Keir Starmer’s No. 10 has been criticised for lacking mission or purpose – but in one area, at least, its relentless focus remains undisturbed. That cause is, of course, antagonising the party’s left flank.
Its latest move along those lines is the appointment of 57-year-old former Sun editor David ‘Dins’ Dinsmore to the new role of permanent secretary overseeing government communications.
Dinsmore, who has spent the last decade as News UK’s chief operating officer, is well regarded and respected in the industry, but in an era where more people get their news from YouTube and social media than the combined circulation of British newspapers, hiring another News UK executive is a peculiar move.
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Happily for Dinsmore, his own tenure as Sun editor – from 2013 to 2015 – is safely long after the conclusion of the phone hacking saga, but that doesn’t mean he’s got no uncomfortable skeletons from that era. Most notably, Dinsmore was editor when Katie Hopkins published her infamous article saying she’d “use gunships to stop migrants” shortly after a photo of a drowned three-year-old refugee hit front pages everywhere.
Later, after he’d moved upstairs, he described the Brexit vote for which the Sun campaigned with heavily biased coverage and headlines like “We’ll Get Stuffed by Turkey” as “a massive feather in the cap for the power of the press”.
No. 10 might have decided ‘Dins’ is now a politically acceptable figure, but others felt differently – in 2023, he was forced to step down as a trustee of Parkrun after just one month following a backlash from runners. Conveniently, as Dinsmore is joining the government as a civil servant, he won’t have to attend Labour’s party conference in Liverpool this September.
Dinsmore will want to ensure some of his old comments aren’t surfaced too often. There is a 2013 interview from his time as editor of the Sun in which he enthused about Britain’s “huge amount of positive immigration over the years, which has added to the cultural mix of Britain”. That kind of talk is sadly now off-message for this government.
