Paper Monitor
13:53 UK time, Tuesday, 4 May 2010
A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.
It's that time in the election campaign when all the papers are declaring where their support lies. Mostly it's predictable stuff - the Sun, having declared for the Conservatives a few months back, has made no secret of its antipathy towards Gordon Brown and Nick Clegg.
But elsewhere there have been some more subtle developments. The Financial Times has come out in support of the Conservatives... for the first time in more than 20 years. It's interesting to note that despite its image as the newspaper of the City and big finance, the FT's support for Labour goes back at least to 1992, when it backed the pre-Blairite party against the then PM John Major. Subscribers can here.
The Guardian has also changed its tune, going for the Lib Dems over Labour.
And while the paper declares its support to be "enthusiastic" in , it seemed less sure about how to get over the matter of whether a newspaper should be telling its readers who to vote for or not. It resorted in the end to a sort of hypothetical scenario:
"Citizens have votes. Newspapers do not. However, if the Guardian had a vote in the 2010 general election..."
And while the Daily Mirror "remain[s] committed to Labour" its advice is to vote Labour or Lib Dem (it all depends on which constituency you live in, and there's maps and stuff inside to guide readers through this difficult exercise).
But the Mirror does suggest readers should put their cross in a Conservative box in one seat, Buckingham. That's the place where Labour and the Lib Dems are not standing and John Bercow, the Speaker, is being taken on by Ukip's Nigel Farage.
The 
