Leave’s major advantage in the last three weeks of the campaign. The Tory press is on their side
The Sun front page from last Friday, after another poor set of net immigration figures for Cameron
This referendum could boil down to Cameron v The Tory Press. If Cameron prevails, it could be good news for Corbyn.
One of the most fascinating aspects of this referendum campaign is a Tory PM and most of the Tory Press being on opposite sides. As Neil Kinnock and Ed Miliband can attest the press can very brutal. Whilst I don’t subscribe to the belief that it was solely The Sun wot won it at the 1992 general election, as a politician it is much more advantageous to have media on your side.
It seems we have been transported to DC comics’ Bizarro world, where everything is the opposite to what it should be, with the likes of The Mirror and The Guardian backing a Tory Prime Minister, whilst the likes of The Daily Mail, The Daily Telegraph, and The Sun vehemently opposing the Prime Minister. Today sees the first debate/Q&A of the referendum, it isn’t difficult to see those newspapers taking a very anti-Cameron line tomorrow morning, as we can see with The Sun front page above, they can be very damaging to the Prime Minister.
There’s been a long term decline in the influence of the print media, in the last few weeks we’ve seen the closure of the print edition of The Independent, there’s been rumours, subsequently denied, that The Guardian would follow The Independent’s lead and turn into a purely online outfit, and this past week The Daily Mail’s parent company issued a profits warning, “after reporting a 29% fall in profits, driven by a double-digit decline in print advertising, at its newspaper operation in the six months to the end of March.”
So if Remain do win despite the onslaught of the Tory press, this might be good news for Labour and Jeremy Corbyn. It isn’t the difficult to envisage the political waterboarding the Tory press will give Jeremy Corbyn at the 2020 general election, with the impact of the press diminished, Labour might have less to fear about 2020 and the chances of Corbyn becoming Prime Minister might be higher than some currently think.