Hamlet with the prints: how Blair became the papers' tiger

IF ELECTIONS were only about which party can attract the greatest press support, Tony Blair is home and dry.

He has Britain's to largest selling daily papers, the Sun and the Mirror, behind him, together selling 6.4 million copies a day. Add on the Guardian, the Independent, the Financial Times and the Daily Star (which declares for Blair in this morning's issue) and the New Labour sale is more than eight million.

John Major's daily press backing is less impressive. The Daily Mail, the Express and the Daily Telegraph muster 4.5 million. Even with the Euro-sceptical Times, the non-Blairite total comes in at just 5.2 million.

The nine national Sundays tilt even more in Blair's favour. The News of the World, Sunday Mirror and People have joint sales of 8.9 million. With the Independent on Sunday and the Observer, it reaches 9.6 million. But the total for the Tory quartet Sunday Times, Sunday Telegraph, Mail on Sunday and Express on Sunday reaches only 5.5 million.

Of course, it's nowhere near as simple as that. Readers are not passive consumers, voting as their paper advises. When it was at its most rabidly Tory, 30 per cent of Sun readers voted Labour. Now it is fashionably pro-Labour, polls suggest it won't deliver more than 55 per cent of its readership to Blair.

Nor should we imagine that the "undecided" will have their minds made up by editorials in the campaign's final week. The mood has been set long ago, proved by the polls which have altered very little since the election was announced.

Of greater fascination are the reasons, or alleged reasons, behind the editorial decisions to favour Blair or Major. Most of the fevered speculation surrounds the differing advice offered by Rupert Murdoch's four Wapping titles.

The News of the World and the Sun back Blair. The Sunday Times urged its readers to vote the Tories "warts and all". The Times took the bizarre step yesterday of advising readers to back candidates, Labour, Tory, whoever, based solely on their opposition to European integration.

This means a right-wing paper finds itself urging support for noted left-wingers such as Tony Benn, Ken Livingstone and Jeremy Corbyn, while calling for the defeat of rock solid Tories like the deputy prime minister Michael Heseltine, former prime minister Edward Heath, and former Northern Ireland ministers Michael Ancram and Michael Mates. No wonder it took a leading article of interminable length to explain the "principle not party" approach.

I am convinced the Times more closely reflects Murdoch's views than either of his tabloid papers. His hostility to Europe, ostensibly because of bureaucracy but in reality due to what he regards as its back door socialism", is tied to his own business concerns. There is even a suggestion from Wapping insiders that he now regrets having urged the Sun to come out so early and so fervently on Blair's behalf.

Belatedly, he has come to the conclusion that the move towards a single European currency and the consequent adoption by Britain of all European Union laws and rules will threaten his media empire.

Murdoch has no enthusiasm for the Social Chapter, seeing it as a regression to pre-Thatcherite days when unions held sway, and is concerned at anti-monopoly regulations which might not only stop his expansion but might also force him to divest.

He has little to fear from a British parliament, whichever party wins. This does not mean that he has done a deal with Blair about relaxing restrictions on cross media ownership. But he is convinced that New Labour will, at the very least, maintain the status quo. Some rivals remain convinced about a link between Blair and Murdoch.

Conrad Black's Daily Telegraph even constructed a conspiracy theory in which senior executives of Murdoch's satellite company, BSkyB, are said to have offered Blair public backing in return for a private pact. The paper said BSkyB's chairman, Gerry Robinson, who also chairs Granada, recently came out for Blair, as did another director, Dennis Stevenson.

I understand that Blair didn't even know of Robinson's BSkyB connection when he endorsed the party. His aides accuse the Telegraph of paranoia. The Daily Telegraph editor, Charles Moore, has never made any secret of his own Europhobia and it has long been the central theme of his paper's coverage.

But Europe did not emerge as the defining issue of the campaign until almost the fourth week and that was largely due to the Daily Mall. Not only did the Mail force lit on to the agenda by revealing the vast number of MPs defying the party's wait and see policy on monetary union, it also led the paper away from its tacit support for Labour.

In previous months the paper's owner, Lord Rothermere, and its editor in chief, Sir David English, had dropped heavy hints about it being time to give Blair a chance. Paul Dacre, the Mail editor, remained unconvinced and his single handed attempt to change the minds of his bosses eventually succeeded.

ROTHERMERE and English did, however, allow their London paper, Evening Standard, to take the opposite stance. That paper yesterday opted for Labour on the grounds that Major is a poor leader and it's time for a change.

The Financial Times's half hearted support for Labour also hinges on Europe. "The Conservative Party has reached a point at which it makes it all but impossible to implement rational policies towards Europe," said yesterday's leading article.

But the paper of business did have the sense to admit, if some what patronisingly, that "its readers make up their own minds about how they vote".

Let me assure them so will the readers of every paper.