Alarming views

Something is happening at The Sun. Since Rebekah Wade took over as editor, three weeks ago, the tone has changed at Britain's top-selling newspaper. Wade thinks that it has become sharper and rediscovered its cheeky sense of fun. On her first day as editor, the Page Three girl was "Rebekah from Wapping".

More significant, her first opinion column was an angry denunciation of the Blair government for letting the people down on public services, crime and immigration. This last is where the change has been most marked. And the charge has been led by Trevor Kavanagh, The Sun's political editor for the past 20 years. Possibly the most influential writing journalist in Britain today, Kavanagh is the public face of The Sun, regularly appearing on television; David Yelland, the last editor, rarely gave interviews, and Wade never does.

Kavanagh has been straining at the leash for the past six years, wanting to let rip at Labour. A Thatcherite, he was unhappy when the paper switched to outright support for Tony Blair in 1997, although he now accepts that the logic of its alienation from John Major was to go over emphatically to the other side. Fence-sitting is not The Sun's style. And, although he will not say so, it is obvious that he thought Yelland was too soft on New Labour.

Now, Wade has unchained the attack dog. Her arrival coincided with Kavanagh's 60th birthday, and one senses a man liberated to say what he really thinks. Last week, he dismissed Blair's promise of tougher asylum laws as being "six years – and more than one million 'asylum seekers' – too late". Laws designed to help genuine refugees have been hijacked by "parasites". Such an "irreversible" betrayal of the British people has led to the "colonisation" of this country by "people with no right to the sanctuary they claim – or the welfare cheques".

Kavanagh's comments were backed by a pungent editorial suggesting that terrorists, criminal gangs and "the alarming number arriving with incurable diseases" have "polluted the sea of immigration".

David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, condemned the tirade as racist. Kavanagh rejected the charge in the paper's broadsheet stablemate, The Times, in an article that repeated the offence and added some more. Kavanagh does not do defensive. He does polite. He does calm. He does intense conviction. When I suggest that his language was inflammatory, he replies: "Sometimes you have to say things in order to capture the attention." That's a schoolboy argument, I say. "Well, it's working." By which he means he has the Government on the run. Ten days ago, the Prime Minister publicly speculated about revoking the European Convention on Human Rights. Today, The Sun claims half a million signatures on its petition to "end asylum madness now".

Kavanagh welcomes the change under Wade. "There has been a shift in tone, which is what you might call exasperation. We've given them an awful lot of rope; we've backed them on almost everything, except the euro and profligate public spending." But he has had enough of Blair's "dishonest" politics. "People are waking up to the way that they have been misled and let down and deceived," he says.

He claims to have been driven to use attention-seeking language by Alastair Campbell, the Prime Minister's spokesman, who has brushed off his persistent questions on asylum and immigration for years. Kavanagh returns again and again to the assertion that one million people have come into this country in the first five years of this government. "You don't have to be racist or extremist or xenophobic to wonder whether this is an acceptable process. So where do you go from there? We have been trying for a long time to raise it in a polite, amiable, un-racist way, and nothing's happened – the numbers are increasing."

He distinguishes The Sun's campaign from that of the Daily Express, which he calls "alarmist". Yet he, in his Times article, wrote: "Nobody asked the views of the voters on this unprecedented invasion. Nobody has suggested how many may follow. Is it five million more? Ten million?"

That is pure alarmism, especially as his original figure of one million proves elusive. It is from Home Office statistics, he says. The Home Office figures show fewer than half a million people accepted for settlement in those five years. So whose figures is he quoting? They are from Migration Watch UK, he says, a campaign for tougher immigration controls, which arrived at the figure by adding in people coming here to work, because they usually end up staying, and estimates of illegal immigration. Its total is not supported by the 2001 census. Not official figures, then.

But Kavanagh claims to know about immigrants. After all, he was one. At 22, he was a reporter on the Hereford Evening News when he paid £10 for an assisted passage to Australia. It transformed his outlook. Brought up in a working-class, Labour household, he had his eyes opened by the openness and classlessness of Australian society. But his "political conditioning" did not start until 10 years later: after working on the Bristol Evening Post, back in Britain, he returned to Australia to work for Rupert Murdoch's Sydney Daily Mirror.

He was plucked from a sub-editing job to replace a political correspondent who had been close to Gough Whitlam's Labor government. Thus he had a grandstand seat for the disintegration of that government. He felt isolated in Canberra because he was outside the Labor consensus and not in thrall to Whitlam's charisma. "I was fingered by one of the Labor MPs in the chamber, who pointed at me in the press gallery and said: 'There's Rupert Murdoch's hatchet man.' "

For 30 years he has revelled in that persona, returning to Britain in 1978 and joining The Sun just in time for the winter of discontent and the Thatcher glory years. Despite his donnish demeanour, he has always been aggressive on paper. But is he racist? "The last thing we want to do is stir up racial tension and hatred; it really is. As a newspaper, we have, over a long period of time, overtly and consistently acknowledged the debt that we owe to immigrants who have enriched this country.

"What we are saying is that the well has been poisoned by a small but significant number. It doesn't take much to poison a well or a pond or even a sea."

The asylum system is in a sorry state, and even the Archbishop of Canterbury is discussing measures that would have appalled liberals in the past, such as temporary detention. But the distortion in Kavanagh's description of the problem is far worse than any deception practised by this government. Kavanagh famously once asked if Mr Blair was the most dangerous man in Britain. To answer that question, he has only to look in the mirror.