**Gordon Brown has insisted “it’s the people who decide elections, not newspapers” after the Sun backed the Conservatives to win the next election.**The newspaper’s front page on Wednesday is headlined “Labour’s Lost it”.
The tabloid backed Labour in the 1997, 2001 and 2005 elections but the prime minister said: “It’s the British people’s views I’m interested in.”
The Sun’s declaration came hours after Mr Brown’s party conference speech insisted Labour was “not done yet”.
“The Sun’s decision to desert Labour in this way and at this time will cause dismay in Labour ranks”
Nick Robinson, BBC political editor
The BBC’s political editor Nick Robinson said the Sun had “timed its big political switch… for maximum impact both in terms of gaining attention for the paper and taking the gloss off Mr Brown’s big day”.
George Pascoe-Watson, the Sun’s political editor, said that in 2005 the paper had "warned Labour that it had one last chance… to try and prove it was the right party for the country.
“We’ve now decided after four more years, particularly after the prime minister’s… underwhelming performance in his conference speech, that it was time now to take a verdict and announce that verdict to the nation,” he told the BBC.
"The prime minister failed to convince us he was the right man for the country.
‘‘We feel it’s time for a new leader’’.
Mr Pascoe-Watson said the paper believed that Tory leader David Cameron had “the vision, the energy, the drive, the ideas to take the country forward”.
He added: "We believe he will cut away a lot of the red tape which is strangling British business.
"We think he is a fresh administration, he’s got good people around him, and we will be holding him to account.
“We’ll be an honest friend but we’ll also be a critical friend, like we were with Labour for many years - 12 years is longer than we ever supported a Conservative administration in the past.”
According to the BBC’s chief political correspondent James Landale, at the Labour conference in Brighton, allies of the prime minister said: “It may be the newspapers that get David Cameron out of bed in the morning - for Gordon Brown, it’s the issues that matter to the British people.”
Energy and Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband admitted to BBC Two’s Newsnight that he had “seen better headlines”.
He said: “I want as many people to support us as possible and it would be better if the Sun was supporting us but… I think the Sun’s made the wrong judgement.”
‘Difficult months’
MP Eric Joyce, who recently resigned as a defence ministerial aide in protest at the government’s strategy in Afghanistan, said: "It is not something we can ignore but it does not mean the end is nigh.
“I am very sad about it. However I do not think the game is up.”
Conservative Party Chairman Eric Pickles said the paper’s support was “obviously very good news”.
He added: "But I do think it’s important for the party to understand that we’ve now got an opportunity to persuade not just the Sun editorial people but also Sun readers that the Conservative Party can be trusted with government.
“And we’ve got a difficult few months ahead of us, I think we’ve now got a possibility to make our case in a way that perhaps we didn’t have before”.
In a speech lasting just under an hour in Brighton on Tuesday, Mr Brown strived to boost the morale of party members fearing a heavy general election defeat.
The Labour leader urged activists to “reach inside ourselves for the strength of our convictions” and “fight” for victory, calling on them to “dream big dreams and watch our country soar”.
Mr Brown announced a string of new policies, including:
• Ten hours of free childcare a week for 250,000 two-year-olds from families “on modest or middle incomes” - paid for by scrapping tax relief for better-off families
• A plan to house 16 and 17-year-old single parents in state-run shared houses rather than council flats
• A £1bn “innovation fund” to boost industry
• A new National Care Service to “provide security for pensioners for generations to come”
• A commitment, enshrined in law, to allocate 0.7% of GDP to international aid
The PM also announced that minimum wage, child tax credits and child benefit would continue to go up every year and confirmed that ID cards would not be made compulsory in the next Parliament.
Damage threat
The newspaper was a big supporter of Margaret Thatcher’s Britain of the 1980s, backing the controversial poll tax and mounting attacks on Tory MPs who plotted against the then-prime minister.
After she was ousted in 1990, the Sun stood by new Prime Minister John Major, and on polling day in 1992, the paper ran a front page showing Labour leader Neil Kinnock’s head in a light bulb.
The headline read: “If Kinnock wins today, will the last person to leave Britain please turn out the lights.”
Many pundits had predicted a Labour victory but the Tories retained power, prompting the Sun to famously declare: “It’s The Sun Wot Won It.”
It had not, Nick Robinson says, adding that the paper “tends to follow its readers’ views rather than set them”.
But Labour must now hope that the paper does not choose to regularly attack Mr Brown himself, which, “rather than a single day’s endorsement of the Tories… would do real damage”, he says.
In 1992, the Sun sold more than 3.5 million copies a day. It is still the UK’s top-selling newspaper, with average daily sales of 3.13 million in August, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulation.