VICTORIAN ELECTION AFTERMATH:

MELBOURNE: A shattered Herald Sun editor Sam Weir is ruing what may have been after he took the fateful decision late in the state election campaign “not to go personal” on Premier Daniel Andrews.

In an exclusive interview with Australia’s No1 family netzine, Weir (pictured below right) showed The Bug some of the scoops the paper had planned to run in the dying stages of the campaign, including the election-day cover shown at top and below.

“I accept full blame for pulling the pin on these great stories at the death,” a contrite Weir told us.

“I mean, really, look at that scrunchie story. I couldn’t believe out luck when our Dan Dirt File Unit … sorry our researchers … discovered Andrews was a scruncher.

“Yuk! Could that have swung the election the LNP’s way? We’ll never know now.”

Weir said he made his decisions partly on the mistaken belief that the election had turned the LNP’s way any way and Opposition Leader Matthew Guy was pulling ahead in the polls. Maybe we shouldn’t have started to believe the stuff we were writing?

“Deep down, I guess I also wanted to run a positive campaign coverage based on legitimate policy issues and not get down and dirty in the gutter by resorting to personal attacks.

“That’s why we stuck with yarns around whether a drunk Premier faked that fall over a two-plank set of stairs and wasn’t hurt anyway and the possibility he was pissed to his eyeballs and was actually driving that car a decade ago and selfishly and cruelly made his long-suffering wife take the blame.

“We had a Liberal Party member and an eye witness who wasn’t there who was adamant that is exactly what happened.”

Weir also showed The Bug other splashes the Herald Sun had come close to running in the final days of the campaign (below).

“Should I have run them and would they have helped rid this wonderful state of the toxic, polarising, hated, lockdown-loving Daniel Andrews and put Victoria in the safe, sensible hands of the LNP’s charismatic Matthew Guy?

“As I said earlier, I guess now we’ll never know.”