No matter how successful any paper is, you can reckon it will make more money than permanent waves.Just ask Rupert.. Stephen Carter gazes out at the dredgers and ferry boats battling their way down the Thames past St Paul’s Cathedral and under Southwark Bridge. He acknowledges the magnificence of the view from his spectacular modern headquarters, but the greyness of the water moves him to complain, “Wouldn’t it be better if it were blue?”

Stephen Carter gazes out at the dredgers and ferry boats battling their way down the Thames past St Paul’s Cathedral and under Southwark Bridge. Nor will it deter such serious and capable journalists as Stephen Glover from pursuing the dream of launching a new newspaper to expound on politics and foreign affairs from inside a celebrity-free zone. Like most of those papers already competing for a fickle and fading readership, Glover’s venture will be no more than a useful cog in the democratic machine. When he gained control of the group, he forecast that the Daily Express would overtake the Mail within seven years – less time that it took his OK! to catch and pass Hello!.

The average daily sale of the paper for the month he took over, November 2000, was 1,033,858. In February of this year, with a similar number of bulks distributed here, there and who-knows-where, was 961,836. With the halfway stage of his self-allotted term almost upon him, the gap between the Express and the Mail has actually widened.This will not influence those deluded by self-aggrandisement and, at best, a sketchy view of what dominates thinking and decision-making among their readership. Richard Desmond presumably thought that contributing to the debate on asylum seekers with what amounts to barely-controlled hysteria wins friends, in terms of readers, and influences people Wrong. How many divisions does the Pope have, asked Stalin? How many votes do the papers really control? None at all.Incongruously, many senior figures in a diminishing newspaper industry appear still to believe that the world – this corner of it, at least – is hanging on every word spilling from the opinion pages. “We can’t change the world,” he admits, “but, hell, we can all try.”Politically, the press can certainly reinforce prejudices that are parading around the country demanding to be stroked under the chin and told they are right.

The anti-asylum-seekers propaganda pumped out by the Associated Newspapers titles and the Express group doubtless fill a need felt by pink-faced country gentlemen and shaven-headed youths with bulldogs on their T-shirts alike, but the power to destabilise the administration remains with the people. Those politicians who are paranoid about national newspaper editorials, he once told me, “are probably wasting a lot of emotional energy”. This doesn’t stop Murdoch, or others, vigorously campaigning through his papers against adoption of the euro and what he sees as the negative impact of the EU, but he is under no illusions. It wasn’t The Sun what won it with its sustained anti-Neil Kinnock campaign in 1992, any more than the majority of the press’s anti-Labour stance in 1945 mattered to the returning servicemen who had already decided to dump Winston Churchill by then.Rupert Murdoch knows the score. Richard Desmond barely had time to shuffle copies of Asian Babes under his desk blotter at Express Newspapers before being whisked to No 10 for tea and a sympathetic ear. Favoured editors are f?d at Chequers.Mr Blair, his ministers and a nervous Opposition believe in the power of the press, yet there is little evidence to support the theory that even the largest-selling titles much influence the way readers vote. The Prime Minister, having cosied up to Murdoch to gain the blessed Rupert’s endorsement in the 1997 general election, has retained a sometimes demeaning chumminess with his News International.