The fact the polls haven’t moved much in Labour’s favour so far isn’t the knockout argument against Starmer some people seem to think it is. His personal approval ratings have been steadily climbing, so his team can say the reason is Labour remains too toxic.

The effort to put what they regard as clear blue water between “Starmer’s” Labour Party and “Corbyn’s” is clearly driven by that conviction: on the antisemitism controversy, distance from trade unions and protest movements, ‘patriotism’ (understood in right-wing terms), etc.

Acting ‘decisive’ where Corbyn was ‘weak’; ‘not just opposing things for the sake of it’; rebuilding relations with the City ( https://www.ft.com/content/199c88dc-db88-466f-8616-d34d3c01724e). For me the question is, on what terms does Starmer engage with different sections of the press?

The media landscape has changed totally from the mid-90s. Even if he was to pursue a Blairite strategy of accommodation with the right-wing papers, their politics have changed & so has the relative weight of individual titles - the Mail is eclipsing the Sun in print & online.

The average age of a Sun, Mail, Times, Telegraph or Express print reader is far older now than it was in 1997. Online now, i’d say the Mail and Express are perhaps more powerful than they were in print in the 90s; the Times & the Sun less.

These titles retain immense perception-/agenda-shaping power, much of it via their influence on the broadcasters. But they’re more right-wing relative to the rest of the country than in the 90s. Starmer would have to build a longer bridge to reach them even than Blair did.

One last thing which often gets left out: in the mid-90s, Blair could bank on the automatic backing of the Mirror, which was at that time still just about the 2nd biggest paper in the country after the Sun. More on past newspaper circulation here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_newspapers_in_the_United_Kingdom_by_circulation