How Brown snatched the euro deadlines

As the Blair-Brown battle over the euro rises in a crescendo, with

Tony Blair has famously schmoozed proprietors and editors for years,
ensuring friendly, supportive coverage even from some Toryinclined
newspapers. But Brown has quietly beavered away at cultivating his own Fleet
Street links - and his efforts are now paying dividends in his euro-squabble
with Blair.

Above all, the Chancellor has struck up a reasonable relationship with
Rupert Murdoch, whose eurosceptic papers play a crucial role in fanning
anti-euro sentiment.

Brown is rather too socialist for Murdoch's tastes, but the media mogul
admires the Chancellor's promotion of hard work over welfare and the dole - a
shared view inherited from their Scottish Presbyterian backgrounds - and they
both admire America.

Murdoch has always made it clear to Blair he would abandon him over the euro
and, though Brown is not eurosceptic enough for him, he knows the Chancellor
is the best available bastion against euro-membership. So the briefings of
the Brownites are generally well received in the Murdoch papers.

Brown has made a special point of cultivating the Murdoch Sun, which is
always ready to print stories favourable to the Chancellor on the euro. The
Sunday Times also has a sympathetic ear: last Sunday's page-one story about
how the volatile state of Britain's housing market made euro-membership a
parlous venture had the fingerprints of Ed Balls (Brown's chief aide) all
over it.

But even The Times, normally a noticeboard for 10 Downing Street thinking,
has been surprisingly supportive. Last Friday's news coverage of the ongoing
Blair-Brown spat by well-established Blairite conduit Philip Webster was
scrupulously even-handed, with the Brown line given equal prominence to the
PM's.

The PM, of course, has his own powerful allies on the euro issue.

Philip Stephens of the Financial Times is the über-Blairite of the British
press and makes sure the FT always sings the PM's euro song. The
Independent's political editor, Andrew Grice, is also close to the Blairite
camp, though his paper no longer has the political clout it once enjoyed. His
opposite number at The Observer, Kamal Ahmed, is similarly inclined and is
regularly rewarded by the Blairites with page-one stories.

But The Guardian is a mixed bag, reflecting divisions within its editorial
staff. Larry Elliot ( economics editor) and the respected Kevin Maguire
(chief reporter) are regular recipients of Brownite briefings while
columnists such as Polly Toynbee and Hugo Young are firmly on Blair's side
(at least when it comes to the euro).

Then there's The Daily Mirror. It shares the PM's passion for the euro, but
its chief political voice, Paul Routledge, is Brown's biographer and a great
admirer of the Chancellor. So Blair can expect no favours there, either.

The Telegraph, of course, is too Tory to take either side but the equally
Rightwing Daily Mail is the wild card: as the voice of middle England it
might be thought to have little in common with the Chancellor; but editor
Paul Dacre is a great admirer of Brown.

He regards him as an homme serieux, for much the same reasons as Murdoch,
and Brown took the time to videotape his congratulations to Dacre at a recent
ceremony to celebrate his 10 years as editor. So Brown can count even on the
Mail.

NOW you see 10 Downing Street's dilemma: among influential Fleet Street
voices the cards are heavily stacked against Blair and in favour of Brown -
and it goes beyond the usual eurosceptic suspects. Which is one reason why I
believe, despite all the huffing and puffing by Cabinet europhiles, that
Brown will get his way and rule out euro-membership for the rest of this
Parliament, whatever the exact wording of his 9 June statement.

If Blair allowed the Cabinet to overrule Brown then the Chancellor would
resign - and, as we've seen, he has enough powerful friends in the press to
make life intolerable for Blair from the backbenches, where he would command
dangerously wide support.

Until 9 June the rival briefings of press favourites will continue.

Every time readers see a euro story, remember: caveat emptor.

Mary's home movie

Monday's Mary Archer documentary on Channel 4 was Hello!style TV at
its most craven. The tone was unreservedly pro-Mary, which was no doubt the
quid pro quo for lengthy access to her, her brother (who reported, with
masterly understatement, that his first impression of Jeffrey was somebody
"we have to watch carefully"), her sister and two old family friends.

Not exactly a disinterested line-up.

The show was clearly a first stab at his rehabilitation, and speaks volumes
for Mary's loyalty to her wayward husband.

But when she claimed that his affair with his PA was nothing more than "a
fling" (it lasted for eight years), that he lies no more than the average
person and that the night he met the Shepherd's Market prostitute he had
actually eaten "at the Caprice and went home", you cried out each time for an
informed journalist to present the facts and point out that Mary may be in an
advanced state of denial. Instead, we got a "documentary" that Mary (or even
Jeffrey) could have edited.

Of course, it was fascinating TV, especially since the normally icy Mary
came across warmer than I've ever seen her.

But it was part of a current TV trend to swap journalistic rigour for
access, in the same category as the recent show about Roy Keane and David
Furnish's films about Gianni Versace and Elton John.

They cater for our obsession with celebrity, but the substance amounts to no
more than self-serving home movies.

It might be going out on public-service television, but let's not dignify it
as documentary journalism. It really belonged on Five rather than the
supposedly quality C4.

I understand that C4's head of current affairs has refused to broadcast a
similar show about Express proprietor Richard Desmond: it got the access but
no content of note. Maybe C4 is getting the message.

Sly flashes the blade at Piers

Maybe Trinity Mirror's new chief executive, Sly Bailey, knows what
she's doing after all. Her first major editorial decision - to sack Scottish
Daily Record editor Peter Cox and replace him with Bruce Waddell, the editor
of its main rival, the Scottish Sun - has been widely praised in newspaper
circles north of the border. It does not bode well for Mirror editor Piers
Morgan.

The immediate cause of Cox's firing was the botching of an interview he'd
been granted with Prince William before it took place: when Cox started to
boast about his coup, the Palace withdrew the offer. But the real reason is
that the Record's circulation has been in even faster freefall than the
Mirror's.

The Record used to dominate Scottish tabloid journalism, with sales of more
than 750,000 a decade ago. It's been in decline for some time but in the past
couple of years the haemorrhaging has gathered pace, slipping below 600,000
then hurtling towards half a million. In the past 12 months, sales have
collapsed from 567,000 to 507,000, taking the Scottish figure to only 475,000.

At the same time, the Scottish Sun has come from nowhere to sell 376,000. It
was widely expected that Waddell's Sun would overtake the Record in the next
couple of years. So it was shrewd of Bailey to lure him over. He will want to
put an end the cut-price practice of pushing the Scottish edition of The
Daily Mirror - a costly strategy which merely puts Trinity's two red-tops in
competition with themselves.

Even though the Mirror has abandoned its cut-price sales in England, the
Scottish Daily Mirror still sells for only 15p. The strategy was devised to
prop up the UK sales of Morgan's Mirror. Waddell will want that ended, and
Bailey will be of a mind to oblige.

So even if her sacking of Cox is not a prelude to bigger changes in London,
Morgan will no longer be able to look to Scotland to bolster his ailing sales.

And now, the News at… zzzzz I HEAR that the Soho House's new membership book
loftily decrees that conversations in the club should proceed on "lobby
terms" - and not be reported in the press. What mad vanity. If a clubful of
journalists, minor celebs and politicos boozing away the small hours didn't
end up producing some juicy stories, I would lose my faith in Her Majesty's
press.

Anyway, far as I recall, the whole idea was that Soho House should be a
meeting place for politicians and journalists who didn't want to join the
stuffier clubs.

What's the point, if it's going to turn into the Athenaeum?

ITN's reward for its superb coverage of the Iraqi war is to see its
flagship News at Ten on ITV shunted off to 10.30pm. The powersthatbe at ITV
had already devalued the newscast by shunting it all over the late-evening
schedules. Now hapless ITV bosses are complaining that they can't compete
with the BBC in the 10pm slot and want to move their news to 10.30pm.

But let us not forget it was only ITV's own stupidity and lack of commitment
to network news that made it possible for the BBC to occupy the 10pm spot in
the first place - and that one of the few regulatory obligations ITV has in
return for its lucrative franchise is that it must run a network news show in
prime time. I don't know many homes in which 10.30pm is regarded as prime
time.

If the regulators let ITV get away with it then they will be shown to be
just as useless as those they are meant to be regulating.