Revenge of the tabloids | Andy Beckett

Rocked by the phone-hacking scandal and haemorrhaging readers, the rightwing tabloids seemed to be yesterday’s news. But now, in Theresa May’s Brexit Britain, they look more powerful than ever

Two years ago, when the UK had a future in the European Union and Ed Miliband was a potential prime minister, the chief business commentator of the Financial Times, John Gapper, announced the demise of Britain’s rightwing tabloids. Unusually for an FT journalist, Gapper had once worked at the Daily Mail, and at the FT he often writes about the media, sweepingly and authoritatively even by that paper’s standards. “The era of the Fleet Street tabloids, the populist and fearsome emblems of British culture and politics, is over,” he wrote on 25 June 2014. “It has been over for some years, in fact, but neither they nor their critics chose to admit it.”

He pointed to their shrunken print circulations: in 1950 the Daily Express was “the world’s best-selling paper”, he wrote, and “sold more than 4m copies each day”. Yet by 2014 it was selling barely a ninth of that; and it has weakened further since. “The tabloids appeal to a readership limited by class, occupation, and social attitude,” Gapper continued. “That is not sufficient in the digital era. Young people are not loyal to one tabloid title and few of them will subscribe online.”

The need for broadcasters to be balanced, once seen as a threat, has created a market for tabloid shrillness

During the Cameron governments, it felt like Murdoch and Dacre were the adults, and the politicians were children

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