Mail Men

by Adrian Addison

  What we wear often reveals how we feel. On Monday night before her ‘We will not be defeated by friend or foe’ speech, the Prime Minister wore a voluminous velvet cloak with a huge stand-up collar. She looked just like Queen Elizabeth I, who ruled for 45 years. Maggie clearly feels she herself has only just begun. And I suspect she believes, like royalty, only death should have the power to dethrone her.20

  However, it was all over for Thatcher and her reign ended a few days later, when she was knifed by her own Cabinet. The Mail proclaimed in an editorial – probably written by the editor himself – that she was ‘Too Damn Good for the Lot of Them’.

  Betrayed and rejected by her party, Margaret Thatcher gave up her power yesterday . . . Still strong. Still sound. The great oak has been brought down. The fall of Margaret Thatcher has the full dimensions of tragedy. The woman who has given so much and done so much for Britain felled, not by the democratic will of the people, but by the desertion of her own party supporters. Bitter? Of course, we feel bitter.21

  It was a shuddering blow to Sir David; his reborn Daily Mail and Maggie Thatcher had risen together. But Thatcher’s demise was nothing compared to what the English family were facing at home, just down the road from where Maggie was packing her bags: Lady Irene, English’s beloved wife, had been stricken with Alzheimer’s disease.

  One day in the early 1990s, English’s oldest friend, Chris Rees, picked up the phone to an utterly disconsolate Sir David. ‘David was really cut up when he rang me he’d had to do what he didn’t want to do which was to have Irene committed to a nursing home because she was a danger to herself, wandering the streets and so forth. “This is the worst day of my life. I’ve just had to call the people and have her taken to a nursing home,” he told me. And he was truly distraught. They were extremely close, Irene and David. Extremely close.’22

  They were also extremely loyal, say friends, with there never having been any suggestion that Sir David had strayed; a newspaper editor can sometimes exude a raw kind of sexual power that some women find attractive. ‘David adored Irene,’ said Tony Burton. ‘I mean, who knows what really goes on but, no. No. I think he was completely faithful.’23

  ‘David was crazy about Irene,’ agreed Anthea Disney, ‘and he was very close to his kids. He was very much a family man. David loved gossip but that didn’t mean he wanted to do anything on his own behalf. I would be stunned if you told me he had an affair with anybody. Stunned. It just didn’t seem to me to be part of his DNA.’24

  The last time Tony Burton saw the stricken Irene was on a sailing trip in Chris Rees’s boat on the Solent, the strait that separates the Isle of Wight from Southampton, the city on the south coast where the Englishes had married in 1952. Rees and Burton moored the boat. ‘I remember David and Irene walking away down the dock ahead of us after we had tied up, he had his arm around her and her head was on his shoulder,’ said Burton. ‘They looked like the loneliest people in the whole world. I suspect David’s enormous success had turned to ashes in his mouth and he would have tossed it all in the water if it would save Irene.’25

  Before Sunny Harmsworth founded the Daily Mail he’d tested the journalistic theories he’d formulated in the magazine trade within the pages of the Evening News, the first newspaper the Harmsworth family had ever owned. But by the time Paul Dacre was ready to step up and become an editor himself, a century later, the Evening News had already been dead a decade, swallowed by the Evening Standard. It would be, for Dacre, a similar kind of testing ground.

  By 1991 Bunny’s grandson Vere owned the Evening Standard outright (after first co-owning it with the group that controlled the Express) and it had become ‘the voice of London’, edited by ‘a newspaperman’s newspaperman’, the founding editor of the Mail on Sunday’s You magazine,26 John Leese, who answered to the editor-in-chief of Associated Newspapers: Sir David English. But Leese fell ill with cancer and retired in March of that year (he died six months later).

  The Standard needed a new man at the helm, and when Paul Dacre was informed by Sir David English and Viscount Rothermere that he was to be appointed its editor he was, understandably, ecstatic. There was, after all, no sign that Sir David was going to leave the Daily Mail any time soon.

  It was a tremendous moment in my life. I mean I’d worked for the last twenty years with the objective of becoming an editor, I desperately wanted to become an editor. And the Standard was a wonderful paper. It was one of the most exciting moments of my life . . . I know this sounds slightly silly, but I actually went back to Arnos Grove and I went to walk round the house where I had grown up as a boy. And walked the area that I knew so well . . . those are the forces that created me.27

  It’s worth taking a step back in time at this point, to walk through the doors of that suburban Dacre home of the late 1950s and early 1960s where, on any Friday evening, a demonic little Glaswegian called John ‘J. J.’ Junor was likely to leap from Dacre senior’s briefcase and ruin the family’s weekend. J. J. was the heavy-handed, autocratic editor of the Sunday Express and Peter Dacre’s boss.

  My father would come home on a Friday night and he’d have written his article for that week with the carbon copy black in his briefcase and I’d rush for it and there were Junor’s notes scrawled on it. It’d either say absolutely brilliant or rubbish. And if it was rubbish and it didn’t go in the paper that weekend it was a rather a gloomy atmosphere in our household.28

  Junor was, by almost all accounts, a monster. He was a hard-drinking, workaholic womanizer who would often bawl his journalists out like a drill sergeant and even had buzzers fitted to the desks of his senior men so he could zap them as required; everyone else would know who’d been buzzed due to the fact that they would leap from their chair. The ‘seedy gargoyle’ also ‘propositioned the wives of almost every member of his staff’, wrote former Sunday Express hack Graham Lord, whom Junor invited to his home and on his boat even though Lord was only a junior employee; it was Lord’s wife he was interested in. J. J. would ply Lord with brandy to remove the obstacle between his urges and Lord’s wife: ‘J. J. would grope her at every opportunity and had once chased her along a corridor. The endless huge glasses of calvados had been the old goat’s attempt to knock me out so that he could ravish my wife.’29

  J. J., according to his own daughter, Penny Junor, had a ‘fundamental dislike of women’ – to J. J. there were only two types of female: sluts or virgins.30 Junor may have been a hideous human being but he seemed to be the perfect editor for the Sunday Express; his crisp and simple editorial approach articulated the fears and foibles of Middle England so well that it generated a peak circulation of somewhere around 5 million copies every Sunday. Paul Dacre has often said he believes Junor’s Sunday Express to have been one of the best newspapers there has ever been. J. J. was famous for reading every single word in his paper and running it through a simple mental filter; if he couldn’t understand what the reporter had written, then the reader most certainly wouldn’t. And J. J. himself got to vent his anachronistic views on these readers in a column of his own that romanticized a tiny little town in Fife, Scotland, called Auchtermuchty, a place where men who wore hats or had facial hair were not to be trusted and where if they drank white wine they were ‘poofters’. J. J. hated Socialists, immigrants, social workers and intellectuals and he would never knowingly allow a homosexual into the pages of his newspaper.

  ‘J. J. was a bigot who instructed his staff never to trust a man who smoked a pipe or wore a beard, hat or suede shoes,’ wrote Graham Lord. ‘He believed that Aids was a fair punishment for buggery.’31

  His Sunday Express, though, didn’t have much space for actual news, and most of the intros were ‘dropped’ – meaning there’d be layers of icing before the reader got to the actual cake in the third or fourth paragraph. Paul Dacre loved it: ‘The paper was warm, aspirational, unashamedly traditional, dedicated to decency, middle brow, beautifully written and subbed, accessible, and, above all, utterly relevant to the lives of its
readers.’32

  John Junor – alongside his father, David English and Brian Vine – shaped Paul Dacre’s understanding of what it took to create a successful newspaper.

  Back to the spring of 1991, and the euphoric freshly crowned Evening Standard editor Paul Dacre now had the opportunity to stamp his personality on a newspaper in the same way J. J. had a generation earlier. But the Evening Standard staff were not quite so excited about his arrival.

  ‘Everybody was absolutely terrified because he’d got “a reputation”,’ Anne de Courcy, a writer on the Standard at the time, told the author. ‘And the joke that went round was that somebody had sent a message to the Daily Mail to ask, “Hasn’t anybody got a good word to say about Paul Dacre?” And they got the reply: “No, but his mother is reconsidering . . .” But I liked him immediately, I immediately warmed to him. The Evening Standard was put together like a series of magazines – because the people who came to it had worked on magazines – and when Paul came I thought, “Oh, how wonderful. Working on a newspaper again.” He immediately revitalized it.’33

  The readership of the Standard Dacre inherited was mostly male, so the new editor sought to recalibrate it to appeal to women by adding lifestyle pages which soon boosted the female readership by 60 per cent. He also thought it was ‘in danger of becoming just a little too twee and its appeal was to too narrow a social band of people’,34 so he broadened its outlook. And the advantages of state-of-the-art technology meant that the new editor could tear apart up to ten pages even late into the afternoon, meaning the paper’s final edition was still pretty damn fresh and warm even as the morning papers were starting to put their pages to bed. It impressed a lot of people in ‘Fleet Street’, including the owners of other newspapers.

  ‘He was a very good editor of the Standard,’ Evening Standard senior staffer ‘Kevin’ told the author. ‘It was a good mix because he was this rather crude militaristic leader in charge of a bunch of highly intelligent, argumentative, eccentric people, who made the Standard work. And the two went together well. They needed him, and he probably needed them. To help him further his career.’35

  These were very good days for Paul Dacre and some of the Standard staff actually warmed to the man himself, preferring Dacre to his boss Sir David. ‘David English was always considered a nasty piece of work by people on the Standard,’ Standard staffer ‘Kerry’ said. ‘He created such an awful atmosphere on the Mail, most people at Associated would much prefer to work on the Standard over the Mail. Paul was a very sharp editor and a much nicer man than English I thought but, the funny thing was, he had no social skills whatsoever. He was always very awkward.’36

  Less than eighteen months after taking the helm, and in a time of recession, the paper’s vigorous and brutally hard-working editor had increased its readership by 26 per cent. Magic numbers for any newspaper owner. And the biggest beast in ‘Fleet Street’ was about to take a bite out of any dreams Sir David might have had of hanging on as Mail editor for much longer.

  The Times would soon be in need of a new editor, as the incumbent, Simon Jenkins, wanted to go back to being a full-time writer. And Kelvin MacKenzie, the editor of The Sun – a Times stablemate within Rupert Murdoch’s News International – recommended Dacre to executive chairman Andrew Knight as a good choice for the top chair at The Times after noticing the change in Dacre’s revitalized Standard. ‘The idea came to me from Kelvin,’ Knight told the author, ‘but it immediately chimed with what I – and many people – observed anyway in the Evening Standard at the time; Paul’s editing verve shouted from the paper every day.’37 Knight picked up the phone and later arranged for Dacre to come round to his house in Hampstead and meet Rupert Murdoch, a meeting at which Dacre showed his respect for the position of The Times as the ‘newspaper of record’ and the need to maintain the paper as a high-quality broadsheet ‘while stressing he could make it more aggressive in getting stories and making waves with campaigns’.

  ‘Our concern was that he did not see The Times as a downmarket tabloid, scrapping in the tabloid market. He went out of his way to demonstrate that that was not how he saw it. Editing the Standard or the Mail was one thing, Paul said, [but] editing The Times would be quite another. However, he would bring aggression to the broadsheet market which he thought was missing. I had pre-briefed both Rupert and Paul, we sat around a dining table, and the meeting was totally one of like minds . . . Rupert simply made it clear that if Paul wanted to be editor the offer was there.’38

  Indeed, the son of Lord Northcliffe’s favourite Australian was firmly of the mind that Dacre was about to join his empire. ‘I have great respect for his abilities,’ Murdoch said later; ‘he agreed to leave then and come and edit The Times and I was extremely pleased.’39 Out of courtesy, Dacre insisted on speaking to Sir David first before signing any contract and soon found the editor-in-chief in a meeting with a royal contact and reporter Ann Leslie at a hotel bar near the Mail ’s HQ. They had a drink and English insisted Dacre speak to Lord Rothermere first before joining The Times, but the proprietor had gone fishing and was uncontactable as he was in the middle of a lake – in Iceland. Sir David had to think fast on his feet: he couldn’t let Rupert Murdoch – of all people – take his top man, especially a man who was proving to be such an exceptional editor of the company’s Evening Standard. So English decided to step aside and give his job to Dacre, as he knew that would keep him in the firm and away from Murdoch. But first he had to clear it with Lord Rothermere, who had by now returned to his home in Paris. Sir David flew out to meet him and the two friends who’d saved the Mail two decades before sat down for lunch at Le Vaudeville brasserie to talk again about change, their faces reflected back and forth at each other 10,000 times in the famous old establishment’s massive mirrors.

  Dacre had kept Murdoch waiting for almost a week when Lord Rothermere finally arrived back in London to formally offer Dacre the Daily Mail editorship, and Dacre asked if he could spend an hour with his wife discussing whether to turn down The Times in favour of the Mail. Paul Dacre, like John Junor, is famous for reading every word in his paper, and maybe during his hour or so away to think about Vere’s offer he saw his future written there in the stars. In the Standard’s horoscope that day, Scorpios were experiencing ‘what may be the most powerful few days of the year for you. Do not be distracted from events that could revolutionise your life.’40 The hour came and went but Dacre hadn’t returned, so Sir David went and found him and the pair returned to Lord Rothermere’s plush sixth-floor office. Dacre agreed to turn down The Times.

  On the other side of London there were no hard feelings for Paul Dacre. ‘I cannot fault how honourably he behaved,’ Knight told the Sunday Times at the time. ‘He was straight throughout. He made it absolutely clear that he very much wanted to do the job but had tremendous loyalty to David English and Lord Rothermere. I feel sad but I don’t feel let down. Paul Dacre was very firmly of the view that he was coming because he couldn’t see David English stepping down.’41

  ‘I jested that our consolation prize was a £2 million aggregate increase in Associated’s salary bill,’ Knight added later.42

  Sir David would later spin one of his own inimitable yarns around the whole saga, about how he had selflessly stood aside for Dacre – insisting his own promotion to Lord Rothermere’s role as chairman of Associated Newspapers that resulted from the reshuffle was only an afterthought when he and Vere had sat down exhausted at the end of a very long day. That was not, as was so often the case with David English, strictly true; Dacre insisted he’d never have taken his mentor’s chair if it had put Sir David on the dole and Lord Rothermere had actually suggested English replace him as chairman many months previously. Vere was, of course, still ultimately in charge; he was the proprietor and he remained chairman of the parent company.

  English had been twenty-one years in the top chair, not quite as long as Tom Marlowe but still, a good innings. The paper announced the changes to its readers in July 1992, quoti
ng Sir David as saying:

  I am tremendously honoured . . . To start as a cub reporter and end up as chairman of a great national newspaper group is an achievement beyond anything I believed possible. But it can happen in Fleet Street.43

  Meanwhile, as part of the reshuffle, Stewart Steven had been forced to leave the Mail on Sunday to take over from Dacre at the Standard – while Sir David’s other most-favoured Mailman, Jonathan Holborow, took over the Mail on Sunday. Steven burst into tears when the staff ‘banged him out’ – an old custom of the Fleet Street printers, where they’d bang metal plates when a colleague retired – when he put his final edition of the Mail on Sunday to bed on the Saturday night. Steven only agreed to take over the Standard after Lord Rothermere reassured him it was his personal wish and not just the machinations of Sir David English, a man Steven had known for over three decades and whose feline instincts he understood only too well. Insiders believed that Steven may have been a little too gifted an editor for his own good.

  ‘There is no love lost now between David English and Stewart Steven,’ one source told the Sunday Times after the reshuffle. ‘When the Mail on Sunday overtook the Mail in sales, English became very jealous of Steven’s success.’44

  As the editors began to settle into their new chairs and a massive new office was being fashioned for Sir David English, the new chairman of Associated Newspapers, some speculated that Dacre may have learned the most important lesson of all from his Mail master and played a superb game to get his hands on the Mail. ‘I don’t think many people have played along Rupert Murdoch and Andrew Knight,’ a source told the Sunday Times at the time. ‘Dacre wanted a particular job and he has now got it.’45

  Long-serving Mailman ‘Terry’ believes English and Rothermere only really had one thing in mind. ‘The most important thing to them was that Murdoch didn’t get one over on them,’ he told the author. ‘It was a panic measure. I don’t think the idea was ever that he’d get the Mail. I think the plan was for Dacre to edit the Standard.’46