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elections were an indication that the Labour Party has not keeled over and died in the face of the Social Democrat unofficial' intervention, that did not deter Fleet Street.

Nine months ago the press was predicting that root victory in the leadership election would be a left wing triumph.

Even the jaded political hacks of the lobby, whose ideas are fixed in a 1950s time warp, must have recognised that Foot's left credentials have long had 'cancelled' stamped over them.

Certainly the majority of the Parliamentary Labour Party planted their faith in Foot as the man to protect the party against the nonTribune left gathering around Benn.

The deputy leadership election has encouraged the press to present new revised opinion on democracy. You may remember mocking articles about elections in the Soviet Union. Bernard Levin used to do a line in analysing the 'swing' in one candidate elections, where 99.98 per cent of the votes were in favour of the candidate.

Benn's "crime" is that he has not accepted. the symmetry of such elections and has insisted on 'disrupting' Healey's triumphal reelection by standing against him, and by making his platform the supremacy of party conferences over cabinet deals.

Not only has he had the temerity to stand but he has clearly now shown that he is no joke candidate, picking up for example backing from the ASTMS conference, against the personal pleading of Clive Jenkins.

As if this were not worrying enough, the opinion polls which had shown the only enthusiastic response to the SDP outside newspaper offices, suddenly showed the new 'party' plunging from 40% landslide victories to the kind of results that the Liberals, have been getting in every mid-term poil since the 1960s.

The real split in the Labour Party is still to come and the press had to face up to that fact.

But the impact of Benn's speech on Ireland (not so much to what he said as to the fact that a leader of the left said something different from the Tories) and the impact of his trade union campaign had left Benn looking like the champion and Healey a mute and inglorious challenger.

The Guardian signalled the counter offensive on the day that Healey addressed FBU delegates at Bridlington saying in an editorial:

"Mr Foot should therefore warn the party now; that he is not prepared to lead (if Benn wins).

He should make it abundantly clear... that he sees no way in which he can work with a deputy leader who is contemptuously opposed to all compromise and that he would rather resign as leader than soldier on in such a humiliating (and electorally suicidal) fix."

After Healey's kick in the stomach' speech the rest of the press lost no time in taking up the cudgels.

The Daily Mirror cribed it as *the bitterest power struggle the party nas known for 20 years' The front page article by political editor Terence Lancaster ended:

"His (Benn's) growing ambition and his undoubted successes at the present time, could lead to something ever more important. The uitimate undoing oi the Labour Party itself."

The Daily Mail was headlined Poor Old Michael Foot. How much more can he take?"

But its editorial column was taken up with fears that the new SDP would only recruit from "the new middle class of smal businessmen and workers in modern service industries with low levels of unionisation"

The Daily Express seemed to have gone overboard on its lobby briefing. It was headlined The Party's Over" and its story began "Labour was tor almost beyond repair last night...

Political editor John Warden wrote:

"Labour MPs are gripped by the politics of fear. feas of the future, fear of the stab in the back. And fear, not of the Tories, but of the Trots, Marxists and Benmites. There is a word which des cribes the politics of fea These tirades will Healey no favours.

In fact the wild witch hunting is more likely te make support building up for Benn less analytic of he positions, less critical (in th proper sense) of his brand o left reformism.

That is the attacks.