The Page 3 cover-up that never was

Well done, currant bun!

That trips off the tongue quite nicely. Maybe I have a future in writing tabloid headlines. On Thursday morning, when the Sun announced that, contrary to reports in toffee-nosed papers, it was not yet axing the "Page 3 girl" feature, three cheeky words appeared above the revealing photo of Nicole from Bournemouth. "Clarifications and Corrections" is a phrase used by some newspapers for the feature that acknowledges bloopers. You'll find it in the Daily Mail. More significantly for this story, you will find it in the impeccably liberal pages of the Guardian.

"Further to recent reports in all other media outlets, we would like to clarify that this is Page 3 and this is a picture of Nicole," the covering text read. Ha ha! No doubt, as Nicole's bosoms hit newsprint, dozens of journalists were completing smug columns encouraging readers to jig on this squalid institution's recently dug grave. Why, some poor fool in The Irish Times may have hammered home the last triumphant full stop seconds before the news came in. (Grr!)

We have no alternative but to summon up one of the Sun's greatest linguistic innovations. Gotcha!

Raging fools

Kelvin MacKenzie, editor of the

Sun

when that headline appeared above a story on the sinking of the

General Belgrano

, will be raising a glass to his successors’ apparent coup. “We could all go and edit the

Guardian

, whereas the editor of the

Guardian

couldn’t edit the

Sun

,” he famously quipped some decades ago. Now, the paper has made the entire liberal commentariat look like raging fools.

In the three days between Page 3’s apparent disappearance and its rise from the grave, various historical narratives were honed to shiny perfection. Campaigners such as Clare Short, who first made an assault on tabloid pornography in the 1980s, and Lucy-Anne Holmes, of the more recent No More Page 3 campaign, appeared in the papers to proclaim eventual victory in a long war.

"Our grassroots campaign took on a huge corporation, and we won," Ceris Aston wrote hubristically in the Independent of London. Elsewhere it was pointed out that – now masturbatory aids are available on every smartphone – the Sun's own exercise in objectification was largely redundant. Either way, this grubby institution looked to have perished.

Sleep not soundly. "If I were the boss, I'd put in a topless pic just to spite everybody," a shadowy source from the Sun told Kelvin's pals at the Guardian.

How did we all fall for it? Well, one of the snooty papers taken in by the Sun's apparent feint was its venerable stable-mate the London Times. On Tuesday, that publication, also owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, announced that its tabloid cousin was "quietly dropping" the feature. Last September, Murdoch confirmed on Twitter that he found Page 3 "old-fashioned". That seemed reasonably conclusive. Yet the Times now looks to have been one of those duped.

The momentum does still seem to be against Page 3. Companies such as Disney and Apple, allegedly uneasy with the phenomenon, have a policy of not placing their commercials in the UK edition of the Sun (the Irish version abandoned the feature some years ago).

Let us hope the horrible thing does wither away quietly. In an era when (I swear I'm not making this up) an organisation called Campaign for the Rights and Actions of Irish Communities (Craic) finds time to shout outside Channel 4 about a famine-related comedy that doesn't yet exist, it is as well that no statute has yet banned Page 3 and that no regulatory body has prohibited it. We won't misquote Voltaire again, but defenders of freedom of expression are required to argue most forcefully for those publications, art works and satirical squibs that most offend them.

‘Feminazis’

The real challenge for anti-Page 3 campaigners is to alter the wider atmosphere, so the objectification of women no longer makes commercial sense. Such a change is happening and – along with less pleasant movements in cyberspace – it contributed to the

Sun

’s temporary retreat last week. There was never a hint of any banning.

That did not stop some parties pretending otherwise. We won't name the Fine Gael councillor who tweeted the words "good work, feminazis" – after all, he later apologised – but it is hard not to relish the panic surging through party headquarters. In the week when, following Leo Varadkar's revelations, Fine Gael was looking positively metrosexual and, thanks to the television show Charlie, the old slur "Blueshirt" was back in the air, one could hardly imagine a more perfect storm in a teacup. "Feminazi?" Really? It is spiteful of me to bring it up. But I do so anyway.