As the Labour party tears itself apart trying to come to terms with its general election performance, it should understand this reality: the right-wing press was overwhelmingly responsible for its defeat.
I agree with my colleague, Jane Martinson, that the fact that the bulk of UK newspapers backed the eventual winner is noteworthy.
It should not be overlooked because I haven’t a shadow of doubt that Ed Miliband lost because of newspaper coverage.
However, this view is not based on a simplistic, and narrow, Sun-wot-won-it analysis. We know that Britain’s best-selling national daily, in company with the Daily Mail, Daily Express and Daily Telegraph, consistently ran virulent anti-Labour material during the weeks of the campaign.
We also know that, based on newsprint sales, 57.5% of the dailies backed the Tories while 11.7 % backed Labour and, on the same metric, 66% of the Sunday nationals urged their readers to vote Conservative.
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I also agree that Miliband suffered a pounding from those newspapers that was reminiscent of the bitterly personal attacks on Neil Kinnock in 1992 and Michael Foot in 1983.
I am sure that the relentless ridicule over the six-week campaign may have played some part in the voting decisions of the floating voters who buy the Sun and the Mail (and yes, there are plenty of them).
But that factor, in itself, did not make the really significant difference to the Tory victory in England and Wales.
Instead, to understand why Labour lost, look at the overall polling figures for Nigel Farage’s Ukip. It secured 4.8m votes across the UK and its effect on Labour has not been sufficiently understood.
Despite Ukip winning only one seat, it delivered the best performance by a new independent party in post-war English politics, as the Telegraph rightly reported.
Many, many traditional Labour voters abandoned the party in order to vote for Ukip. In several seats that Labour regarded as winnable marginals, expecting to tip out Tory incumbents, the party was foiled by Ukip.
Just look at the results for Pudsey, Keighley, Cleethorpes, Warrington South, Rossendale & Darwen, Nuneaton, Cannock Chase, Northampton North and Ipswich (and other marginals). In every case, Labour failed because of the votes for Ukip.
I concede that it’s difficult to be sure whether the majority of Ukip’s support came from the Tories or Labour. But there is a big clue to Labour defections by looking at Ukip’s support at the expense of Labour in very safe Labour seats.
In Dagenham and Rainham, for example, there was a 12.5% swing from Labour to Ukip despite the popularity of Labour’s excellent MP, Jon Cruddas. In Hartlepool, a 13.9% swing from Labour to Ukip helped the latter to finish in second place.
In the three seats in Hull – East, North and West & Hessle – Ukip managed second place finishes. Elsewhere, in Merthy Tydfil for instance, there were swings away from Labour to Ukip. And in many safe Tory seats, Ukip pushed Labour into second place.
Ukip’s twin policy plank - halt immigration and pull out of the European Union - clearly appealed to voters in traditional Labour areas. I am not alone in pointing this out. Here’s Oxford university’s Stephen Fisher:
“The rise of Ukip that was expected to disproportionately hurt the Tories, in fact seems to have undermined the Labour performance more”.
Yes, yes, yes. Before Labour beats itself up about its supposed failure to attract support from the middle class, it needs to grasp the reasons for Ukip’s polling success in its working class heartlands.
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But why did Ukip do so well? Because in the five years leading up to the election, the rightwing press lent it, and its policies, credence.
In an effort to ensure that David Cameron’s Conservative party followed a largely anti-EU agenda, newspapers gave disproportionately favourable coverage to Farage and his party.
They certainly poked fun at some of his supporters and, at various points, questioned Ukip’s credibility. Yet they treated the party’s policies, including its anti-immigrant stance, with undue sympathy. And that includes the Sun, which – under instructions from its owner, Rupert Murdoch – has been careful to avoid overt criticism of immigration.
It’s true that only the Daily Express actually endorsed Farage’s party (“Vote Ukip for a patriotic Britain”) after its owner, Richard Desmond, gave it £1.3m.
Much more significant than that single last-minute endorsement was the overall support for years across all the papers of the right.
It has, of course, worked out well for those publishers who favour Brexit or, at the least, some kind of radical reform of Britain’s EU membership. Cameron might well have avoided holding an in/out referendum without Ukip’s existence and its newspaper support.
What remains troubling in the long term for Labour is the possibility that it can never win back support from those who left it to vote Ukip.
Unless Labour comes to terms with the fact that many of its former voters are concerned about immigration and about the EU’s open borders policy, the party’s discussions about its future direction, and about its choice of leader, will be irrelevant.
The press’s role in the 2015 election requires more investigation. As so often, the coverage over six weeks tells us little more than we could have anticipated before the campaign began. Agenda-setting over a longer period is far more important.