The fascinating thing about the months that have passed since Gordon Brown took power from Tony Blair is that these rules no longer apply. The political media have entered a highly unusual period, with loyalties fluid. The allegiance of entire newspaper groups is uncertain. This is a situation that occurred briefly in the early 1990s, after John Major lost his authority. It also took place, to a more limited extent, during the period of political attrition when the Callaghan Government was struggling to survive in the late 1970s.

Both Gordon Brown and his increasingly formidable opponent, the Tory leader David Cameron, are fighting a hand-to-hand struggle for the goodwill of three major groups: News International, the Telegraph Group and Associated Newspapers. There had even been reports, before Roger Alton's sudden departure from his editorship in October, that Cameron's Conservatives fancied their chances of winning over The Observer. It is unlikely that Cameron believes he can secure the backing of The Guardian. The paper has nevertheless issued enough coquettish signals to give the Conservative leader grounds to believe that he can realistically hope to abate its hostility, if not secure its support.

The most significant – and promiscuous – of all these targets is Rupert Murdoch's News International. Gordon Brown has been dispensing favours to Murdoch for some time. At one Treasury party for the media, thrown in the summer of 2006 before Brown became Prime Minister, this special treatment was extremely obvious. From ordinary newspapers, only political editors were present. But all political reporters from News International titles appeared to have been invited. Furthermore, it was bleakly noted by journalists from rival papers that News International hacks were allowed to monopolise Brown's company for most of the evening.

This favouritism became yet more blatant at Bournemouth this September, when Brown delivered his first party conference speech as leader. When he stood, the first two rows in front of him, as is customary, were filled with members of the Cabinet. A third row seemed to be composed of Labour dignitaries. But in the fourth row back were seated the most senior News International figures – executive chairman Les Hinton, Sun editor Rebekah Wade and others. Brown was placing News International executives in the same privileged category as elite members of the British governing party.

Recollection of horror

This year at Bournemouth Gordon Brown was determined to avoid the same embarrassment – and this favoured treatment certainly seems to have had the desired effect. A few days later at the Tory conference in Blackpool, one senior News International executive was publicly expressing the view that Brown would certainly call an election in the autumn, adding for good measure that News International titles would certainly support Labour, and that Labour would most certainly win.

It needs to be borne in mind that this decision by Brown to extend maximum favour to News International came as he was making careful preparations for an autumn election. Indeed, as the Tory conference ended the Prime Minister sought to deepen his friendship with News International yet further by inviting Rupert Murdoch and his wife Wendi Deng to Chequers. Another guest at this power weekend was Alan Greenspan, the legendary former chairman of the United States Federal Reserve who received an honorary knighthood, at Brown's suggestion, in 2002. When the invitation to the Murdochs was originally extended, Brown had earmarked that very weekend as the likely date that the General Election would be announced. Brown must have envisaged this intimate Chequers party with Rupert and Wendi Murdoch as the perfect way of taking the newspaper tycoon into his confidence about election strategy – as well as offering the reassurances about European policy that Murdoch would have needed in order to award the full-hearted support of his titles to Labour.

However, circumstances had changed by the time the Murdochs arrived. The crisis over the election caused Gordon Brown to arrive late and extremely harassed from Downing Street, where he had been detained giving the now famous interview to Andrew Marr, for broadcast on the following morning, in which he called off the election. According to well-informed sources, Brown had planned to propitiate Rupert Murdoch by giving the noelection information to The Sunday Times. This ploy also went wrong after Marr, to his credit, at once released his exclusive to the world. This only made matters worse for Brown. Murdoch was, as the proud owner of Sky TV, at a loss to understand why the story had been granted exclusively to the BBC. It was only in the evening that Brown, along with his advisers, started to grasp that he was dealing with a massive problem.

By then the visit from Murdoch was beginning to turn into the weekend from hell. One well-known and distinguished political observer compares the dinner that took place at Chequers on Saturday October 6 to the scenario favoured in 1970s sitcoms, when the new boss gets invited to dinner for the first time. All concerned are desperate to make a good impression, but everything goes horribly wrong. Gordon Brown was desperate to show himself off to Rupert Murdoch and Wendi Deng as a masterful figure, completely in control of events. At the same time he was being interrupted by calls from panicky strategists. As the full scale of the disaster gradually dawned on the Prime Minister, it may have been hard for him devote his full attention to his important guests.

Murdoch and Deng appear to have been less than impressed. According to well-placed sources, Murdoch was for the first time beginning to feel genuine doubts about News International's support for Brown. These doubts were to intensify the following evening when – by coincidence – Murdoch and Wendi Deng attended a Notting Hill dinner party thrown by Murdoch's daughter Elisabeth and her husband, the power broker Matthew Freud. This long-planned event was designed to rebuild the badly-damaged relationship between Tory leader Cameron and Rupert Murdoch. Besides Samantha and David Cameron, he fresh from his triumphant conference speech, Murdoch's key lieutenants were out in force – Sun editor Rebekah Wade, accompanied by her partner, the former racing trainer and Old Etonian Charlie Brooks, along with Les Hinton and his partner Katherine Raymond (former special adviser to David Blunkett and now an adviser to Gordon Brown inside Downing Street). Also present at this meeting between Murdoch and the Tory leader were Tony Blair's political consultant Philip Gould and his wife Gail Rebuck, who is chairman and chief executive of the publishing giant Random House, which is to publish the Blair memoirs.

Unlike previous encounters between Cameron and Murdoch, the evening, smoothly hosted by the Freuds, went off well. By the end of it, says a source, guests came away well aware of three things: that “Murdoch felt Alistair Darling's capital gains proposals were a disaster, that the inheritance tax cut was a very good idea, and that Cameron felt passionately about a referendum on a European treaty”. One senior News International executive adds that it is now conceivable – for the first time since 1997 – that News International support could switch to the Tories. “Whatever the real reason,” says the executive, “there is no doubt that Rupert could find his public excuse on the Europe issue.”

Shock and incredulity

The Daily Telegraph, for so long the emblematic newspaper of Tory Britain, is an extremely interesting and curious study. In a sharp departure from its traditional approach, the new editor William Lewis has authorised, on the Telegraph comment pages, a long series of virulent and extremely personal attacks on David Cameron, thus placing the paper in diehard opposition to the new Tory leader's mission to rebrand the Conservative Party. Meanwhile the political reporting team has been dramatically reshaped, at least partly in what appears to be a voluntary alignment with the Downing Street news-production machine. “The Telegraph bet very heavily indeed on Gordon Brown establishing himself as a strong leader,” notes one well-informed insider. This novel – and for the Telegraph, revolutionary – mode was in sharp contrast to the more scrupulous and distant approach of former political editor George Jones, who departed early this year. Jones's replacement, Andy Porter – soon to be joined from the Daily Mirror by reporter Rosa Prince – brought with him exceptionally strong contacts with the Gordon Brown camp, and he is close to the Prime Minister's key press operator, Damian McBride. Porter was in many ways exactly what the Telegraph needed – a young and hungry story-getter. But occasionally he seemed in danger of practising a methodology of news reporting that was closer to the client journalism of News International papers during the Blair era, rather than the High Tory scepticism characteristic of the Charles Moore and Max Hastings regimes. Brown, along with other Cabinet ministers, made a point of attending the Telegraph drinks reception at Labour conference this year, and has devoted significant time to wooing Will Lewis.

Most extraordinary of all, however, is the recalibration of the Daily Mail under the Brown premiership. Throughout living memory the Daily Mail has supported the Conservative Party. Under the editorship of Paul Dacre it was the only newspaper to reject consistently the entreaties of the Tony Blair Downing Street machine. This makes the friendship between the Mail editor and Brown an intriguing phenomenon. Observers say the relationship is based on a close personal empathy, dating back several years, between Dacre and Brown. The two men are said to meet regularly, taking walks in Kensington Gardens near the Associated Newspapers HQ. In modern times it is hard to recall such a close friendship between a serving Prime Minister and a national newspaper editor. There is no doubt that this alliance has an effect on the tone of the Mail coverage. To give one example, the old Mail might have been expected to greet enthusiastically David Cameron's “English votes on English laws” campaign, started at the end of October. In fact, if anything, the paper appeared to sympathise with Downing Street.

Meanwhile, the Daily Mail's relationship with David Cameron has been frosty for long periods. Though never launching into the vicious attacks seen in The Daily Telegraph, the Mail has often been unenthusiastic and sometimes not far from mute despair. There was speculation, when an autumn General Election seemed on the cards, that the Mail might even formally back a Gordon Brown election victory. This may seem far-fetched, but it was equally hard to envisage anything more than a lukewarm endorsement for Cameron.

There are many reasons for this partial detachment of large sections of the British press from its traditional patterns of allegiance. Personal factors, such as the friendship between the editor of the Mail and the Prime Minister, is one. Fluctuating media loyalties also reflect the fact that the two main political parties are running neck and neck in the polls, and newspapers do not want to find themselves too far out of step with readers. But the phenomenon of shifting allegiances cannot be fully understood without also grasping that both political parties have changed their techniques of press management in recent months.

Corrupt Blairite methods

Judging from his first few months in office, it is fair to say that Brown has indeed restored some honesty to the political process, and helped to restore the integrity of Parliament. He has (and he deserves more credit for this than has so far been awarded) voluntarily relinquished some of his own ability to control the press by making newspapers less dependent on the Downing Street machine, even if there are already signs that he may not stick to this policy in the long term. He has also scrapped proposals to water down the Freedom of Information Act and, in a speech during which he backed selfregulation of the press, revealed that he wants to broaden FoI and reduce the 30-year secrecy gag on “sensitive” government documents, with the review being chaired, significantly, by Paul Dacre of the Daily Mail.

Meanwhile there have also been critical changes in the David Cameron press machine. When Cameron became Tory leader nearly two years ago, it was extremely striking that, like Brown in his early months, he tried to distance himself from the formidable-though-corrupt Blair media techniques. One sign of this was Cameron's decision, encouraged by his principal strategic adviser Steve Hilton, not to seek to enter into any form of alliance with News International. A lunch between Cameron and Murdoch in the summer of 2006 went very badly wrong. According to aides, Cameron had been coached in advance about what to say – in particular about Europe and about tax cutting – in order to please Murdoch. “The trouble is, he wouldn't say any of it. The lunch was a disaster,” sighed one News International figure. At another meeting, in Davos, the News International tycoon is said to have cold-shouldered the Tory leader. Similarly, Cameron's early encounters with Paul Dacre were chilly. During this period Cameron was even advised to launch an open public attack on the Murdoch empire, just as Stanley Baldwin famously attacked the Beaverbrook and Northcliffe press in the early 1930s.

More striking still was Cameron's refusal to bring a heavyweight press handler into his inner circle. His chief press officer George Eustice was an honest, straightforward and decent man who did not practise dark arts. The virtuous, uncomplicated and (critics claimed) ineffective media strategy came to grief in the summer of 2007. Close observers identify July and Cameron's decision to keep his promise to visit the troubled African state of Rwanda, rather than stay in Britain and engage with the floods crisis, as the turning point. They say that it was Steve Hilton and George Eustice who urged Cameron to persist with his trip, adding that the hard-headed advice to dump the overseas jaunt and focus on domestic politics came from Andy Coulson, the former News of the World editor who had departed in the wake of the Royal phone-tapping scandal at the start of 2007.

Coulson found a new job as Cameron's press adviser in June, six weeks ahead of the Rwanda trip, the fall-out from which is said to have vindicated his judgment. His arrival has coincided with a very dramatic change of strategy from the Tories: Cameron has abandoned his soft focus approach of concentrating on the environment and issues surrounding social well-being. Instead he has concentrated on tax cuts, family values and immigration. Coulson has also provided a connection with Murdoch, hitherto missing from the Tory central machine. Meanwhile, George Eustice has left the press beat. “Coulson has been effective,” says one political editor. “He's an old-fashioned Fleet Street bully. The Cameron operation has got rid of a very straight, mild-mannered bloke and brought in an Alpha male thug who hands out bollockings like Alastair Campbell. That's Coulson's pitch.”

So this autumn the British press is out of kilter. News International flirts with Cameron, while Associated courts Brown. Tribal loyalties have been abandoned. Everything is up for grabs. As a result, reporting from Westminster feels cleaner. Stories can be written up for what they are worth, not fine-tuned to suit party political allegiances. This is an enormous contrast to the days when Margaret Thatcher (through her media manipulator, Bernard Ingham) and Tony Blair (through Alastair Campbell) bamboozled press and TV commentators into uncritical support. Thatcher, until the very end, could rely on the unscrupulous support of Associated, the Telegraph and News International. For all his whingeing about a feral media, Tony Blair could rely for many years on a client press.

Now something unfamiliar is happening. Life is better. Spin is diminishing. Honest, unadulterated political reporting is making a reappearance. Probably the newspapers are just sizing up the two leaders, waiting to see who cracks first so that – in time-honoured fashion – Fleet Street can rush to the aid of the winner. But who knows? Maybe it can really last. With the coming of peace at the end of the Second World War the great Daily Mirror cartoonist Philip Zec produced a famous drawing with the message: Don't Lose it Again. Exactly the same can be said of Fleet Street at the end of the era of Blair.