Express Delivery

‘THEY say that you can tell a lot about a man from his enemies. In which case, Thursday April 22nd will go down as a good day for Tony Blair.

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It was the day that the Express newspaper announced that it had made ‘the historic decision’ to give its support to Michael Howard and back the Tories at the next General Election.

‘We believe,’ it says, ‘Mr Blair has lost his way and no longer offers the nation either decisive leadership or a political prospectus based on the timeless British values of hard work, free enterprise, individual liberty and respect for authority.’

Oh, and of course a congenital dislike of foreigners.

After a brief flirtation with the centre left at the end of the 1990s, the Express has returned in the last couple of years to representing the timeless values of little England – xenophobia, small-mindedness, distrust and fear of the unknown.

And at times it has even managed to pass itself off as a nastier version of the Mail.

Why we need a nasty version of the Mail we don’t know as the paper whose job it is to put the fear of God into Middle England today shows it has nastiness of its own to spare.

The paper puts together a montage of Tony Blair’s face made out of the images of 71 service personnel who have died in Iraq, Kosovo, Macedonia, Sierra Leone and Afghanistan since Labour came to power in 1997.

The effect, borrowed from an American artist who used the technique to make a portrait of George Bush, is clearly intended to imply that Blair is responsible for these deaths.

Men such as Cpl Richard Ivell, who was killed in a vehicle accident in southern Iraq in February, Major James Stenner and Sgt Norman Patterson, both of whom died in a car crash in Baghdad on New Year’s Day, Cpl Andrew Craw, who died in a training accident, Rifleman Vincent Windsor, who died in a road accident, Sapper Robert Thomson, who died in a construction accident…’

Posted: 22nd, April 2004 | In: Tabloids Comment | TrackBack | Permalink