Stephen Glover

In the media age, life is a soap opera. For a time we are obsessed with a particular storyline. Then it is resolved, we move on to the next story, new characters are introduced, and the old characters on whose every word we once hung are phased out and forgotten. Two months ago the country was convulsed with 'Cheriegate', and it seemed that nothing else in the world mattered. Day after day the tabloids and broadsheets screamed their headlines, which said that Cherie was not telling the truth and that the Prime Minister himself was threatened. Pages one to ten were cleared. Andrew Marr and Adam Boulton camped outside No. 10. Then Peter Foster made his statement, in effect exonerating the Blairs, and we moved on to something else.

Piers Morgan, the editor of the Daily Mirror, is an opponent of the coming war against Iraq. Fair enough. Many of us are unhappy about it. But he has taken his opposition to extreme and, I would say, imprudent lengths. To use a military analogy, he has fired off his biggest nuclear missiles without first going through the range of lesser weaponry. Last week there was an enormous picture of Tony Blair on the Mirror's front page with his hands covered in blood. It referred to an inside rant by John Pilger. The previous day the front-page headline had told George Bush to 'Cool it, Cowboy'. Day after day the paper inveighs against war. Most of its readers may be sceptics, but I cannot believe that they relish coverage that is both hysterical and obsessional.

A couple of weeks ago I promised that this column would keep a watchful eye on Rebekah Wade, the new editor of the Sun. As is so often the case, the first piece of evidence is right before our eyes, in the pages of Who's Who. But before we get on to that, let me say something about what Rebekah has done to the Sun. She has certainly livened it up - many would say coarsened it. The substantials may not have changed, but she has turned a lot of knobs and dials, and the overall effect is very different. Rebekah's rumoured aversion to Page Three girls turns out to be a piece of old PR which no longer applies. Whereas under David Yelland's regime 'Page Three lovelies' generally had a girl-next-door look, Rebekah's are raunchier.

A very high-minded European recently complained to me about British newspapers. Why are they all so awful, he asked? Even the so-called serious ones look like comics, with their pictures of footballers and half-naked actresses on the masthead. As for the tabloids, he went on, their venom, iconoclasm and sheer beastliness, not to mention their obsession with third-rate celebrities, were incroyable. France had a truly intellectual newspaper in Le Monde, whose cultural, foreign and political coverage surpassed anything available in Britain. And Germany, Italy and Spain boasted several almost equally fine papers, and had nothing which remotely compared to our trashy tabloids. He looked at me with pity, and I muttered that maybe he had a point.

The appointment of Rebekah Wade as the editor of the Sun has given rise to much baseless speculation. It has been suggested that she may swing the paper behind the euro. We are told she may ditch Page Three girls, to whom she is said to have a feminist aversion. She is, says my esteemed colleague Roy Campbell-Greenslade in the Guardian, a former young Tory who may be 'ready to cut the umbilical cord with Downing Street' and support Iain Duncan Smith or whoever may succeed him. All these theories ignore a simple fact. It is Rupert Murdoch, not Rebekah Wade, who will determine the editorial policy and future political allegiances of the Sun. I don't doubt that she will have a say at the margins, but she is not going to be allowed to do what Mr Murdoch does not want her to.

Anyone who has ever had breakfast, lunch, dinner or any other meeting with Gordon Brown will know that he gives very little away. Some ministers are known for their bluntness and occasional indiscretions; others may sometimes drink a glass or two more wine than they should, and say things they should perhaps not have. The Iron Chancellor falls into neither category. His complete self-control makes him both formidable and rather unlovable. As has already been reported in the press, on Monday 18 November Mr Brown had breakfast at the Guardian's offices in Farringdon Road. It is not uncommon for the paper to host such get-togethers with ministers. By the standards of some of his colleagues, the Chancellor was not on this occasion particularly indiscreet.

One of Richard Desmond's heroes is Rupert Murdoch, who was profiled in glowing terms in the most recent Sunday Express. The proprietor of the Express group regards the Australian-born adventurer as an outsider like himself. In fact, Desmond is far more of an outsider than Murdoch. His fortune is based on his pornographic magazines and television channels, some of which by my definition are hard-core. By comparison Murdoch - Oxford-educated, son of Sir Keith - is almost out of the top drawer. But Murdoch's Sun did take on and topple the established Daily Mirror, introducing a new brand of popular journalism including 'Page Three girls'. Desmond hopes to work a similar trick on Associated Newspapers, publisher of the Daily Mail.

There is one person in the world whom I would love to meet. Or maybe two. I am thinking of the propagandist who writes the monthly front-page 'brief' in the Times extolling the paper's circulation performance. His (or her?) counterpart on the Daily Telegraph would be interesting, too, though this person has fallen rather silent recently. The genius at the Times was at work last Saturday. The general gist was that the newspaper was inexorably closing the gap on the Telegraph. A casual reader might suppose that the newspapers are neck-and-neck in the circulation race. This is not so. What has happened, as I suggested several weeks ago might be the case, is that the Daily Telegraph has given up the costly battle to remain above a daily sale of one million copies.

The Burrell affair illustrates how much the press has changed over the past 20 or 30 years, and how powerful it has become. Not very long ago the majority of newspapers would have given the Queen the benefit of the doubt in such a matter. As it was, only the Daily Telegraph jumped unhesitatingly to her defence. It simply did not occur to the paper that she might have been at fault in coming forward at the eleventh hour with information that stopped Paul Burrell's trial, and so it naturally looked for others to blame. In this it was alone, which certainly would not have been the case 20 years ago. The Times, which once could have been counted on to mount the Establishment defence, asked several awkward questions which the royal family may have regarded as unseemly.

My colleague Stuart Reid has been urging me to write about the Times for weeks. 'There's a buzz on the streets,' he says. 'Oh, yeah?' 'Yes, people are saying that the Times is improving under its new editor.' 'Really?' 'Yes, that is the word. The Times is getting better. Not much, but a little. It's getting more serious. That is what they say.' Are they right? Unlike Stuart, I haven't met many of these people. I haven't heard the buzz. But it is time we considered the question. For there is no doubt that Robert Thomson, who has been editor of the Times for nearly eight months, wants to take it upmarket. He has even told a couple of friends of mine that Rupert Murdoch, the paper's proprietor, shares his dream.

Is the Daily Mirror for sale? It is, according to a well-placed City source. He says it is being offered around to 'the buy-out boys'. My instinct is that he is right, and that Trinity Mirror wants to offload its troubled national daily, as well as its other national titles. Until 1999 Trinity Mirror was Trinity, a strong group publishing profitable regional titles. Then it made what has turned out to be the serious mistake of buying Mirror Group Newspapers. For although Trinity had plenty of experience with regionals such as the Birmingham Post and the Liverpool Echo, it knew little or nothing about the very different business of publishing red-top national newspapers.

Prince Charles's leaked letter to Tony Blair has not done him any good. The Mail on Sunday, whose first edition broke the story on Sunday, seemed to think that the letter did him great credit. One can certainly see what he was getting at. But to compare farmers with gays or immigrant communities, and to suggest that they are less well treated, was not spot-on. As has been pointed out, farmers, impoverished though many of them may now be, receive much bigger government handouts than either of the other groups. More damaging still than the letter was his reported remark that if fox-hunting were banned he might as well spend the rest of his life skiing abroad. Again, one sees what he means.

Newspapers, as we know, love truth. They castigate evasive politicians and track down dodgy businessmen. They deliver ringing lectures in their editorial columns when ministers do not come clean. And yet this love of truth has one blind spot. When newspapers - and I would say in particular broadsheet newspapers - come to present their own circulation figures, they become considerably more economical with the truth than the slippery politicians whom they are wont to criticise. In the hands of a skilled propagandist, a small decline in a paper's monthly sales can be made to look like an impressive increase. The same propagandist can represent a rival title's modest gains as a catastrophic setback.

The very name of Soham induces a strange mixture of disgust, boredom and pity. I return to it with reluctance. But we have to consider the conduct of the media, and in particular the criticisms made about the press by the Cambridgeshire coroner, David Morris, and by the Cambridgeshire police. I'm certainly not going to defend the worst excesses of the media. The rewards offered by some newspapers are said to have encouraged hundreds of gold-digging callers to clog up police telephone lines. Some papers printed details I would very much rather not have read. The News of the World's renewed call for 'Sarah's Law', which would give parents the right to know the identity of sex offenders living in their area, seems to be a case of jumping on the wrong bandwagon at the wrong time.

In April the Daily Mirror relaunched itself as a more serious newspaper. Its editor, Piers Morgan, got rid of its red masthead. He hired supposedly upmarket writers such as John Pilger and Christopher Hitchens, and resurrected the famous Cassandra column. Mr Morgan invoked the name of Hugh Cudlipp, who edited the Daily Mirror in the 1950s, when it offered more serious journalism to the working classes and sold more than four million copies a day. His changes were widely welcomed, particularly by pundits in the broadsheet press who know rather little about Hugh Cudlipp or red-top tabloids. Even this column wished him well. Four months on, Mr Morgan's experiment seems to have failed.