Still plenty of time for change in our Eurosceptic daily press

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/oct/18/eu-referendum-national-daily-newspapers-brexit

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A week is a long time in politics: consider two years and two months, the maximum arguing time left before that European referendum. Leave? Remain? Stick? Twist? Yawn? In one sense, it’s an unequal fight for the dailies. Who’ll vote Remain? Probably only the Indy, Guardian, FT and Mirror: total circulation not much over 1.35 million, while the Leavers command five million or more. Duck for cover once the Express, Mail, Times, Telegraph, Star and Bun start booming away. Yet time, passing, raises some interesting calculations.

Let’s assume the Remain four won’t change position – their views don’t really hang on what David Cameron brings back from Brussels. The Leave squad, by contrast, have some human and temporal problems to confront. Richard Desmond is trying to sell his Express titles and maybe his Star ones at a suitable profit. There have been talks with Trinity Mirror. Would Trinity, say, be keen on a full-throated Leave campaign if its Mirror titles were crying Remain? It is, at least, an open question.

That open condition also applies to those twin titans of Euroscepticism, Paul Dacre and Rupert Murdoch. Dacre’s Mail, on last week’s belligerent form, looks certain to lead the Leave legions. But Dacre is 67 next month. Is the Mail itself, in history and by conviction, wedded to Brussels scepticism? It wasn’t when David English was editor (and mentor of Dacre). Vere Harmsworth, the present Viscount Rothermere’s dad, sat on the cross benches in the Lords.

There’s no certainty that every jot of Mail policy would survive a change of editor, any more than there is that Rupert Murdoch, 84, will still be pulling the old levers of hostility as Sky TV marches across Europe. News UK is these days less a personal fiefdom and more a conventional business, full of corporate circumspection.

Business is business: as it is for Aidan Barclay at the Telegraph, whose social circle revolves around (big) business chums of the bank/retailer/ developer kind. Why put that at risk if there’s a reasonable escape hatch? Why, especially, bet the Telegraph position as supreme Conservative supporter if you’re likely to wreck your best-beloved in the process? In short, there is time – loads of time – for things to change. And, with renegotiation still pending, just factor in our old chum fudge and mudge, and a visceral debate turns suddenly bland.