‘What are you going to do about the Sun?” It was the first question Neil Kinnock asked, when a bunch of eager young political advisers setting up a now long-forgotten campaign for Britain to join the single currency begged his advice. By then an EU commissioner, Kinnock had never forgotten the paper’s devastating 1992 front page asking the last person left in Britain to turn out the lights if Labour won. But for decades now, his question has haunted the liberal left.
The Murdoch press has earned a fearsome reputation among progressives as a kind of giant toad squatting in the road, blocking the way to everything from higher taxes to gay rights and, above all, closer relations with Europe. Few did more to pave the way for Brexit than the immigrant-bashing, Brussels-baiting Sun, whose once cheeky Euroscepticism had descended by 2015 to the nadir of a Katie Hopkins column describing migrants drowning at sea as cockroaches. “Show me pictures of coffins, show me bodies floating in the water … I still don’t care,” she wrote. Across the Atlantic, Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News channel offered a similarly shrill platform for the angry, increasingly paranoid voices who would propel Donald Trump to power. Though he eventually came to regret enabling Trump, when the 92-year-old Murdoch finally relinquished the reins of his empire to his son Lachlan last week, it was with one last defiant populist attack on the “elites” supposedly setting the political narrative.
