I don't understand your point
We agree there were meetings where Morrissey was discussed and targeted? We know this because Maconie was "part of a small faction..fighting his (Morrissey's) corner".
That doesn't necessarily follow. By the early 90s, post Bengali In Platforms, post Kill Uncle, and coming off the back of The National Front Disco, Morrissey was seen as a spent force by much of the very, very left-wing music press, and guilty of the famous thought crime of "flirting with right-wing imagery". He hardly helped himself though, did he, because he did do just that. He left himself open to attack, and was then astonished it happened. As with so much political through his career he proved himself to be a dilettante. Not for the last time.
What is interesting about Madstock is how Madness themselves got off scot free. Those nasty hooligans which offended that delicate flower Andrew Collins - a "man" who would make Milhouse Van Houten look like Arnold Schwarzeneggar - so deeply were not Morrissey fans, they were there to see Madness.
It is not unlikely that some in the music press still liked him and fought his corner in editorial meetings. That does not mean the others were out to destroy his career. Some quite probably were, the repulsive Steven Wells made great capital out of it from memory, because the far left are the scum of the earth, but that doesn't mean it was a concerted "official" effort. They could have damaged him far more by relegating him to the inside edge of page thirteen.
We also know that simply put, Kelly does not like Morrissey
and we know that those NME articles were hatchet jobs - because its not racist to hold a union flag. That's the end of the story. The truth is in plain sight.
Post-Thatcher, post the NF and others you could barely get through a week without some nutcase lefty claiming the Union flag and/or the St. George's Cross was a racist symbol. Billy Bragg virtually made a career out of it. It certainly wasn't the music. The 90s saw the ratcheting up of the sect of cultural Marxism which has so successfully dominated the political agenda here for so long. Within five years we had Cool Britannia and the flag waving of the Spice Girls and Oasis, but as that was under the warmonger Blair suddenly the NME lost its high moral position, and wrapped itself in "the butcher's apron" as keenly as any.