LONDON — On the day after elections that handed the Labor Party a worrying midterm report card, Friday’s editions of the Times offered readers an unusually handsome, front-page portrait of Gordon Brown, the probable next leader of Labor, and an authoritative account of what transpired at the polls.

And for those who weren’t interested in the political future of Britain, a hot pink banner across the top of the page lured readers to an inside feature on homosexuality in the workplace: “How we came out at work.”

Editors past at the Times — once the staid, reliable holy writ of institutional Britain, tucked under the arms of generations of powerful, polite men in bowler hats — must have been spinning in their graves.

This, some would say, is the imprint of press mogul Rupert Murdoch, who bought the Times in 1981 and turned it into a tabloid in 2004, the same physical format as his raucous, breast-heavy “Sun.”

Mr. Murdoch’s surprise $5 billion bid for Dow Jones & Co. has raised questions about whether the tycoon, a staunch conservative, could resist meddling in the news pages of the world’s pre-eminent financial newspaper, the Wall Street Journal.

Some editors who have worked in his newspaper empire doubt it. Andrew Ferguson Neil edited the Sunday Times and worked on several of Mr. Murdoch’s television ventures but fell out with the tycoon when he wrote a book about his adventures. Mr. Neil recalled that Mr. Murdoch “loved the Journal’s editorial page. It was closer than any other paper to his views.”

“He once said to me he read it every morning because it was like having a really strong cup of coffee, it got him going,” Mr. Neil said. “Whether he would be so tolerant as to allow the news pages of the Journal to go their way, independent of the editorial pages, which is the American broadsheet tradition, I wouldn’t be so sure.”

Mr. Murdoch’s takeover bid has led to comparisons with the Times and its sister paper, the Sunday Times, which along with the Australian have represented the empire’s quality papers.

In London, the Times and Sunday Times, even with Mr. Murdoch on the masthead, remain well-regarded in the upper echelon of the most competitive newspaper culture in the world.

In part, this is because London bears scant resemblance to the stuffy, white, English, Thatcherite city that lingered over the old Times’s endless gray columns with its morning tea.

These days, it’s hard to pick Mr. Murdoch reliably out of the crowd when the conservative Telegraph has video of “My life with R2D2” on the main news page of its Web site and the highbrow Guardian, which shrank to a mid-size format just a shade bigger than tabloid in 2005, flags on its Web page a column (written by a former Times editor) on the legal fight over Catherine Zeta-Jones and Michael Douglas’s wedding photos.

“You can say the Times has been dumbed down from what it was up to the ‘70s, but it is of a piece of a newspaper culture which is vastly competitive and is trying to steal sales from all over the market, including the middle markets,” the director of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University, John Lloyd, said. “It can no longer function as a paper for the establishment, in part because the establishment no longer exists in a coherent form, as it used to.”

The Sunday Times remains the most successful of Britain’s quality Sunday newspapers, reaching 1.2 million readers and making enough money to subsidize the usually money-losing daily Times, whose circulation, at more than 639,000, is neck and neck with the Telegraph’s and well above those of the Guardian and Independent.

The two papers retain stables of respected foreign correspondents and often break news; they have been out in front from the beginning on the cash-for-peerages scandal that has beset the Labor government. The Times also fields one of the better business sections in London.

That is largely thanks to the current editor, Robert Thomson, a former editor for the Financial Times who joined the Times when he was passed over for the editorship of the FT. Mr. Thomson proceeded to hire away some of its best writers and beef up the Times’s business coverage.

Mr. Murdoch, many of his former editors suggested in interviews, is often misread as a compulsive purveyor of celebrity dish, right-wing zeal, or in recent years, enthusiastic support for the government of Prime Minister Tony Blair. The Sun and News of the World closely reflect Mr. Murdoch’s own politics as well as his sense of what the masses want to read. The Sun sells 3 million papers a day.

But he has just as calculatedly pursued the up-market reader, said Simon Jenkins, who edited the Times from 1990 to 1992.

“For the most part, his chief interest in newspapers is commercial. When he asked me to take over the Times, he did so because he thought it was severely threatened by the new Independent, which had just started up,” Mr. Jenkins said.