Cleggmania sets off 'raw panic' in right-wing media outletsBritain's right-wing newspapers in a spin over the possibility that they might have backed the wrong candidate
To the untrained eye, yesterday's unprecedented wall-to-wall assault on Nick Clegg in the pages of Britain's right-wing newspapers might have looked like an orchestrated attack by a Tory media machine – a notion that one seasoned observer, Lord Mandelson, spent the day doing his best to promulgate. But the truth, according to those with knowledge of the editors and newspapers involved, was far more visceral and chaotic.
"It's raw panic, that's what it is," was how one former senior Fleet Street executive put it, adding that he had never witnessed anything similar in his entire career. The rise of Clegg has not just thrown into doubt the prospect of a trouble-free election victory for David Cameron. It has also triggered the most deeply held revulsions of the Daily Mail's all-powerful editor, Paul Dacre, while stoking internecine tensions at the very top of Rupert Murdoch's media empire.
The Mail's front-page claim that Clegg had committed a "Nazi slur on Britain" in a 2002 Guardian column, alongside reporting on his expenses in the Daily Telegraph and a hatchet job in the Sun, triggered a backlash and a day of energetic online activity. On Twitter, critics of the Mail sarcastically blamed Clegg for everything from the Icelandic volcano to the fall of the Roman empire, while the Daily Mail-O-Matic website generated parodic Clegg headlines ("Could Nick Clegg molest house prices?").
There were signs that the newspapers' broadsides were causing a fracturing of unity on the right: the Tory blogger Iain Dale called the attacks on Clegg "a terrible indictment of the British press", warning that they would backfire and "only serve to increase his popularity and position in the poll".
Behind the scenes at the Mail, the eruption of hostility towards Clegg – including the Nazi story, a leader-page piece on "the horror of a hung parliament", a full-page Stephen Glover column on Lib Dem opposition to Trident, seven other articles, and a leader column – resulted from both personal and political motives.
Perhaps surprisingly, the Mail's backing for David Cameron has always been uneasy. Dacre "really dislikes Cameron viscerally", according to one person who knows the Mail editor well. "He thinks he's an Old Etonian toff." By contrast, Dacre has a relatively warm relationship with Gordon Brown. It was Cameron's commitment to a £150 tax break for married couples that finally solidified the Mail's backing.
More than he supports a Tory election victory, though, Dacre is known to abhor the notion of a hung parliament, preferring a country run with the same uncompromising authority he exerts over his newsroom. Furthermore, most of Clegg's positions – on immigration, Europe and Trident especially – are anathema to Dacre, who, in the words of one acquaintance, "sees him as a third-rate Cameron". Dacre's lukewarm stance towards Cameron and friendly history with Brown had also, until this week, denied the Mail a clear villain around whom to target its election coverage. For now, at any rate, Nick Clegg seems to have solved that problem.
Tensions inside the Murdoch empire appeared to reach their most frenzied pitch a day earlier, on Wednesday, when James Murdoch and the chief executive of News International and former Sun editor, Rebekah Brooks, made an uninvited visit to the Independent's newsroom in central London, finding their way past security to berate the newspaper's editor, Simon Kelner, in front of dozens of journalists. "What the [LIFTED] are you playing at?" Murdoch asked angrily, apparently objecting to an Independent ad campaign telling readers: "Rupert Murdoch won't decide this election. You will." "They strode in like a scene out of Dodge City," one astonished journalist said.
Perhaps lending some credibility to Mandelson's speculations, Brooks and Murdoch had originally travelled to Kensington, where the Independent shares a building with Associated Newspapers, publishers of the Mail, to see the Mail proprietor, Lord Rothermere, although it is not know what they discussed.
If nerves are fraught at News International, it may be because much is riding there on a Cameron victory. Brooks had to lobby hard for the Sun and other Murdoch papers to back the Tory leader, according to the media mogul's biographer Michael Wolff, because the elder Murdoch had become a loyal friend of Brown's. "Murdoch is still stewing over an ill-timed and inept endorsement of John McCain over Barack Obama," Wolff wrote. The faltering of Cameron's seemingly assured victory may thus be straining his relations with Brooks.
John Lloyd, director of journalism at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University, said: "Clearly, the newspapers and editors who are ideological Tories are suffering from a howl of rage, now that what had seemed to be a shoo-in has turned into the risk of a hung parliament."
"There are a lot of very, very powerful people here with a lot to lose," said the former senior Fleet Street executive. "These editors have told their proprietors it's going to happen. Before the first debate, the Tories thought they might be in power for three terms, and the debate has made it quite possible they'll never get in again, if the Lib Dems hold the balance of power and we get proportional representation."
Additional reporting by Hugh Muir and Jane Martinson
), and I have to say I was a bit surprised once I saw the row of headlines attacking Clegg. I obviously knew entire sections of the British press were retarded, but I didn't think they were actually that stupid...
