The Power of the (De-)Press(-ed)

I was watching Newsnight last night when the momentous news broke - The Sun was no longer backing Labour, and instead had switched its allegiance to the Conservatives. Moments later Jeremy Paxman popped up with the odious sixth-form swot Ed Milliband, who was trying gamely to persuade us that he didn't really mind that much, and that in any case it was the voters who decided elections, not newspapers. Turns out that Milliband Minor may not be as green as he's cabbage-looking.

It's taken as Holy Writ that It's The Sun Wot Won It, referring to the unexpected victory of John Major in 1992 which received wisdom alleges to have happened as a result of another headline in The Sun. Well, I don't buy it - neither The Sun nor this piece of revisionist balderdash. The Sun - or, more properly, the Murdoch family - supports whichever side is most likely to win. In 1992 it was a close call, but since Neil Kinnock actually espoused some left-wing policies, it couldn't throw its weight behind him. When Kinnock spectacularly failed to get elected, The Sun rather cleverly persuaded us (well, not me, but some rather gullible fools - the sort who rather readily believe that there's no entry in the OED for the word "gullible") that it (The Sun) had played a major part in the result. Of course, the cause and effect are the wrong way round - The Sun backs the winning party because it's going to win, and not the party wins because The Sun backs it. This morning, on The Today Programme, the Political Editor of The Sun (which must be surely the cushiest job in Wapping - you could write any old shit and none of the readers would be able to tell, never mind be interested enough to care) declared with a breathtaking disregard for the facts, that their readers come first, second and third, whereas what he should have said was that the readers come a very distant fourth behind Rupert, James, and the rest of the Murdoch clan. Neither should it be overlooked that the majority of The Sun's readership don't vote, and that those who do probably vote for UKIP or the BNP. Not that Murdoch would care if either of these parties won - the tit quotient in The Sun would remain the same, and sales would therefore remain high.

What actually happened in 1997 was that Murdoch père et fils recognised that Blair, Mandy Antoinette et al. were somewhat to the right of John Major, and so they decided that The Sun should become the paper of change. Not, obviously, a change to the degree of attention they were paid by those lickspittles in power nor to the ease of access for the Murdoch Family to those seats of power - oh no - just a change in the faces on the government benches. By the by, all this talk of "right wingers" reminds me of one of the funnier of the week's stories, starring - yes, you've guessed it - Mandy Antoinette himself. Lord Mandelson criticised "extreme rightwing figures" for spreading rumours about Gordon's alleged intake of pharmaceuticals. One of The Guardian's CiF commenters put it best:

Extreme right wingers? Meaning Cabinet Ministers? Bankers? Warmongers? The insane brigade trying to privatise the post office & keep the railways out of public hands , those who are in charge of PFI. People who crawl on to the yachts of plutocrats for a summer holiday. Those who promote religious schools.

These are the people who come to mind when extreme right wingers are
mentioned. I think Lord Mandelson knows where they live.

Of course he knows where they live - he certainly knows where their yachts are moored. If you're not convinced by my protestations of his awfulness, witness his craven scuttling after the Tories as he offers to work under a future Conservative administration - there really are no words to describe what an utter shite he is. As The Daily Mash put it,

A friend of the business secretary said: "Peter has to have a title because
without one he quickly reverts to being a long, perfectly manicured streak of
absolutely fuck all."

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The new exhibition of Aztec art is all over the media at the moment, with otherwise sane people such as Philip Hensher arguing that the exhibition is flawed because it doesn't come with a post-Enlightenment critique of Aztec blood sacrifices. What I want to know is - when did Montezuma become Moctezuma? And why? I'll tell you this for free - I'm no more going to refer to the old bastard as Moctezuma than I am planning to change from a lifetime of calling Boadicea by her original name, nor calling Madras "Chennai" nor pronouncing Veni, vidi vici as Whiny, weedy weeky. We don't refer to Paris as Paree, nor Munich as München, so why all the crap about Beijing, Mumbai and the rest. When a poster asked the same question about Moctezuma on a blog, a smug tosspot piped up that "Moctezuma" was his proper name, just as "Boudicca" was hers. Yeah? So sue me. Thought so. Not so easy when you've been dead a few centuries. Plus, I'd be willing to bet that both of them was were illiterate.

*****

The sharp-eyed among you may have noticed a music-player widget at the top. Only one song loaded so far - a very hissy and poorly recorded demo from the 1980s. More coming soon.