Using the tried and tested marketing wheeze of projecting things onto walls, the side of the blue-lit News International printers last night read “We’re Feeling Blue” (with echoes of the red smoke pouring out of the NI chimneys back in 2005). Then today’s headline – “Labour’s Lost It” – leads into an editorial that’s a roll call of pet Sun causes; it’s a rhetorical marvel, with flashcards like “Baby P”, “bogus asylum seekers” and “our troops” patronisingly deployed to effect a kneejerk reaction in its readers.

Despite its wan support of the Tories, what you can hear loudest of all is the mindset of the corporation – there is a poisonous and deeply unpatriotic distrust of the state in The Sun’s paranoid editorial, that the chest-beating nationalism of its final lines (“the Conservative leadership can put the great back into Great Britain”) does little to dissipate. “The will of every family to improve its lot through its own efforts”, “clipboard-ticking target managers”, “decent people live in a virtual police state of snooping cameras and petty officials empowered to spy and to punish” – there’s an individualism and libertarianism from The Sun that is the voice of the mogul, not the people.

It’s depressing even before you look at the nauseating and hateful generalisations (“a huge, idle underclass for whom work is a dirty word”), the shonky straw men arguments (“over ten years NHS spending rose 140%, but MRSA-related deaths went up 313%”) and shoehorned debates – “Great Britain is the most watched nation on earth with 20% of the world’s CCTV cameras but only 1% of the population. But what happens when The Sun turns the camera on 12 years under New Labour?”

So Murdoch can be heard throughout this missive, but his unconvincing party political support may not make a difference this year. Roy Greenslade, writing in the Guardian today, says that the Sun is “seeking to back a surefire winner rather than daring to take any political risk” – the tortuous progress of this election cycle, beginning somewhere around when Brown went back on his call for an election, means that opinion has taken longer to properly foment; perhaps the dynamism of previous election campaigns made them riper for media intervention. You can’t help but feel that people have already made up their minds, and it’s just a case of limping on until next year.

Labour for their part are saying they can do without The Sun. “I don’t think editorials will decide elections”, said Brown this morning. “I think that Sun readers actually, when they look at what I said [in the conference speech], will agree with what I said.” Meanwhile Mandelson said that “the last thing Sun readers want is to see their newspaper turned into a Tory fanzine. They want a newspaper, not a propaganda sheet.” I actually think there’s little chance of a Tory love-in though – more likely is a continuation of the distrust in the party political machine and big government altogether. Both Brown and Cameron have closely courted Murdoch, but the fact is that he’s merely going to put up with the one that most people already seem to like.

Osborne went considerably off the leash with his claims, saying that Labour secretly planned to raise income tax, and implying that civil servants had, in allowing the plans to be forged, given up something of their political impartiality. Stung, the servants told Osborne to drop the Hardy Boys schtick – the “secret plans” were actually in the public domain as part of the Budget, and the increase in income tax was tied to the ongoing growth in the economy.

He’s set in motion the kind of political Pokemon battle we get every election cycle, where each side fires its rhetorical magic at the other in turn, until one of them emerges the victor – so much for Osborne’s recent condemnation of electioneering. But with his vicious fireball deflected by the backroom staff, he was left dangerously exposed over the weekend. Mandelson, I choose you!

The business secretary and veteran political warhorse described Osborne thus: ”Like a boy in a man’s job”. Saucer of milk, etc etc, but while we wait for the homophobic reaction that dogs Mandy’s every move (let alone when he’s talking about boys and men) David Miliband has also slagged Osborne, describing him as “not a serious person”. He described the Tories’ tactics as “juvenile and student politics…the politics of the big lie and the big smear”. Treasury Chief Secretary Liam Byrne added: “this truth problem for Mr Osborne is becoming a pattern of behaviour”. Vince Cable meanwhile has managed to get mileage out of both his opponents in a single sentence, saying: “The public doesn’t need George Osborne’s imaginary secret documents or conspiracy theories to work out that the public finances are in a bad shape”. 

The Tories were also hurt by the Lib Dems rooting through their post-election plans and finding over £50bn of spending pledges that don’t really chime with Osborne’s prudence – new-school policies like high-speed rail sit next to classic Tory stances like cutting inheritance tax.

While it’s all good fun to see the internecine bitchery of The Hills get transplanted onto the UK’s political scene, this all seems like a case of electioneering distorting the genuinely necessary action. Cuts will be an inevitable part of the next government, whoever it is – the public discomfort at a rocketing deficit can’t be ignored. But the need to score points off and differentiate themselves from Labour has drawn the Conservatives, and to an even greater extent the Lib Dems, towards a economic model based on arch prudence. This is framed for maximum gain as brave and wise, positioned opposite Labour’s supposed recklessness with the public balance sheet.

But it’s too soon to make cuts, and using them as such a hot political topic is dangerous; fiscal stimulus needs to carry on for some time yet. Keynesian economists like Robert Skidelsky and William Keegan have written over the weekend about the importance of letting fiscal stimulus continue, Skidelsky with a simplicity that is either charmingly optimistic or dangerously reductive depending on your leanings: “Had the Government given everyone a spending voucher of £500 last Christmas, the chances are we would have had no output gap and full employment today!”

But for all the weirdly mechanistic and presumptive nature of Keynes, his ideas are still valid, and to ignore them for brief political gain would be disastrous. The recent crowing about the end of the recession, along with the City-minded political economists, means that talk of cuts might not seem too premature, but if the stimulus is cut back before much of the country has had time to feel it, then any future government could find itself with a hole where its income tax should be. Once the economy is genuinely growing again, with consumer spending steady, then we can start worrying about the deficit. At the moment, all the talk of cuts is only benefitting political strategists.