By Bagehot
LISTENING to this morning’s Today programme on BBC Radio 4, Bagehot’s first, unworthy thought was: blimey, it’s Statler and Waldorf from the Muppet Show. Instead, the men shouting at and across each other turned out to be the former Labour leader Lord (Neil) Kinnock and his fellow Welshman John Humphrys, the indefatigable radio presenter. If you could get past the annoyance of being unable to hear Lord Kinnock advance his arguments half the time, it was gripping stuff and important too, clarifying neatly two key questions about the future of the British press.
Those two questions are knotty ones.
First: if people agree that Rupert Murdoch wields too much power by owning two loss-making but respected broadsheets (the Times and Sunday Times) as well as Britain’s best-selling paper (the profitable tabloid Sun) and a big chunk of the BSkyB satellite television network, who, exactly, do they imagine could afford to run the Times and Sunday Times on their own, following a forced break-up of News International?
