Today’s Sun says you should vote Conservative. Not a huge surprise there.

Oh, hang on: it’s also saying you should vote SNP.

That’s odd. How can the Sun say two different things on either side of the border?

To a lot of people, these front pages show the low regard the Sun has for its readers’ intelligence. That it thinks it can say one thing to one group of people and another thing to another group of people, and get away with it, because the two groups of people don’t overlap or talk to each other. That Rupert Murdoch doesn’t have the guts to say in Scotland what he says in England, because the Scottish Sun’s circulation would collapse if it supported a party that’s so unpopular there.

While these people have a point, it’s worth remembering that these are two different newspapers here, published in two different nations, so it isn’t unreasonable that their editorial lines might diverge.

What I find bizarre isn’t that the newspapers have offered different views but that the contrast between their coverage is so striking. The “English” Sun has, along with the rest of the right-wing press here, spent the last month engaged in increasingly hysterical attempts to demonise and smear Nicola Sturgeon, the leader of the SNP. In today’s endorsement of the Conservatives it lists, as the second most notable argument in their favour, that they would “stop the SNP running the country”.

It’s the extreme negativity of the English SNP coverage that makes it seem odd and deeply cynical that the Scottish Sun has come out in their support.

I’m hoping that News International will end up looking back on their move to paid content as a serious blunder. Not because I’m irked at the idea of paying for the Sun or the Times (I don’t read either) or even because I’m a particularly ardent defender of free content. I just dislike News International in general and Rupert Murdoch in particular, and would rather live in a world in which their influence is greatly diminished. I also believe that Rupert Murdoch has a history of serious miscalculation when it comes to the internet and would like to see that belief borne out.

If I’m wrong, it’ll at least be interesting to see what paid-content providers end up doing to differentiate their output from non-charging competitors. We might end up seeing a period of accelerated innovation in digital content as it becomes a product in its own right – as opposed to a vehicle for selling advertising.

But to go back to my original point – I do hope that this all turns out to be a major cock-up on Murdoch’s part.