Christopher Gray criticises a tabloid story regarding Britain's cars

‘It woz the Sun wot won it!” (or illiteracies to that effect). We can always rely on ‘Britain’s most popular paper’ to tell is like it is. Or can we? Take a big story from last Friday’s newspaper dealing with a topic that is of some importance to many people living in Oxford.

The main article on the leader page, written by Simon English, began with an emphatic single-sentence paragraph: “Britain is rubbish at making cars.”

Another followed: “Our workers are disruptive and expensive.”

Then a third: “Better leave cars to the Germans and focus on banking.”

Given the attention span of the average Sun reader, this is probably as far as many of them got before turning to more important matters like the Page 3 totty.

But anyone who did give up on the story would have been left with an utterly false picture of what it was actually about.

For here are paragraphs four and five: “That was long the view from those who thought this nation’s days as a manufacturing giant were history. But figures just out give the lie to this attitude. “Britain’s car industry is a rocking success. It’s Vroom Vroom Britain.”

Yes, this was an example of that dated and dangerous journalistic device, the delayed drop intro.

Its employment here has resulted in the article saying, for many careless readers, precisely the opposite of what was intended. The compliment that the article pays to the workers at BMW’s Mini plant at Cowley would also have been missed by readers put off by the down-beat start to the piece.

It woz the Sun wot got it wrong . . .