Poor, wretched Gordon Brown: having lost the love of the traditional Labour left, and Middle England, and his own front bench, and even – whisper it – the White House, he has finally and irrevocably, in what must be the worst heartbreak of all, lost the love of Rupert Murdoch.

The Sun's announcement last week that it is withdrawing its support for Labour after 12 years has led to a backlash within a backlash. Some of the British broadsheets (well, the former broadsheets – the compacts or midis or berliners or whatever word they use to avoid saying 'tabloid') have begun praising Brown. This after more than two years of throwing rotten tomatoes at him every morning. There has often been occasion to wonder, since June 2007 when Brown succeeded Tony Blair, what exactly Britain thought it was doing. Seeing off Blair was one thing, but it must have been obvious that the destruction of Gordon Brown could lead to only one thing – a Tory government by 2010 at the latest. Was that really what they wanted?

Of course it's easy to be sympathetic to other people's political leaders. There is a manifest likeness between Brown's accession to power and Brian Cowen's – both unelected prime ministers, both successors of an absurdly popular chancer, both swiftly landed in a diabolical economic mess – but you won't catch me making a case for Cowen here.

Like Cowen, Brown – stern, undemonstrative and with no grin to speak of – emerged that moment too soon. Those were the days before people had been persuaded to forgo their Bollinger and blockbusters in favour of a basin of thin gruel and a volume of Knox's sermons (or in our case, probably something like Anam Chara by the other John O'Donohue). He was doomed from the outset.

As the New York Times rather superciliously pointed out last week: "Britons tend to grow weary of governments and turn on them. Sensing blood, the ravening British news media can be as vicious as the gang of boys in Lord of the Flies."

After the Sun's announcement, Brown appeared crankier than ever on a succession of morning television programmes, and dismissed the significance of the move. He said "newspapers are entitled to their opinions" but that he had an "old-fashioned" view. "You look to newspapers for news, not propaganda. I don't think editorials will decide elections." Tell that to Conservative leader David Cameron and his communications director Andy Coulson, who clearly believe newspapers have power over their readers, as they have reportedly been courting Murdoch tirelessly for months.

However, Brown does have a point, at least as far as the Sun goes. It may have eight million readers, but it's unlikely that many of them depend on it for its political coverage, even if Gordon Brown might be too wary of the accusation of intellectual snobbery to say as much. But there is something more, too, to Brown's retaliation against the fourth estate. Do you get the feeling that, for the first time in his tormented career in Downing Street (Nos 10 and 11), Brown may have actually hit on a populist idea? Media-bashing is the frenzy du jour, after all, and its various opposing forms cover all the social classes.

Some people hate the press for nameless reasons, something to do with recklessness and inaccuracy; they don't actually read the papers but they have it on someone's good authority that there's nothing in them. A second school believes the media is composed of a shower of hand-wringing pinkos – damn women the whole lot of them, even the men, and thank God for Kevin Myers. A third belief is that reporters are lily-livered establishment spokesmen with their corporate paymasters on speed-dial. In fact, a typical journalist is dimly aware that her corporate paymaster wouldn't recognise her if she walked up to him in broad daylight and pinched his bottom. But there is a grain of truth in this, out of which people have made giant, spectacular sand pictures. There's nothing like a course in media studies and a youth spent quarrelling on the internet to turn everyone into the new Noam Chomsky.

For once, could Brown have taken the low, quick pulse of his disillusioned constituency? Could this incident see the prime minister united with his people, for the first time, in ganging up on the meejah? If so, Murdoch may find he has shot David Cameron in the expensively-shod Etonian foot.

Limestone Cowboys: Run them off the land

CONTROL freak of the week award goes to the Burren Connect Project, the heritage department of Clare County Council, and other unidentifiable, unelected do-gooders, for taking a stand against 'mini-dolmens'. It seems visitors are fond of building little replica dolmens around the Burren and no, you're wrong, that's not cute. It's vandalism, it's "scribbling on a masterpiece", hanging's too good for them. It's not clear where the campaign stands on the dolmen-building vandals of 6,000 years ago – or about five seconds ago, in the timescale of the Burren.

Hundreds of schoolchildren were enlisted to dismantle the mini-dolmens last week. Get them young, so that when they grow up, they will make you take your shoes off before you go into their houses; they will have no pets; their children will be afraid to dirty their clothes; they will use air freshener in every room to obliterate the whiff of humanity; and they will close the Burren to visitors altogether.

etynan@tribune.ie

Diarmuid Doyle returns next week