Take Me To Your Leader Writer

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...has written more leaders (newspaper editorials) than anyone alive or dead, an honour still to be recognised by the Guiness Book of Records or the Nobel judges. I have produced them for the Daily Mirror, Daily Mail, Sunday Mirror, Today, the Sunday People, the Evening Post (Hemel Hempstead), the Caithness Courier and the Student (Edinburgh). My creed is: Have opinions, Will travel.

Saturday 3 June 2017

Lies, damned lies and the Tory papers

To look at the front pages of the Tory newspapers yesterday (I haven't inflicted todays' on myself yet) was to peer into a parallel universe. Following the election on radio and television it was clear that Corbyn was having a good one, looking assured, dealing with difficult questions well (usually) and not avoiding answering them or hiding from the voters. Theresa May was the opposite. She is having a stinker of an election. She doesn't know how to deal with issues, parrots cliches and simply regurgitates nonsense instead of attempting to deal with questions, even when they aren't that difficult to answer [in evidence, m'lud, I call her interview with the Portsmouth Herald, not generally known as one of the nation's most incisive questioners]. She looks quite out of her depth. Then look at The Sun, Mail, Express and Telegraph. The Sun yesterday filled its front page with a picture of a tree with money hanging off it to illustrate "Labour's money tree" - the line pumped out by Central Office to attack Labour's pledge to spend more on health, social care and education. It also claimed that a Corbyn victory would cost every family £3,600 a year - although when the Remain camp produced a similar figure during the referendum campaign, it was denounced by The Sun (among others) as Project Fear. The Mail yesterday claimed that Labour would hit pensioners with a massive tax bill - ignoring, naturally, that Theresa May is really the one who has launched an attack on older people. It would be nice to think that the voters are intelligent and knowledgeable enough to treat this nasty, unbalanced stuff with the contempt it deserves but enough of them won't. I still hear plenty on the radio who describe May as strong and don't recognise the qualities Corbyn has been displaying. Remember the infamous headline after the 1992 election: It's The Sun wot won it? It will be again this time.

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