It hopes that the Times and the News of the World, also owned by Murdoch, will be positive. The NoW editor, Phil Hall, has seen Blair on several occasions and speaks to Mr Campbell most weeks. Nor has Associated Newspapers, publisher of the Mail titles and the London Evening Standard, been ignored. Its chairman, Lord Rothermere, has had two recent meetings with Mr Blair, including a dinner at the papers’ Kensington offices, in the past two weeks. Also present was Sir David English, editor-in-chief, who has made no secret of his respect for Mr Blair.

Friday’s Evening Standard came close to an invocation to vote Labour, arguing that “just now the prospect appeals of at least a change in the cast of scoundrels”.Labour has collated a paperback book’s worth of negative comments from Tory papers about Mr Major, designed to embarrass any that revert to the Conservatives before polling day. And the minor downside of the Sun’s endorsement of Labour is that it has superseded Mr Campbell’s other prized initiative, the launch of the “Melinda Messenger Sun readers for Labour” campaign. As the Sun might put it, it’s politics, John, but not as you know it.. Before Tony Blair basks too much in his endorsement by Rupert Murdoch, he would do well to reflect soberly on how rapidly the Murdoch passion for Labour could turn to dust.

One blatant example of Mr Murdoch’s political fickleness happened in his native Australia following the election of a Labor government in 1972, in circumstances chillingly similar to those in 1997 Britain.
In late 1972, Australians elected a federal Labor government after 23 years of conservative rule. In the run-up to the 1972 campaign, Mr Murdoch courted Gough Whitlam, then Labor leader, in a mirror-image reflection of the way that he has courted Tony Blair – and for many of the same reasons. He sensed a national mood tired with the old regime and hankering for change. And, with his ever-expanding business interests uppermost in mind, Murdoch did not want to be left backing the wrong horse.When Mr Murdoch invited Mr Blair as a keynote speaker to a 1995 management conference on Hayman Island, an Australian resort, there was a more modest precedent 23 years earlier. In 1972, Mr Whitlam was Mr Murdoch’s dinner guest at a Sydney restaurant appropriately called the Hungry Horse. The magnate looked the Labor leader over and decided that he had the right stuff to take the country into a new political era.