The liberal conscience in me would very much like to think that there will be consequences for the Evening Standard for the way it has behaved over the last few weeks. For the duration of the campaign it has turned itself from a relatively respectable newspaper with some journalistic integrity, with a generally right of centre agenda, into a full-scale campaigning newspaper for Boris Johnson. Its headlines, and perhaps most powerfully of all the billboards it has prominently displayed around London, have carried headlines which would have shamed the writers of the most partisan party campaigning literature for their cheerful disregard for balanced fact.

This matters, of course, because the Evening Standard is the only proper newspaper in London (for those who aren’t familiar with the rather odd newspaper situation in London, there is also one morning paper, and two afternoon ones, all distributed free on the Tube, two of the three of which are lite versions of the Standard itself, and all three of which are broadly speaking rubbish).

Now I don’t have a problem with the right of anyone to run a newspaper and through it promote a particular political agenda – and I certainly don’t think there is a strong case for extending to newspapers, even monopolistic ones like the Standard, the requirements for impartiality which are (rightly) imposed on broadcasters.
But I would like to think that so many people have been turned off the Standard by its behaviour, which has been so incredibly blatant that everyone has noticed, that people will stop actually buying it, and that a competitor newspaper might spring up, perhaps one with a more broadly liberal approach.

I am not an expert on the London newspaper market, but sadly I fear this is unlikely to happen. Setting up a newspaper to rival the dominant Standard is no small task, and I also fear that even though most Standard readers will have realised what it was up to and some will have been offended by it, I doubt whether most will care enough to switch paper, at least not for this reason alone.

This may partly depend on the attitude that the Standard takes to Boris now that he has actually become Mayor. Its editor, Veronica Wadley, cannot surely intend to turn its back on Boris and attack him as it attacked his predecessor, but equally the Standard’s incredibly strident tone contrasts rather oddly with the much more measured and statesmanlike tone that the new Mayor himself is now trying to project. Perhaps the way forward is for the Standard simply to retreat back towards the middle of the road – though presumably it will be a bit more generous to Boris than it was to Ken, with whom it waged a feud throughout his eight years as Mayor, albeit generally not on quite the same scale as the last few weeks.

And of course for all those of us who are outraged at what the Standard has done, there are plenty of others who will be just as grateful to it. This must surely include the Conservative party establishment and indeed almost everyone who did really want to see Boris in City Hall. It also helped the Standard itself, by highlighting the significance of the paid-for newspaper in a market where all the interest in the last few years has been in the freebies. And its influence has indeed been remarkable in an age where we are all endlessly writing about the decline in traditional power centres in the media, in the face of phenomena such as blogs and consumer-generated content. Sadly for those of us who have been fairly appalled by what it has done, I suspect the Standard will not only have got away with it, but indeed successfully used the Mayoral race to enhance its own position.