The Sun to go down on infamous headline

The Sun’s ‘Queen Backs Brexit’ headline is almost certainly so exaggerated as to amount to inaccuracy, writes Raymond Snoddy – so what does it mean for both the newspaper and the regulators?

Tony Gallagher, the former editor of the Daily Telegraph who now edits The Sun, has had a lively start to his impressive new role – perhaps a tad too lively.

There have been a string of decent scoops. Leaving aside predictable topics such as celebrity breakups and infidelities, until very recently the rock solid exposure of the sweetheart deal between Age UK and energy group E.ON, which worked against the interests of pensioners, was probably the most memorable.

Interestingly, questioned recently at the Newsworks Shift conference, Gallagher, who has also been deputy editor at the Daily Mail, explained that it was the similarities, rather than the differences of working for the three titles that had struck him most forcibly.

Eighty per cent of what he did at The Sun could easily have also appeared in the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail he argued.

A key difference was the high percentage of humour, irreverence and the premium put on exclusives at The Sun.

Then in a perhaps unnecessary throwaway line, Gallagher added: “We cover everything with equal ferocity.”

Ferocious indeed. We now know that the ferocity extends all the way up to the Queen.

How The Sun must have enjoyed writing its splash headline earlier this month – Exclusive: Bombshell Claim Over Europe Vote. QUEEN BACKS BREXIT

And underneath in much smaller type: EU going in wrong direction, she says.

What a story. What a headline, even if it has long been forgotten what a bombshell actually is.
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There has been nothing quite like it since the Sunday Times claimed in 1986 that the Queen did not care much for Prime Minister Thatcher. Or more precisely that the Queen did not care for some of the divisive things she felt the Thatcher Government was doing to British society and the threat to the Commonwealth of the Thatcher Government’s refusal to support sanctions against apartheid South Africa.

That time the Sunday Times got its expected denials – of the non-denial variety – amid establishment harrumphings.

A few months ago came unsurprising confirmation that the Sunday Times had been right, in the Charles Moore biography of the UK’s first, and so far only, woman Prime Minister.

Thatcher herself did not accept the Palace denials and conceded there was “some truth” in the Sunday Times allegations and that the leaking has probably been informally authorised at a senior level.

Will Tony Gallagher and The Sun fare as well?

Up to a point. Without any knowledge of who said what to whom at a Privy Council lunch at Windsor Castle in 2011 it is obvious there is a problem with the headline.

The Queen probably did indeed say over what she thought was the most private of lunches that she thought the EU was heading in the wrong direction, or words to that effect.

With everyone heading for cover while issuing unconvincing denials, we will probably never know exactly what was said, or at least not for a long time.

Assuming that Her Majesty did say something of the sort that might make her, possibly, a pale Eurosceptic. It most certainly did not make her a supporter of Brexit – not least because the term had not been coined then.

With some precision the Palace has lodged a formal complaint to the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO) under the accuracy provisions that include headlines.

The stakes for all concerned are high – The Palace and the Queen’s reputation for political impartiality, Gallagher and The Sun, IPSO and Impress, the totally friendless would-be, recognised, Royal Charter regulator.

It’s good news for IPSO, which has in effect been given the Royal seal of approval, with top politicians referring to it as the press regulator, though its formal status at the moment remains ambiguous.

Future reputation will depend to a considerable extent on whether IPSO can deliver a timely, robust, independent decision.

One thing is clear. The Sun will go down on the headline at least. It is almost certainly so exaggerated as to amount to inaccuracy.

There is no evidence whatever to suggest that the Queen “supports Brexit” unless the paper has something dramatic that it has not yet revealed. If they had such information it was rather odd not to have published it in the first place.

It could be the end for Impress, the body largely funded by Max Mosely which is bereft of anyone wanting to be regulated by it.

IPSO will have established itself as the de facto press regulator without having to come under the scrutiny of a Royal Charter.

Gallagher will survive whatever the outcome of the complaint. He is the editor of a paper with a Eurosceptic readership, owned by a Eurosceptic proprietor who is no friend of the Royals.

Gallagher has also had the courage to come out and defend his paper on the Today programme and has promised a robust defence with additional information not yet published.

Gallagher could well manage to defend the substance of the story successfully, if not the headline chosen to over-embellish it.

In the past Sun editors have tended to lie low and bravely dispatch their managing editors to deal with the flying solids.

The Palace and its traditional reliance on either silence or unconvincing non-denial denials is unlikely to emerge well from the debacle, even if it does manage to inflict a flesh wound – the publication of a prominent correction in The Sun for an inaccurate headline.

There is the remaining issue of the leaky politicians who took an oath not to breathe a word of what the Queen says in Privy Council meetings and by extension at the lunches that follow them.

No-one is likely to go to the Tower.

Nick Clegg, MP for Sheffield, Hallam is out of front-line politics probably forever.

The case of Justice Secretary, Michael Gove, is a little more complex. He will probably survive for now but at least one trail of breadcrumbs leads straight to him.

He was at a pre-wedding dinner held by Rupert Murdoch and was at the 2011 lunch. Murdoch loves gossip and his courtiers try their best to feed him nasty scraps over dinner.

Most damning of all the Brexit-supporting Gove has denied he was responsible for “all” of the story.

Come 24 June it could be added to the charge sheet if David Cameron emerges triumphant from his high-risk referendum gamble.