Similarly when the print media, in the Conservative interest, attacked Nick Clegg with charges of Nazism and other nonsense, the Lib Dems consolidated their improvement in the polls and Cleggmania was off and running. Once again the public told the press where to get off in pushing an agenda that the people did not buy.

So the print media, previously so powerful and dominating, so used to dictating to Prime Ministers and government departments, has failed in its stated aims of forcing a Cameron government on the people.  The Sun, the embodiment of this hubris, the newspaper above all others which has arrogantly assumed that it rules the country and that politicians must bow to to the will of Rupert, has lost the plot and lost the power.

After the 1992 election, the Sun ran a famous headline which boldly claimed that "It Was The Sun Wot Won It!". In 2010 the matching headline would have to be "It Was The Sun Wot Lost It!".