The plane landed in Saigon with the Daily Mail editor on board and Hunt was ‘surprised’ when English spoke ‘sharply’ to MacPherson because he hadn’t quite found the 150 babies he’d ‘ordered’. The BBC correspondent Brian Barron was there too, and described English as ‘a shabby General Custer galloping over the horizon to save kids in need’. Another reporter present, New Statesman correspondent Richard West, thought the whole affair ‘a disgusting sham’. West never believed that the Vietcong would seek vengeance on innocent children and described English as ‘the star of the airport ceremony’ in a combat uniform inscribed with the words Bao Chi, meaning ‘journalist’. English had even learned to pronounce ‘Bao Chi’ correctly, said West, unlike other hacks who would often unwittingly label themselves ‘dog shit’ in Vietnamese if they simply said the two words as written.
‘The Mail ’s Mercy Airlift’ was front-page news for the Mail, of course, and the paper devoted six more pages to it inside. Evergreen reporter Vincent Mulchrone, a father of three, wrote the main story with MacPherson from inside an orphanage: ‘We ourselves – and anybody who called – were invited to help with the bathing, powdering and feeding . . . Not all the children had the olive-coloured skin of the Vietnamese. Several were obviously sons of negro GIs, who would grow far taller than the average Vietnamese, and would always be marked men should the entire nation fall to the Communists.’21 Some of the numbers written on the backs of the babies to identify them for the blanket visa had rubbed off in the sweltering heat and nobody knew who they were.
Brian Freemantle, David English, Vincent Mulchrone and the other Mailmen on the plane helped six doctors and nurses feed the children and changed nappies on the long flight to Heathrow. ‘It would have been so easy to have wanted to adopt these children,’ said Freemantle, ‘or to have got deeply involved because they were so frail.’22 Most were suffering from malnutrition, and thirty-four were ill enough to be kept in hospital. Three died.
A hostile press reception awaited the Mail ‘mercy mission’ crew when they landed at Heathrow. ‘We came in for a lot of stick at a press conference when we got back, saying it was just a stunt,’ said Freemantle. ‘Well, yeah, it was a stunt. But it was a stunt that worked and it got 100 kids out of Vietnam who were in real danger. It was also partly just “Fleet Street”; other papers attacked us because they’d not thought of it first.’23
Freemantle quit the Daily Mail shortly after the orphan airlift scoop to focus full-time on writing books. On his last day, there was a huge leaving party that was kicked off by gossip writer Nigel Dempster jumping up on to the foreign desk wearing a mask and cape, tights and a T-shirt with the name ‘Captain Schizoid’ sprayed across it. ‘Because I used to commute up and down from Southampton,’ said Freemantle, ‘David turned his office into a railway carriage and everyone dressed up, Gordon McKenzie was dressed up as a station master. David loved giving parties. And he gave me a wonderful one.’24
Some hacks were also dressed up as Vietcong soldiers as they all fell out of the main entrance to Northcliffe House down by the River Thames, and David English, with a nod to a Saigon street scene, stood between the sticks of a rickshaw and proceeded to pull Freemantle up Carmelite Street and on to El Vino, the famous wine bar on Fleet Street itself that had been a haunt for journalists from well before the Daily Mail was even born.
As the hacks celebrated at El Vino, just across the road a bronze bust of Lord Northcliffe stared benevolently down Fleet Street from outside the church of St Dunstan-in-the-West. Northcliffe had shared the same taste for mischief and foreign news as David English, but his bust, unveiled in 1930, had spent four grim decades forming a green patina and watching helplessly as the first two Rothermeres ruined his paper. By 1975 the Mail ’s circulation, after a rocky relaunch, had stabilized at around 1.7 million – almost the same number it sold when Northcliffe died – while the Express was losing readers rapidly. Now, at last, Sunny Harmsworth – the boy who liked to make the news instead of wait for it – would surely have been pleased; his Daily Mail was back on song.
10
Tall Stories
David English must have felt humiliated.
The pioneering, campaigning and boldly successful father of the ‘compact’ Daily Mail had been well on his way to becoming a living legend – even his diarist was beating the best political writers in Fleet Street to scoops; in the spring of 1976 Nigel Dempster predicted that Prime Minister Harold Wilson, who had Alzheimer’s, was planning to step down. Yet there the revitalized paper’s editor was, a year after Wilson had indeed quit, searching for the Mail ’s other parent, Vere Harmsworth. So he could resign. The wheels were being ripped off English’s career by the British car industry – in the days when Britain actually had one, albeit an unwieldy and clumsily amalgamated heavy load carried by the state.
Only a handful of people knew anything about the Daily Mail ’s ‘scoop of the century’ until one evening in the spring of 1977 English came out of his office and ordered that the front page of the next day’s paper be scrapped to make way for a special story. He handed the text to the ‘splash sub’, Nick Morrison. ‘There you are,’ English told him, ‘I bet you’ve never had to sub a front page like that before?’
‘Yes I have,’ Morrison thought. ‘And the same man’s byline was on the story.’1 English had poached Morrison, like so many others, from the Daily Express, where, a few years before, he had prepared the Express’s front page to receive another ‘scoop of the century’ – it had been the tale about Martin Bormann. Both stories began with the three words ‘By Stewart Steven’. Steven, of course, had also been poached by English and was by now the third most senior man on the Daily Mail.
The paper had a letter from Lord Ryder, the chairman of the National Enterprise Board, to the chief executive of British Leyland, Alex Park, which suggested that Ryder condoned or even masterminded millions of pounds in ‘slush money’ – for the paying of bribes – to obtain overseas orders. The source had seemed strong to English, but was soon arrested for fraud, as the letter was a forgery and a sloppy one at that. The struggling Labour Government wrung the scandal for all it was worth and Steven had little choice but to resign. Yet, it later turned out, the substance of the story – about bribes and corruption – was broadly true (though there was no proof Lord Ryder himself had ever been involved). Angry MPs demanded English’s head roll too, and his position seemed untenable, so he wrote his letter of resignation and went to see Vere.
‘It never entered my mind to let David English go,’ Vere told Harmsworth biographer S. J. Taylor,
not for a solitary second. There was a great furore in the House of Commons demanding that David English should be dismissed. But they could demand whatever they liked. It wouldn’t get anywhere with me . . . It was a good news story. And if British Leyland hadn’t been bribing the Arabs or whoever, well, then, they bloody well should have been, like everybody else has to do. You can’t do business in those parts of the world if you don’t.2
Vere may have declined his resignation, but English did feel the need to write a long letter of apology to his readers the day before his forty-seventh birthday in 1977, which he published in full in the paper:
. . . the Daily Mail is a newspaper which reflects much of what is fine and decent in our country. It is not only a good newspaper, it is a great newspaper. It has courage and humanity. It has understanding and compassion. Yes, it fights hard and it attacks relentlessly when it believes it should. And sometimes it is human and gets things wrong. And occasionally it is misled and gets things very wrong. But it is not dishonest. It is not dishonourable. It does not deliberately set out to smear people. It does not concoct lies, or twist facts, or invent incidents . . .3
It was a blow to the paper’s soaring confidence after six years of unmitigated success. The paper had got something horribly wrong – and rather amateurishly and publicly wrong at that – and was now facing a potentially massive bill for libel.
Yet Vere stu
ck with his editor just like Northcliffe had done with Thomas Marlowe all those years ago. The first two Lord Rothermeres had viewed their editors merely as hired hands, to be changed on a whim: they went through fourteen between them. Vere would only ever have two, and his second editor (as of early 2017) is still there.
Technically, during this period of the Mail ’s recovery, Vere still answered to his father, Lord Rothermere, even though Esmond had washed his hands of the whole sorry mess that the Harmsworth newspaper business had become when he handed over to his son in 1971. Esmond remained chairman of the Daily Mail and General Trust (DMGT) parent company, while Vere was chairman of Associated Newspapers – that is, the company that owned the Daily Mail was itself owned by DMGT.
But Esmond’s involvement in the paper’s affairs was minimal. Indeed, while spending three months on holiday in South Africa after walking away, he didn’t even know the Daily Sketch had been closed4 and 1,733 of his employees had been made redundant,5 including his host, the paper’s South Africa correspondent, Peter Younghusband. Esmond remained chairman of DMGT but Vere was in charge of the newspapers as chairman of Associated Newspapers.
Esmond was also weakened by Alzheimer’s disease in his final years and died, aged eighty, at his home in London shortly after returning from a trip to the south of France with his wife and young son, Esmond junior, in the summer of 1978. The Rothermere title passed to Vere, though the hereditary principle did not sit well with the third viscount – he had even considered rejecting the title, just as Lord Beaverbrook’s son had done. ‘You could call it vanity, I suppose,’ Vere told a friend. ‘But it means changing my name to somebody else’s, and I think I’ve made a name for myself.’6
Change was coming too in Westminster. Margaret Thatcher had made such a name for herself since taking over as Tory leader in early 1975, with the Mail ’s backing, that it looked as though she could actually secure victory for the Conservative Party and be Britain’s first female Prime Minister. The seismic political shift to the right for which the reborn Daily Mail had been aligning itself for its entire existence was about to come to pass.
By the time the general election was called in 1979, David English and Margaret Thatcher were firm friends and political soulmates. Two weeks before polling day, which coincidentally was to be held on the mini-Mail ’s eighth birthday, David English sat down to interview his friend. Thatcher raised the spectre of a Socialist state reminiscent of Orwell’s 1984 rising slowly, Labour taking freedom away ‘by stealth until you get to the position which no nation would tolerate if they saw it coming but suddenly it is there’. She alleged that everybody would become council house tenants and every worker a government employee; ordinary people would become dependent upon the state for everything.
At the beginning of the peak period of the campaign, Margaret Thatcher is looking good and feeling great. She poured out the drinks – a gin and tonic for me and a scotch and water for herself – took a sip and settled back. She looked remarkably untired for someone who starts work at seven and finishes after midnight. I said, ‘Well, I seem to be able to get by on five hours’ sleep a night.’ She replied, ‘Well that’s very lucky. But there is a trick to it; you have got to get one good night – eight or nine hours’ solid sleep – once a week. That puts all the energy back into the bank. That’s my secret.’
Being a mother and handling crises in the home was great training for a Prime Minister, she said. Yet Labour had painted her as an ‘Ice Maiden’, not a mother of two children, wrote English:
a woman they project as cold, indifferent, insensitive and out of touch with ordinary people. The personal attacks on her are going to get rougher in the days ahead. ‘It’s a political thing, trying to pin those labels on me,’ she said. And then she grinned, a good old-fashioned grin, enjoying a joke. ‘You know they can never forgive me for having such an ordinary background. They’re so angry about that.’
Maggie Thatcher was the nice girl you knew from the corner shop who stood for the exact same things as David English’s Daily Mail: she’d cut taxes, put money back in people’s pockets and reduce waste. Bunny Harmsworth would have adored her. It was an act of faith, she said:
that if we give people the chance with their own money. If we put the ball at their feet, a great number will take it, start running and score some goals. This is the way to break out . . . I now believe we can fight for victory. And make our country great again. I’m fighting to win . . . and win we shall.7
‘It’s history – a woman takes over No 10. Prime Minister Maggie!’8 was the headline on 4 May 1979 – the eighty-third birthday of Sunny’s Daily Mail: David English may have started out as a Socialist but the Mail, like Maggie, was born a Tory.
It’s awfully difficult to proclaim oneself a ‘Messiah’ in the information age.
Pesky journalists tend to demand proof, a photograph perhaps, of this well-connected chap actually walking on water; they would seek interviews with witnesses to his miracles and medical evidence to prove that the sick had been, for a fact, cured by his hands. The red-tops would almost certainly uncover an ex-girlfriend or two or maybe a criminal record along the way, and they’d find out exactly how much cash his new church was generating and query why an ascetic needed a big house in the country with a swimming pool sunk in the lawn and a Bentley on the drive.
David English’s Daily Mail could never be accused of lacking ambition, and the paper’s next fight was with a man some thought was truly a messenger of God, a man called Sun Myung Moon who had once declared: ‘He [God] is living in me and I am the incarnation of Himself. The whole world is in my hand.’
Reverend Moon, or ‘humanity’s saviour’ as he liked to be known, was born to a peasant family in what is now North Korea, and claimed to have had a vision at the age of sixteen in which Jesus asked him to set up God’s kingdom on earth. The crucifixion was actually – Jesus told Moon – an unfortunate error, and had he lived, Jesus would have married the perfect wife and created a ‘pure’ family. Moon’s mission, of course, was to complete this task himself with the second Mrs Moon. His Unification Church became known in the 1970s for its mass weddings, in which thousands of identically dressed strangers married one another in huge ceremonies in front of their ‘true parents’, Mr and Mrs Moon. Moon’s missionaries headed out across the world and were accused of ‘love-bombing’ – flattering and brainwashing – impressionable youngsters into joining the Moonies cult. Members were also encouraged to break all contact with their friends and family; unluckily for Moon, one new church member was the nineteen-year-old son of one of David English’s neighbours, and English took it personally.
Moon’s followers may well have believed their leader was ‘the perfect human being’, carrying a message direct from God, but the low-church Methodist editor of the Daily Mail wasn’t convinced. To David English, Moon simply attacked the most important institution on God’s earth: the family. In May 1978 the Mail accused the Moonies of being ‘The Church That Breaks Up Families’. English penned the piece himself, recounting the tale of his neighbour’s son being picked up by ‘love bombers’ outside a railway station in San Francisco while on a hitchhiking trip across the USA before taking up his place at Oxford University:
Almost immediately they began the thought control process, which ended inevitably with him coming under their complete control. In the weeks that followed, I saw first hand the seeds of disintegration take root and tear that family apart. Michael, the son, stopped writing to his family after one missive telling them he had found a new kind of life.
Michael’s parents travelled back and forth to New York and found their son working as a street seller for the Moonies and then working up to ten hours a day as a labourer on one of the church’s building projects. ‘I did not bring up my son to work to the point of exhaustion to make one of the richest men in the world even richer,’ his father told the Mail editor. ‘And as for his happiness? How can I tell whether he is happy or not? I can only tell you that
he’s a zombie, dehumanised it seems to me . . . incapable of giving or receiving any affection. Capable only of repeating endless slogans.’
English’s neighbour wasn’t the only family to tell a similar story – many others had written to the paper. The Mail launched its campaign, and the British branch of the Moonies sued for libel.
Early in the proceedings, the paper could have settled the case for a few thousand pounds and an apology and not risked losing an estimated million pounds in a libel action. And the Moonies could afford a long-drawn-out court battle; the church’s global income was tens of millions of dollars a year. It owned properties across the US and businesses around the world that included various newspapers, a ski resort, a golf course, hotels, a football team and even a ballet company.
Vere, now the third Lord Rothermere, and his editor decided to fight because settling the case and apologizing, wrote English, ‘would have been a cheap and easy way out. But the real cost would have been our professional pride and the betrayal of our readers. Campaigning newspapers do have to live dangerously.’
The case went to the High Court . . . and the Moonies lost. The court even went a step further and recommended the church’s tax-free status be investigated, as it was a political organization, not a charity.
‘The Daily Mail is a family newspaper, which means it cares passionately for those values of family life that bring so much to ordinary people in this country,’ English wrote. ‘Yesterday, the Daily Mail won a great victory for those values.’9
Although it was a case fought in the English High Court against a movement originally founded in South Korea, the Moonies story was essentially an American tale. Moon had moved to the States in 1972 and lived in an eighteen-acre compound in Irvington, up the Hudson River from New York City in a house that had a ballroom and a bowling alley, two dining rooms (one of which had a pond and a waterfall) and a kitchen with six pizza ovens. His church owned several properties and companies in the US, including the New Yorker Hotel in mid-town Manhattan. Moon was also later sentenced to eighteen months in prison in the US – for tax evasion and conspiracy to obstruct justice.10
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