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Alexi Mostrous

Media Editor

In 2005, The Sun decided that the general election was so boring that it needed to employ a Page 3 girl to represent each of the three main parties. The paper followed up by announcing support for Mr Blair with a puff of red smoke from an office chimney. Five years on there were no such stunts. Political reporting was re-energised as Labour sought an historic fourth term. As doubts over David Cameron’s prospects of victory increased, editors flooded pages with election copy. In the month before polling day on May 6, national newspapers printed 11,017 stories mentioning the election, compared with 9,263 during the same period in 2005.

After two elections in which the majority of the press supported Tony Blair and new Labour – overwhelmingly in 2001, begrudgingly in 2005 – Gordon Brown entered this campaign without the unequivocal support of a single national daily newspaper. The Sun abandoned Mr Brown in September 2009, defecting on the day of his speech to the annual Labour Party conference. After more than a decade of supporting Mr Blair, the News Corporation publication offered its 7½ million readers the front-page headline: “Labour’s Lost It”. The paper spent the next seven months gleefully capitalising on Mr Brown’s unpopularity. A story in April revealed that even Peppa Pig, the children’s television character, had apparently “turned her back” on Labour.

Less than a week before polling day, The Times came out for the Tories for the first time in 18 years. In a fullpage editorial, the paper said that Mr Cameron had shown the “fortitude, judgment and character to lead this country”. After supporting Labour in the past four general elections, the Financial Times also concluded that “on balance, the Conservative Party best fits the bill”. Less surprisingly, The Daily Telegraph’s 2 million readers were encouraged, for the 18th consecutive time since 1945, to vote Tory, as were the Daily Mail’s 5 million.

In perhaps the most significant change, The Guardian decided to switch its support from Labour to the Liberal Democrats. “Invited to embrace five more years of a Labour government, and of Gordon Brown as prime minister, it is hard to feel enthusiasm,” the paper told its million readers. Even the Daily Mirror, Labour’s most loyal supporter since 1945, urged some of its 3.3 million readers to vote tactically for the Lib Dems.

At the same time, media cognoscenti were calling time on the very relevance of the press. Nick Clegg had supposedly broken the two-party mould with his barnstorming appearance in the first party leaders’ debate on ITV. Like Susan Boyle before him, a virtuoso performance seemed to catapult Mr Clegg into the nation’s consciousness. Unlike Susan Boyle, good first impressions did not translate into votes. The Lib Dem leader’s approval ratings jumped by 11 percentage points but subsequently fell back, with the party winning fewer seats although more votes than in 2005.

Part of that disparity may be explained by the barrage of anti-Clegg stories unleashed by right-leaning newspapers after the first debate on April 15. On the morning of the second debate, the Telegraph used a massive front-page headline to reveal that some Liberal Democrat donors had been paying money directly into Mr Clegg’s bank account. He produced bank statements showing that these were to fund part of a researcher’s salary. The Daily Mail upped the ante with a front page accusing Mr Clegg of a “Nazi Slur”. The story was based on remarks he made in 2002, when he wrote that Britain had a “more insidious…cross to bear” than Germany over Nazism. The scoop drew ire from Mr Clegg’s supporters, who pointed out that the Mail’s website at one point carried no fewer than eight anti-Clegg stories.

Private Eye provided some light relief. “Is Clegg A Poof?” ran a fake Sun headline in the satirical magazine. “Voting For Clegg Will Give You Cancer,” a fake Mail page warned. “And Cause Collapse In House Prices.”

Many journalists expressed excitement at Mr Clegg’s elevation, however, not least because it added to the tantalisingly vague prospect of a hung Parliament. Nick Robinson, the BBC’s political editor, told the Radio 4 Today programme that Cleggmania was “the reason people in our business are getting so excited”. The Sunday Times ran a front-page story on a YouGov poll showing Mr Clegg to be more popular than Winston Churchill.

Whether the attacks on Mr Clegg had a significant effect is arguable. They may have slowed some of his momentum and left voters in doubt as to his party’s ability to govern. Perhaps more likely is that voters showed themselves more influenced by sustained media exposure in the years before an election, which the Lib Dems have never enjoyed, than by a one-off television performance, however impressive. With Mr Clegg as Deputy Prime Minister, that disparity is likely to be corrected.

Mr Cameron and Mr Brown were convinced that newspapers move votes. Yet as Roy Greenslade, Professor of Journalism at City University, points out, the press has been mostly pro-Tory since 1945, but Labour has won more elections. According to an Ipsos MORI poll cited by Professor Greenslade, between 20 and 30 per cent of Daily Mail readers consistently voted Labour between 1997 and 2005, despite the paper’s protestations. In 2010, however, the result may have been more similar to 1992, when only 14 per cent voted for Neil Kinnock.

Times readers appear to be even more independent: 64 per cent agreed with the paper when it advised them to vote Tory in 1992, according to Ipsos MORI, but in 2001, when the paper came out for Labour, 40 per cent of readers still said that they would support the Tories.

About 45 per cent of Sun readers pledged to vote Tory in 1992, when the paper put Neil Kinnock’s head in a light bulb on polling day and ran the headline: “If Kinnock wins today will the last person to leave Britain turn out the lights.” In contrast, only 29 per cent said that they would vote Conservative when the paper supported Mr Blair in 2001. A similar swing back to the Tories this year may have carried influence, especially in marginal seats.

Readers themselves do not consider newspapers to be influential at all. A survey by Press Gazette in March suggested that nine out of ten voters believed that their vote would be unaffected by any media organisation. Editors have to hope that Anthony Wells, a political commentator for YouGov, is right when he says: “The real impact is more subconscious, the long-term drip-drip of positive or negative coverage.”

The great irony about reporting this election is found in the numerous editorials warning voters against a hung Parliament. In the event, the actual outcome of 2010 was one that no newspaper, save The Independent, endorsed.