It's a cover-up

For the last 44 years, van drivers, men in barbershops and frustrated teenagers desperate for a furtive glimpse of bare breasts have made The Sun their daily destination. Ever since Sir Larry Lamb (not to be confused with the dad from Gavin & Stacey) decided, somewhat randomly in November 1970, to plonk a topless picture of 20-year-old German model Stephanie Rahn over the length and breadth of the tabloid's third page, "Page 3" has virtually become a generic noun for one of the most controversial features in British newspaper history.

In The Sun's mindset - one that is permanently set in the early 1960s, the Carry On Britain where "Miss" remains anachronistic Sun vernacular for all female teachers and snackfood is still referred to routinely in the context of wartime rationing as a "tasty treat" - Page 3 has been "just a bit of fun".

The Sun's view is that Page 3 is something to put a smile on Britain's face each morning. Because, as we all know, a pair of naked norks are absolutely hilarious.

Here in continental Europe, nudity in any form is never an issue. Shower gel commercials on TV don't cover anything up, and you'll never see a newspaper drawing juvenile attention to a "nipslip", much for the same reason that Europeans don't, generally speaking, have quite the same issues with the human body and its functions as we Brits famously have.

I have no particular opinion on the sexual politics of Page 3. Visual sexism appears everywhere - you're either offended by it, or it simply doesn't bother you - but I do think that Page 3 lost any relevance on the day after Lamb introduced Britain to Frau Rahn.

Because Page 3 is, let's face it, a fairly ludicrous newspaper concept: on Page 1 you have your splash headline - 100-point type, with two sentences of the story squeezed underneath; Page 2, a continuation of the story plus a selection of shorts' (usually of global importance) and the weather forecast; and then Page 3, with three columns filled with a picture of "Curvy Cathy" or "Sexy Suzy" and a sunny but vacuous accompanying caption; on Page 4, the rest of the newspaper begins.

So, what purpose does a mildly titillating bridge between pages 2 and 4 serve at all? Do people still buy The Sun because of it? No, and they never did: the TV section always used to be the biggest sales draw, with Mystic Meg's stars and the sports pages in close competition.

Spend any amount of time in The Sun newsroom, and you understand where Page 3 comes from, and why it has remained. Despite its adjacency to more highbrow stablemates like The Sunday Times and The Times, The Sun has always prided itself on being staffed by journalists from similar social backgrounds to its readers. It has always revelled in an egalitarian culture, though it has never sought to play up working class credentials in the same way as the Daily Mirror has, under editors like Kelvin MacKenzie, The Sun enjoyed baiting its loftier peers, part of the occasional boorishness of British tabloid life (and one indulged by both male and female participants).

Page 3 played its part in this. Its models have always been deliberately drawn from the The Sun's very readership, girls from the UK's industrial heartlands, whose dads drunk in pubs that sold bags of peanuts advertised, incongruously, by women in bikinis, and whose mums thought nothing weird about sending in Costa del Sol holiday snaps of their daughters as auditions for "Britain's brightest daily read".

The argument against Page 3 has, for those who defend it, come from those who wouldn't normally read it. The paper has always maintained that The Sun maintains its audience quite nicely, thanks (pre-Internet it would regularly sell four million copies each day and be read by 12 million), and those who don't like it should stick to The Guardian.

And while Page 3's most vociferous opponents have been drawn from the hardcore PC left, a new, more straight-forward opposition has emerged in recent years. One that simply says that, like any movie featuring Robin Askwith and a window cleaner's ladder, Page 3 is ridiculous throwback to a Britain that has long since disappeared, along with Timothy Whites and Green Line buses in the London suburbs.

Sadly, The Sun and, ultimately, its owner Rupert Murdoch, who still calls the shots, hasn't moved on. This week, it was suggested that Page 3 was no more. Or at least the Page 3 Girl would be no more. After a mysterious absence, prompting the media elite to break into fully-blown chatter mode, with even The Times running a piece saying that the daily feature was being "quietly dropped".

Today it returned less than quietly, with The Sun bringing back a topless model to Page 3 -  "Nicole, 22, from Bournemouth" - and even going out its way to goad the anti-page 3 campaign.

"WE'VE HAD A MAMMARY LAPSE", a teaser on the front page facetiously pointed out this morning. Yesterday evening, The Sun's own PR person provocatively tweeted: "I said that it was speculation and not to trust reports by people unconnected to the Sun. A lot of people are about to look very silly ...", a forewarning reminiscent of Saddam Hussein's former Information Minister, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf - or "Comical Ali" as he was better known - who adopted a similar "you're all going to look like idiots" stance towards the Western media. Thinking about Iraq now, he may well have been right.

As for The Sun, one wonders, then, what Rupert Murdoch himself, thinks about the return of the Page 3 model. He was said to have favoured dropping it for being anachronistic and out of touch with modern public sentiment. It would appear that his own editorial team at The Sun have different ideas.