Is it my imagination, or is the Sun getting smuttier?

A couple of weeks ago I promised that this column would keep a watchful eye on Rebekah Wade, the new editor of the Sun. As is so often the case, the first piece of evidence is right before our eyes, in the pages of Who’s Who. But before we get on to that, let me say something about what Rebekah has done to the Sun. She has certainly livened it up – many would say coarsened it. The substantials may not have changed, but she has turned a lot of knobs and dials, and the overall effect is very different.

Rebekah’s rumoured aversion to Page Three girls turns out to be a piece of old PR which no longer applies. Whereas under David Yelland’s regime ‘Page Three lovelies’ generally had a girl-next-door look, Rebekah’s are raunchier. By my calculations she has also already put near-naked women three times on the front page. We have also had Kylie Minogue in her suspender belt on the front (see my third item). On another day we were offered ‘the wackiest places where we’ve had sex’ above the front-page headline. There is simply a lot more sex about than in Yelland’s day. Presumably Rebekah has an eye on the Daily Star which, though still selling less than a third as many copies as the Sun, has been putting on a lot of circulation with its diet of tit ‘n’ bum.

Politically, too, the Sun is not pulling its punches. David Yelland tried to be all things to all men, praising Tony Blair one day and Iain Duncan Smith the next, and then putting the boot into a junior Cabinet minister for fear of seeming too friendly towards New Labour. Rebekah has adopted a much more adversarial attitude towards the government, though she has not withdrawn the paper’s support, and I don’t think that she will do so in the foreseeable future.