On the Guardian, all of the following statements are true:

1) It is, on balance, good for the Tories if it is weakened
2) "The Left" broadly construed does not have the power to swing its fate one way or another
3) From the perspective of "The Left," The Guardian is a problem...

This is because the Guardian is an example in Media of a local optimum.

To explain: imagine an undulating field, with hills and valleys between them. If your job is to find the lowest point, you take one step, and if you are lower, you continue stepping in that direction...

...and you continue stepping until you can't take a step in any direction that doesn't cause you to go up. You have gotten as low as you can get based on the path you have taken.

Is this the lowest point on the field? You don't know.

You have reached a local optimum. But let's say, now, that there is an urgent need to get lower - say a scythe is about to go over the field, and you need to get below it. In a binary choice situation, a local optimum that you cannot escape is *as bad as anywhere else*...

So at that point, the bit of the instruction "continue stepping until you cannot step down any further, take no steps upward," which once helped you find *an* optimum, is now preventing you from finding the global optimum - which in the binary situation presented... is as bad

"Bad" is not meant here in a moral sense, but rather, "undesirable from a strategic sense."

And the response "Oh, so you'd rather have The Mail be the only newspaper?" misunderstands that The Guardian is a key component in a larger schema that limits a larger leftwing ecosystem

The problem isn't The Guardian, the problem - much like with Labourism - is the ongoing belief that The Guardian has an intellectual monopoly on which forms of progressive politics are legitimate, which - from a strategic perspective - is as much a problem as any other tabloid.

Exhortations to "The Left" to be kinder tonally to The Guardian, as it is actually its only friend, is simply the underlying logic of this system manifesting itself in an obvious way.

And back to the metaphor of the scythe - the UK faces collapsing polity, interlocking climate & health crises, & skyrocketing inequality - the Guardian is ideologically dead set against what the left believes is necessary to solve these problems...