Much of the rightwing press has settled on Kemi Badenoch as its champion in a campaign against Andy Burnham’s Labour government, Guardian columnist Jane Martinson writes, with the Conservative leader’s uncosted £10bn anti-missile plans used to anoint her as a political leader.
Martinson argues that the proposal for a so-called Britannia shield, whose merits she describes as debatable, achieved one notable thing last week: the very idea of the shield was used to crown a leader.
Badenoch’s plans, which Martinson describes as uncosted and pie-in-the-sky, were enthusiastically heralded by the rightwing press, including by outlets she says must know them to be ridiculous. The Sun splashed a smiling Badenoch across its front page under a banner headline calling her the ‘Iron Dome Lady’; the Express paraded her in a power suit and a union jack. The Daily Mail, meanwhile, hailed the Tories for seeking to ‘protect the nation’s skies’ and stamped the plans with its ‘Don’t Leave Britain Defenceless’ campaign mark.
According to Martinson, the coverage, which she characterises as unquestioning, would be the envy of wartime leaders.
The slavish coverage of Badenoch, she writes, is significant so soon after Burnham’s first conference speech as prime minister. It marks the moment much of the rightwing press returned to its traditional Tory-supporting ways after years of flirting with, and outright eulogising, Nigel Farage and his now scandal-hit Reform UK party. It also suggests a back-to-basics return to the economy as the chief battleground for the fight, and not the madder excesses of the war on woke that has recently consumed them.
The praise for Badenoch, who was also recently treated to an all-expenses paid trip to Greece to meet Rupert Murdoch and executives from the Sun and Times-owning News Corp, suggests she has cemented a position as the rightwing press’s best political hope of beating Burnham, Martinson writes.
She adds that the search for a suitable champion has assumed growing urgency because the prime minister has so far proved hard to leave a mark on. ‘Red Andy’, the early attack line, has not been widely used since the June byelection in Makerfield. The Mail may have dubbed Burnham’s first conference speech ‘the most Left-wing speech delivered by a modern British prime minister’, but in recent weeks only the Telegraph’s Allister Heath has fired the ‘Red Andy’ missile, in a column that called plans for pension reform, a social care system and all talk of a return to the European Union ‘mad, nasty and shockingly extreme’.
The coverage reminds Alastair Campbell of his early years advising Tony Blair, when Blair was depicted either as a ‘useless Bambi or Stalin’, Campbell tells Martinson. ‘They can’t decide if [Burnham] is a useless Paddington Bear or red in tooth and claw,’ he says. ‘They just can’t work him out yet.’
Martinson cites several factors making it difficult for the rightwing press to get the full measure of its enemy, including Burnham’s trajectory from New Labour luvvy to working-class champion, the King of the North. Labour advisers also point to the fact that Burnham’s inner circle, in contrast to his predecessors, has been relatively leak- and conflict-free, leaving rightwing combatants with fewer vulnerabilities to exploit.
‘The press are probing his defences,’ former Labour party adviser Tom Baldwin tells Martinson. ‘They’ll keep trying, of course, and the chances are that one of their missiles will eventually hit a target.’
Martinson describes this as the calm before the storm, with Burnham’s opponents gearing up for the budget and the inevitable controversies on 28 October.
Amid rising fuel prices, geopolitical uncertainty and concerns over jobs, she writes that the back-to-the-future nature of the debate is hardly surprising. Burnham has assaulted shibboleths, vowing to reverse ’40 years of failure’ with pledges to repeal Margaret Thatcher’s ban on public ownership of water companies, abolish the Tory version of the right-to-buy housing scheme and restore a sense of common good to Britain. To the right, she says, this is unconscionable. Dan Hodges in the Mail, praising Badenoch’s ‘best speech yet’, wrote that the country faces a choice between Burnham’s ‘unashamed 1970s-style socialism’ and the Tory leader’s ‘bold attempt to reappropriate and recondition Margaret Thatcher’s radical conservatism’.
Although the rightwing outlets fight a similar battle against Labour, Martinson writes that they do so for varying reasons. Some are ideological, but commercial imperatives also fuel their fervour. The 1970s and 80s marked a golden age for newspapers, when millions of loyal readers gave them heft and profits. With sales and readership now at a fraction of their late-80s peak, the Sun, which claimed sales of 3.8m per day in 1987, and several other titles no longer publish their numbers, focusing instead on online reach. In dwindling markets, Martinson writes, the strategy is to stay competitive by aligning with, or perhaps exacerbating, the prevailing wave of political populism.
The Sun has struggled more than the Mail with the shift online, she adds. It has also struggled more with Burnham because of its coverage of the 1989 Hillsborough disaster, in which it falsely blamed Liverpool supporters for a crush that killed 97 people. According to Baldwin, citing well-placed sources, Burnham may become the first prime minister since the Labour leader Jim Callaghan to refuse requests for exclusive interviews and articles in Rupert Murdoch’s biggest tabloid.
Martinson writes that the right’s battle camp has the additional problem that Burnham himself is proving a wily opponent. The prime minister spends 10 minutes a day with his social media team before posting to his nearly 1m followers on Instagram and more than 700,000 on TikTok. His short-form videos on fuel prices and the triple lock do not seem to target younger voters, but are a way of bypassing a negative narrative, or what Campbell calls ‘the madness of the rightwing press’.
Burnham could opt to go his own way and ignore the hostile rightwing outlets altogether, Martinson writes, but in a democracy that would be no more ethical for Labour than it is for Reform UK, which has barred press critics. David Yelland, the editor of the Sun when it put Tony Blair on its front page with the headline ‘Is THIS the most dangerous man in Britain?’, tells her it would also be unwise. The power of the rightwing press is diminished, he says, describing its outlets as ‘toothless tigers in a jungle full of new dangers, dangers as lethal for them as the rest of us, by which I mean AI and what comes next’. But, he adds, ‘the truth is the Tory press still has influence over the political and media classes… it can still set the weather’.
Martinson concludes that, as in famous battles past, the weather can be a decisive factor, and the side that copes with it best usually wins.
Jane Martinson is an academic and Guardian columnist. She is a board member of the Scott Trust, which owns the Guardian Media Group, and writes in a personal capacity.
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