Mail Men

by Adrian Addison

  For a while, it looked as though Sue Douglas could even one day compete with Dacre for the editor’s job on the Daily Mail, if Lord Rothermere decided to appoint a Femail to run a newspaper aimed broadly at women. Meanwhile, Dacre was striving to improve his vocabulary, as one former colleague explained to the Independent; he would drop words such as ‘schadenfreude’ and ‘hubris’ into conversations and stories without, apparently, fully understanding their meaning: ‘I used to think he was reading the dictionary from A to Z because every day you would get a new word and a consecutive new letter from the alphabet.’72

  Dacre also had a weakness for showy French and Latin phrases such as ‘bien pensant’, ‘sine qua non’ and ‘au contraire’ – he would later even invent his own words for his enemies such as ‘quangocrats’, the ‘liberalocracy’ and ‘the Subsidariat’.

  ‘Dacre wanted to be “the intellectual”,’ Douglas told the author. ‘And I think where he and I ever got on was that I could play that card because I actually was an intellectual, and I ended up marrying one.’73 Douglas’s partner at the time was the writer and historian – and presenter of TV documentaries – Niall Ferguson, a man she’d met when she’d been sent up to Oxford University by David English on a ‘talent-spotting’ expedition. Mr and Mrs Dacre would attend dinner parties with brainy types at Douglas’s basement flat in Islington.

  ‘I’d got a first in biochemistry, which Dacre was slightly in awe of,’ she added, ‘and I knew loads of clever people. I think Dacre was actually always in awe of the clever, north London intelligentsia, and because I had that card he was quite respectful of that but he didn’t really like it at the same time, so we got on all right.’74

  Intellectual or not, the talk in the pub at the end of the 1980s wasn’t so much about Dacre’s brain power but more about how he seemed to actually be morphing into David English in conference; some even began to call him ‘Little David’.

  ‘Paul Dacre was wise,’ said Douglas, ‘he kept his head under the parapet and he was a good David English disciple; he followed – he followed and he followed and he followed. He modelled himself on what David was – even down to the jokes, the voice inflection, the way he sat in his chair. Everything. And it was completely sycophantic and revolting. It was like a Hydra, you know, with him growing out the side of David English. But it worked, David liked that. And Dacre knuckled down, he worked damn hard.’75

  ‘Dacre definitely did do the David mannerisms, absolutely. Yeah, he did,’ chuckled ‘Terry’, another senior Mail executive and daily conference attendee. ‘A very high squeaky laugh and all of that. English found that very flattering, I’m sure.’76

  Yet Paul Dacre and David English were vastly different characters: English was exuberant, creative and devious by nature, whereas Dacre was naturally restrained, shy and quiet. It remains a mystery to some fellow Mailmen as to why English pulled him aside to be his protégé, while others believe he never really did; all that hard work simply put Dacre in the right place when the right time came along.

  ‘I don’t think David ever really encouraged an heir apparent,’ said Sue Douglas. ‘David was so completely “the King”, I think there was kind of a weird bit of him that didn’t want anybody to be as good as him. Paul Dacre never did anything that made me particularly go “wow!” He was always very mainstream safe. Dacre would always steer straight. And I think David liked that – because then he could be the stardust. And one big difference I’ve noticed over the years between Dacre and English – then and to this day – is that Dacre never writes anything [under his own byline]. English was a good writer and would byline himself on the front page on the really big, important story; he’d actually write the seismic splash himself. But I can’t remember reading a single thing Paul Dacre has ever written.’77

  Great writer or not, heir apparent or not, as the 1980s turned into the 1990s it didn’t really matter because it looked like fifty-nine-year-old David English would be sitting in the Daily Mail editor’s chair for quite some time.

  12

  Scorpio Rising

  David English was by far the strongest and most secure editor in ‘Fleet Street’ as he approached the anniversary of his second decade in charge of the Daily Mail, largely because he had cornered the female market in a way Sunny Harmsworth had never done.

  Over half the Daily Mail ’s readership were women and, of course, the country was still being led by a female Daily Mail loyalist; Margaret Thatcher was English’s firm friend and neighbour. The supreme Mail being lived just down the road from Downing Street, in a house said to have been bought for him by Rothermere, and would often pop in for chats, and English was there in the early hours of the morning for three of the most special parties for any Tory: her general election victories. In Daily Mail headlines, Margaret Thatcher was usually referred to as Maggie but never Peggy nor Madge; short forms have to fit the personality or they just don’t stick. Likewise, even as a young man nobody ever seemed to refer to David English as ‘Dave’ and certainly never ‘Sir Dave’, which is what he became in 1982 as a personal reward for his newspaper’s help in returning the Tories to power. ‘She looks after you,’ English said of Thatcher. ‘She’ll make you a bloody sandwich if you want one.’1

  Thatcher would also help her friend get a passport for a South African athletics prodigy if he wanted one, especially if the girl could run awfully fast in bare feet for Britain. Sports columnist Ian Wooldridge had written a piece about seventeen-year-old Zola Budd, who was running world record times at middle distance in her native South Africa but could not compete in the 1984 Olympics because her home country was banned due to apartheid. As Wooldridge recalled later:

  The article contained one piece of information I lived to regret revealing: she had a British grandfather . . . ‘Brilliant,’ cried David English, our editor of the time. ‘Because of the British family connection she shall run for us.’ By ‘us’ he meant the Daily Mail first and Britain second. He was a dynamic boss with a strict sense of priorities.2

  The bemused teenager who ran without shoes would become another of English’s celebrated ‘stunts’ – making the news instead of waiting for it like the Vietnam orphans airlift a decade before. The Mail editor flew the Budd family over and settled them in a house near Guildford with some minders – his reporters. He called the Home Secretary, Leon Brittan, and her citizenship was granted in ten days. Other newspapers, especially the Daily Express, were aghast at the speed with which the runner had attained a passport that could take months or even years in similar cases. One of Miss Budd’s minders was Mailman Stewart Payne, who recalled the first time she ran on British soil: ‘We were planted in the press conference to ask innocent, mindless questions to stop other much more pertinent questions being asked. So, we were told to say things like “How did you find the track, Zola?” and “How are you adapting to the weather conditions, Zola?” While others were desperately trying to ask her “How come you’re here in the first place, Zola?”’3

  The youngster suffered terrible homesickness and her father soon squandered the money the Mail were paying for the story, but she did run for Britain in the 3,000 metres final barefoot at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles where she tangled legs with America’s Mary Decker, who fell to the ground. Zola came seventh to boos from the American crowd (and apparently made sure she did not come within the medals, as she knew she’d be harangued on the podium).

  It was the Mail ’s real political clout, through English’s friendship with Thatcher, that put Zola Budd on that track. Yet Thatcher’s number-one media man was never actually Sir David, and he wasn’t even English. It was an Australian who would never willingly kneel before the Queen: Rupert Murdoch. Thatcher’s union-bashing policies of the 1980s had helped Murdoch free all of Fleet Street from the yoke of the kingpins in the press hall when he sacked 6,000 striking print workers one day in 1986, and moved all his newspapers overnight to a state-of-the-art facility that simply didn’t require them. The Mail joined the exo
dus that followed and set up shop at the end of 1989 in an old department store in posh Kensington, west London, with Harrods owner Mohamed Al-Fayed as the landlord. The location was mainly David English’s choice – the editor-in-chief didn’t want to head east to the docks like Murdoch’s News International and both the Mirror and Telegraph groups. As Lord Rothermere’s relative Vyvyan Harmsworth – who helped coordinate the move as head of corporate affairs at the DMGT parent company – told the author: ‘David English liked the area and was very much against going to Docklands because he felt it would disconnect the journalists – especially those on the Evening Standard (a city paper) – from London. And I think that was the right choice in the end.’4

  All the lovely new technology meant things could be done so much more efficiently, but it had little impact on the philosophy that underpinned the Daily Mail, as the top Femail of the day explained. ‘I wouldn’t say the paper was consciously nasty,’ Sue Douglas told the author, ‘it wasn’t. But the paper did play to the prejudices of its readers – which is a very, very different thing; a calculated thing. It’s to sell newspapers to these people. And English was utterly brilliant. He had this feral instinct for the prejudices of the British middle class. So we would reflect that in the paper. Some of us didn’t like that and railed against it but the paper was successful because it held a mirror up to these readers so they could go: “See? Look! I’m right!” It was sexist. Racist. Every other -ist in the book. But not – probably not – in a really nasty way. It reflected society, the Mail ’s part of society anyway. And if you look at it coldly, you have to say that if it’s nasty – then so is that element of society. If it didn’t reflect its readers back at them, it would not be profitable. It really is that simple.’5

  Yet this reflection was often given a good polish. For instance, a Daily Mail advert of the day featured a female barrister wearing a legal wig, with a handsome young chap trailing behind her carrying her papers. The message being that she was the boss. But the truth inside the Mail ’s new office was somewhat different. Sir David would suggest a feature on how housewives ‘always’ lose a single sock in the washing machine,6 to which most of his male execs would nod in excited agreement and chip in with ideas of how to handle the piece.

  ‘The paper did absolutely bugger all to empower women on any level,’ said Douglas. ‘And yet the packaging was “we’re listening to you”. Utter bollocks. There was even a man editing Femail at the time! The truth was that we seemed to be listening and pandering to a female audience – powerful women read the Daily Mail and they read the Femail bit, and all this guff – but it simply wasn’t true. I think women read the Mail as a newspaper and maybe look at Femail, but some of the “sexier” bits of Femail – though they might be, and I use the word loosely, “interesting” to women – by and large it was just an excuse to do things for men. A headline as a question like “What do I do if my husband is unfaithful?” – that’s what the men in the office wanted to read because it was men producing those stories. It was a complete joke.’7

  The office culture, too, seemed still to be stuck in the early 1970s. Sir David’s old pal Tony Burton observed the dynamic between English and his senior staff from the safe position of a close friend. He attended conference one day and watched Sir David harangue his features editor.

  ‘He had the news conference first and that was fine, and then they all left and the features editor Sue Douglas came in. There was just the three of us and I sat there and listened while she put up ideas and one after another he brutally destroyed them – and I don’t know if he was showing off to me or he didn’t like her or what but I felt like walking out it was so fucking horrible and embarrassing. And I should have done. I really didn’t like what was going on there and it was partly English. He was too tough. He would screw people big time.’8

  Sir David’s daily conferences were sometimes, somewhat disparagingly, called the conference of ‘the nodding dogs’,9 because of the way his top Mailmen all fought to agree with their master most forcefully and laugh the loudest at his jokes. But these ‘nodding dogs’ were getting more chances these days to sit in the big chair and actually drive the machine and make their mark on the paper. By the time he turned sixty in May 1990, English was taking much longer holidays and he would also involve himself in the wider Associated Newspapers business that should have been of little concern to the top editorial man. He loved, for instance, to personally organize the annual Daily Mail ski show, which was a promotions affair and not something that should have overly concerned the editor-in-chief. But skiing was his passion.

  There were at least four top Mailmen who’d prowl the brand-new utilitarian carpet outside the editor’s office, desperate to take command of the paper in his absence; they all seemed to dress the same and spoke alike. ‘I used to think of the group of editors below English as dangerous denizens of an aquarium created and supervised by him,’ Tony Burton told the author, ‘partly for his amusement, as he watched them circling for a kill.’10

  The vibe on the editorial floor would sizzle when the supreme Mail being Sir David stepped out of his office and mingled among his senior men on the back bench, a big cat with very sharp claws. The picture editor would even soothe him with sweets he kept in his top drawer, seemingly for that very purpose. ‘English would almost flirt with the picture desk,’ said Stewart Payne. ‘It was all a bit pathetic really.’11

  There tended to be two seats beside Sir David’s throne on the back bench that would be filled by his two most trusted men that day, and one afternoon English whisked one chair away for a laugh and awaited the arrival of deputy editor Jonathan Holborow and the Mail ’s number-three man of affairs, Paul Dacre. ‘English hid behind a column,’ insider ‘Barry’ told the author, ‘to see how Holborow and Dacre would react to find only one chair.’12 Several of English’s top men were in on the joke, as English tittered and giggled like a schoolboy, but, unfortunately for the spectators, it was all handled in a rather gentlemanly way; neither Mailman sat down.

  Mailman ‘Terry’ was another executive who observed the editorial jungle like a naturalist in a sensible tie instead of a sunhat. ‘It was all hugely entertaining for us on the sidelines watching all this silly positioning of the senior guys,’ he told the author. ‘Paul Dacre wasn’t David English’s only favoured child; he had other favourites who were very powerful within the Daily Mail. And definitely, until the last minute, any one of them could have been editor. It’s too clean and convenient to say that Dacre was the chosen one. Maybe he was, but he wasn’t the only chosen one. That just wasn’t David English’s style.’13

  It did begin to become clear, though, to some, that if anyone could edit the paper as well as Sir David, it was Paul Dacre. Dacre had shown from his days as news editor that he understood the philosophy, politics and culture of the Daily Mail.

  ‘The main memory I have of Paul Dacre,’ said Gill Swain, ‘is him sitting at his desk in the new Mail building in Derry Street and leaning right back with his hands on his head pushing his hair back saying – in a sort of posh, mumbling growl – “oorrr, ooor, must do this, we must do this”. And everybody around him on the desk would be sitting and concentrating and reading stuff, getting the nitty gritty done. Dacre would always be sitting back having the strategic thoughts, which is why he became the editor, I guess.’14

  Unlike Sir David, Dacre was most certainly not comfortable in the company of women, and some Femails would use his discomfort to their advantage in a way they could never do with English. ‘I used to sit on [Dacre’s] desk in a very short skirt and sit ever closer, invading his private space,’ said one writer. ‘He used to lean back at such a dangerous angle I thought he was going to fall off his chair. He could cope with screaming, violence and bullying, but he just couldn’t cope with a little coquettish girlie behaviour. A lot of women used to do that on the paper.’15

  There was nothing coy about Sir David’s behaviour when it came to wooing Maggie Thatcher at election time, tho
ugh, when he effectively handed his paper over to the pumping out of Conservative propaganda. One Mailman explained to the Guardian how, during Thatcher’s 1987 campaign, it had felt as if they were all working in Tory HQ: ‘One day, after Labour had scored a particularly good point against the Government, one of English’s deputies stood up in the newsroom and had shouted: “We must hit back! We must hit back!”’16

  Thatcher had won in 1979, 1983 and 1987, and she had her sights firmly fixed upon the new decade as she sat down with Sir David for one of their frequent fireside chats published in the Mail under English’s byline.

  As a young mother Margaret Thatcher lived through the ruinous social revolution of the Sixties. Today she dedicates herself to removing the last vestiges of that decade’s influence from our national life. The Nineties, she says, can bring fresh and better values to Britain.17

  Maybe fresh and better values were on their way, but Margaret Thatcher and Sir David English would not be the people delivering them. It was Europe, which, then as now, was the fault line running under the Conservative Party HQ, that would shake the Tory tree in 1990 and see Thatcher fall to the ground. Sir David didn’t share Maggie’s ingrained and instinctive dislike of Britain’s Continental partners; he was committed to the European cause, as he told the Independent on Sunday: ‘I fell out with her politically because I am a Europhile . . . We enjoyed a good argument and agreed to disagree.’18

  Other Tories disagreed with Maggie too, including her longest-serving Cabinet minister, Geoffrey Howe, who was exasperated by Thatcher’s intemperate anti-European rants and resigned: ‘Sir Geoffrey the Assassin’, the Mail called him on its front page in November 1990.19 And in the same edition of the paper, Lynda Lee-Potter also had a dig at the falling PM for starting to look decidedly regal.