Last week on Spectator TV Fraser Nelson saluted the ‘intervention’ of the Labour party in the debate about whether the magazine he edits, as well as the Telegraph Media Group, should be sold to a UAE-backed consortium. In an interview, Thangam Debbonaire, the shadow culture secretary said that ‘ownership by a foreign power is incompatible with press freedom, which is essential in a democracy’.

We shouldn’t have been surprised at Labour’s championing of press freedom, even for publications in the Conservative stable. The party’s leader, Keir Starmer, has written more than a dozen columns for the Telegraph. The most recent was last December when he accused the Tories of having betrayed voters on immigration. ‘I stand ready to deliver,’ declared Starmer.

Starmer has understood that to shun the media is an act of self-harm

It was the same message he had delivered to GB News, when he spoke to the broadcaster a couple of months earlier. He also used the interview to condemn Hamas as a terrorist organisation responsible for the ‘cold blooded murder of men, women and children’.

Starmer also writes the odd column for the Sun newspaper, for decades the bête noire of the Labour party. Starmer’s predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn, hated not just the tabloid but all of what he regarded as the ‘Tory press’. In 2018, when the cult of ‘Magic Grandpa’ was at its height, and Corbyn genuinely believed he was on his way to 10 Downing Street, he issued a video message to the Telegraph, the Sun, the Express and the Mail. ‘We’ve got news for them: change is coming,’ he crowed.

Corbyn never got the chance to muzzle the press, and Starmer has understood that to shun the media is an act of self-harm. When he was campaigning to become party leader in 2020, he refused to give interviews to the Sun. Now he writes for the paper. Asked last year why he’d changed his position, Starmer replied: ‘I have to make sure that what we have to say is communicated to as many people as possible in the time that we’ve got available and that is why I am very happy to work with the Sun, to write for the Sun, to do interviews with the Sun’.

What made Starmer change his mind? Perhaps it was Tony Blair, or some other figure from the early days of New Labour, who pointed out the advantages of buttering up the paper. It was a strategy of Blair’s when he became party leader in 1994. The following year Rupert Murdoch flew Blair to Australia to address News Corporation’s week-long management retreat. Murdoch let it be known that he found Blair ‘impressive’ and on the eve of the 1997 general election the Sun declared its support for New Labour.

There is no equivalent of the Sun in France but they do have their version of GB News, which is called CNews, and is owned by the conservative Catholic billionaire Vincent Bolloré.

The channel is loathed by the left-wing intelligentsia, which regard it as ‘far-right’ and far too beyond the pale for polite society. Last month, France’s Constitutional Court (crammed full of left-wing intelligentsia) declared that CNews must have a greater representation of comment from across the political spectrum. This has never been a problem in the past.

During the 2022 presidential campaign, for example, left-wing parties received far greater exposure on the airwaves than the parties of Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen.

In response to the ruling of the Constitutional Court, CNews pointed out that they do regularly invite figures from the left to appear on its programmes but they are nearly always turned down. During last year’s pension reform protests, the head of the hard left union CGT, Sophie Binet, was asked a question by a CNews reporter during a rally. She refused to reply. ‘But this is an opportunity to address the French people, don’t you want to explain your demands?’ the journalist asked. ‘No,’ said Binet

Such narrow-minded immaturity has become characteristic of the French left. CNews is among the broadcasters that will host a live debate in the weeks before June’s European elections. But the debate on CNews will be missing two of the candidates: Marie Toussaint of the Green party was the first to pull out and she was followed last week by Raphaël Glucksmann of the Socialists. Toussaint has called on all left-wing candidates to boycott the channel but the Communist Léon Deffontaines has said he will be present.

In justifying his decision not to appear, Glucksmann said: ‘It is an opinion channel that promotes far-right ideas… It’s a tool for ideological ends and it’s a cultural, political and ideological crusade that I can’t see myself supporting.’

CNews isn’t on a far-right ‘crusade’. It is a right-leaning broadcaster that has journalists and guests of many ethnicities, and recently it hosted in its studio Manuel Valls, the former Socialist prime minister and Sébastien Lecornu, the current defence minister.

Glucksman might not support CNews but eight million French viewers a day do, relieved to have an alternative to the centre-left consensus that has dominated the French broadcast media for half a century.

Many of CNews viewers are working-class men and women who two decades ago may well have voted left. Now they either don’t bother to cast their ballot or they back Marine Le Pen.

Like CNews, Le Pen and her party are regularly cast as ‘far-right’ and ‘fachos’ by the left. This is what they are reduced to: insults. They have no ideas or inspiration and, it appears, no wish to win back the voters that they have so foolishly abandoned this century.

In contrast, Le Pen’s MPs regularly crop up on radio and television, regardless of whether the broadcaster leans to the left or the right. This is the strategy of Keir Starmer, which he described as communicating ‘to as many people as possible in the time that we’ve got available.’

That’s how a party wins over people and wins seats; not by sitting at home sulking when it should be debating.