Yesterday I predicted that after Nick Griffin’s appearance on Question Time, the right-wing papers would try to put as much distance between themselves and the BNP as possible. They would do this to hide the frequent overlap of opinion between themselves and the extreme right on a number of social issues. And this is exactly what The Sun has done today, going as far as to give its star columnist Jon Cunt the week off to make its lurch to the left seem halfway credible. Like your parents telling your racist uncle to stay away because you’re bringing a black friend home after school, let’s see how well The Sun has managed to keep its dark side hidden away, at least for a day.

The front page makes it absolutely, blatantly clear that it does not support Nick Griffin. In fact, it ‘loathes’ him. Just as the BNP has to make it clear that it is ‘not racist’ on the first page of its manifesto, The Sun has to make it absolutely clear that it does not support Griffin or his policies. Not many newspapers have to make it clear that they don’t support the BNP, but The Sun does. I wonder why. Maybe because articles such as this one regularly goad its readership into supporting Griffin’s policies. On its website, Sun readers are venting spleen about immigrants and expressing support for Griffin:

Today’s editorial asserts that Labour’s open door immigration policy has led to disillusioned voters supporting the BNP, but mentions nothing of its own coverage of events which does just as much to colour people’s judgement.

Also on the front page, in the left hand column, PAEDOS! For a moment I thought they’d gone soft on us.

Wait, they have gone soft. They’re now apologising for two previous articles which branded one Abdul Muneem Patel “an evil terrorist”. The Sun doesn’t usually withdraw its straight talk. Once you have been hit by The Sun’s clunking fist of common sense, you stay hit. Unless, that is, you are required by law to print a correction or risk getting sued for libel. “We are happy to set the records straight and apologise to him” in two inches of column tucked next to the fold in order to avoid court action.

On page 5, The Sun has plagiarised a line from Billy Bragg’s “Accident Waiting to Happen” for its headline, “A Dedicated Swallower of Fascism”. I’m sure the protest singer and anti-racist campaigner, who endured a spat with former Sun columnist Richard Littlejohn, and stood on picket lines in the 1980s while Murdoch’s paper jeered at the striking miners, will be happy for The Sun to steal his lyrics for its own agenda. Since Bragg’s lyric was an allusion to The Kinks’ “Dedicated Follower of Fashion”, this headline is really third hand wit at best from the sub-editors. In using Billy Bragg of all people, it highlights just how far left the paper has gone today in order to quash all comparisons to the BNP.

POETICAL PAEDO PAGE!

Alliteration galore, as page 9 revelas kids are “Targeted on Twitter,”, which is an Unpolicied Playground for Paedos.” Is Michael Palin’s character from A Fish Called Wanda now writing the headlines? Along with the crude use of language, there is a crude image of a young girl which The Sun actually set up themselves. So in order to illustrate that taking dodgy pictures of kids is disgusting, The Sun has taken its own picture of a kid. Do they fail to see the irony? The kid looks like Madeleine McCann, so maybe they’re suggesting that Paedos, meaning the broad category of sub-human monster The Sun blames for things like this, are far removed from the good honest rest of us, so we can continue to dehumanise them in absurdly over-the-top articles. It’s a vicious circle.  I wonder if any Paedos are getting off to this picture? I bet they are, the sick animals.

LIBERTY! Stone me, I wasn’t expecting this:

Usually the highlight of my Friday is turning to Jon Cunt’s column so that I can get a taste of what people with IQs of less than 50 and other assorted varieties of pond life are thinking. But not today. It seems the naughty boy has been grounded for a week, because The Sun wants to distance itself from the BNP.Despite shitting all over the values of Liberty every week in his column, Cunt was happy to accept the support of Chakrabarti when he got thrown off his TalkSport radio show for calling someone a Nazi last year. Now she comes to his rescue again, filling his big fat bigoted void with some wishy-washy nonsense about not using disabled Iraqi kids as bait for paedophiles. I would usually applaud a publication for offering a wide breadth of opinion, but Chakrabarti’s column is nothing more than a token display of diversity, just like its wheeling out of Anita Baig as a Muslim columnist a few years ago.

So there it is, The Sun has gone to great lengths to show how it loves diversity. Except it does nothing of the sort. Today’s edition has simply found someone more visibly repugnant than its usual cast of scapegoats to vilify. When Nick Griffin sidles back into obscurity, The Sun will be back firing on all cylinders, printing snaps of asylum seekers fleeing the wars which The Sun supports, getting caught in mantraps set at the entrance to the Channel Tunnel by vigilante Sun readers. I can’t wait.