The Daily Mirror today defied a ban to republish the infamous 1987 picture of David Cameron posing with his Bullingdon Club drinking friends using it for a special election-day front page.
The photo appears under the headline: OUR PRIME MINISTER? REALLY? along with a piece by Tony Parsons in which he says: “This is the picture that David Cameron really, really doesn’t want you to see.”
The picture is republished across two pages inside and dates from Cameron’s time at Oxford University when he was a member of the drinking club along with London mayor Boris Johnson, who is also pictured in the photo.
Oxford school photographers Gillman and Soame, who took the picture originally, said this morning that they never give permission for their work to be used in the media and will be contacting the Mirror.
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A Daily Mirror spokesman, said: “This picture was, and is, in the public domain and its publication is absolutely in the public interest and will help inform voters’ decisions before they cast their vote.”
By contrast The Sun today used its front page to create a pastiche of the famous Barack Obama “HOPE” poster but instead using the image of David Cameron. In a front page editorial it says: “Today The Sun says it is time to trust David Cameron.”
The front page is in stark contrast to the one The Sun published the last time it supported the Conservatives on a gemera; election polling day, in 1992. Then it published a picture of Labour leader Neil Kinnock’s head inside a light-bulb alongside the headline: “If Kinnock wins today will the last person to leave Britain please turn out the lights.”
Some later credited that front page with helping the Consvervatives win a narrow election victory.
Then Sun editor Kelvin MacKenzie reveals in his column today that he dreamed up the front page after a lunch with Charles Clarke, now an MP and then Kinnock’s chief of staff, in which Clarke said: “Once Kinnock is elected he will cross a thousand miles of broke glass to get even with you.”
Noting that Clarke now defends a majority of 3,653, Kelvin writes: “Clarke will now follow him into obscurity. Good.”
MacKenzie today promised to leave the UK on a one-way trip to Belize if there is a hung parliament tomorrow.
Yesterday the Evening Standard became the latest newspaper to endorse the Conservatives in a move which puts it at odds with new sister title The Independent, which yesterday endorsed the Liberal Democrats. Both titles are owned by Russian billionaire Alexander Lebedev.
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