Diary – 11 October 2003

Blackpool

People sometimes compare the Daily Telegraph and the Conservative party. Watching the heaving sea from the Imperial Hotel in my last week as editor of the above, I do the same. In 1993, two years before I took the job, Rupert Murdoch began a price war. He cut the price of the Times from 45p to 30p. His principal aim was to knock the Daily Telegraph off its perch as market leader. In September this year, exactly ten years after it began, the war effectively ended. Mr Murdoch put up the price of the Times on Saturday to that of the Telegraph. Although the cost of war to the Telegraph was high, we won. The circulation gap between the two titles has long stuck at 300,000 in our favour. The Daily Telegraph stays well on top and the Times has had to retreat.

In 1994, Tony Blair began a price war against the Conservative party. His predecessors had tried to dislodge the Tory market leadership by saying how awful they were. They believed that people would eventually realise this and so pay a higher price — more tax — for the Labour alternative. The John Smith shadow budget in the 1992 election tested this theory to destruction. The higher price (on the top rate of tax) was explicitly offered, and voters rejected it. So Mr Blair cut the Labour price: you wouldn’t have to pay anything extra to buy his brand, and since you were fed up with the existing market leader this tempted lots of you to do so. The ruse worked. Mr Blair succeeded in politics where Mr Murdoch failed in journalism.

Why? Modesty ahem (as the editor of The Spectator would say) forbids an investigation of the journalism, so let’s stick to the politics.