13
The Pencil and the Knife
Sir David’s Daily Mail was on the slide by the time Dacre squeezed his lanky frame into the captain’s chair and reached for the controls; it was selling around a quarter of a million fewer copies at the end of the 1980s than at the start, yet, still, the formula was just about right. The Mail needed recalibrating for the 1990s but it would have been madness to make major changes.
As the decade went on, the Tories would be on the slide too, just as Labour would re-emerge as a genuine political force capable of actually winning a general election under its young leader Tony Blair. Thatcher, of course, had already gone by the time Dacre was appointed editor of the Mail and, three months before Dacre took over, Sir David had helped shepherd John Major in for the Tory Party’s fourth successive term.
Change was coming, but Paul Dacre’s political instincts seemed – like those of so many middle-aged, middle-class men – to be nudging him out ever further to the right the older he got. It was life in the United States in the 1970s, the same as David English in the 1960s, that had first turned Dacre from a mild student Socialist to a true Tory believer thereafter. ‘If you don’t have a left-wing period when you go to university, you should be shot,’ Dacre told the British Journalism Review.
I don’t see how anybody can go to America, work there for six years and not be enthralled by the energy of the free market. America taught me the power of the free market, as opposed to the State, to improve the lives of the vast majority of ordinary people. I left a Britain in 1976 that was ossified by an us-and-them, gaffers-versus-workers mentality in which a tribal working class was kept in place by subservience to the Labour authorities who owned their council homes, to the unions and the nationalised industries. Mrs Thatcher, in what was a terribly painful process, broke that destructive axis, empowered the individual and restored aspiration and self-reliance in this country. And, I suppose, if there are two words that sum up the Mail ’s philosophy, they’re ‘aspiration’ and ‘self-reliance’.1
By the time he took over the leadership of the aspirational and self-reliant editorial staff of the Daily Mail, Dacre was a firm Thatcherite, more so even than Sir David and certainly more so than Mail proprietor Lord Rothermere. Yet Dacre was entirely unconvinced by the Tories under John Major and he thought the paper’s role in the 1980s as a mouthpiece for Conservative Central Office had been way too cosy. ‘The Tories had been great in power but they were exhausted,’ Dacre said. ‘They were decadent. I don’t want to sound arrogant but I did have very little time for John Major. I thought he was a very weak man. And the Mail, it came as quite a shock to the Tories, became very critical of the Tory Party. Very, very critical.’2
An old town in the Netherlands called Maastricht was the epicentre of a rupture in the Tory Party that also forced clear blue water between the Mail ’s Eurosceptic new editor Paul Dacre and its Europhile editor-in-chief Sir David. In the early 1990s, a collective of Euro-technocrats had gathered in Maastricht to truly start the process of trying to weld Europe together with a document called the ‘Maastricht Treaty’; the treaty created the European Union out of the old European Communities and would eventually lead to the euro.
While still editor, pro-Europe Sir David’s Mail had mostly been supportive of these ever-closer ties to Britain’s Continental partners, but Dacre wasn’t keen. Many Tories didn’t – and still don’t – agree with the erosion of British sovereignty and feared that the UK would potentially become just a small state within a United States of Europe. The tectonic plates under the Tory heartland were rubbing up hard against each other and seismic activity was set to continue, like those under the Pacific, in perpetuity (even post-Brexit, there are Tories who still think Britain should be part of Europe – David Cameron’s replacement as Prime Minister, Theresa May, voted to remain).
Dacre had only been editor of the Daily Mail for two months when Britain was crushed between the cogs of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) – a device to keep each member state’s currency valued within set limits linked, of course, to the German mark as a prelude to joining a single currency. The Prime Minister and his Chancellor, Norman Lamont, spent the ‘Black Wednesday’ of 16 September 1992 trying to prop up sterling by buying billions of British pounds with foreign currency reserves on the markets. Interest rates leapt to 15 per cent and the Government had little choice in the end but to pull sterling out of the ERM and let the pound find its own level.
The aftershocks nearly toppled Paul Dacre out of the Mail editor’s chair a year later when his judgement came into serious question after he backed a Tory Party rebellion against the Prime Minister. In an unguarded moment – typical of John Major, caught on camera – the Prime Minister had branded a handful of his Cabinet ministers as ‘the bastards’ ahead of a confidence vote over the tediously dull yet combustible implications of the ratification of the Maastricht Treaty. The ringleader was a vain, ambitious young politician called Michael Portillo, a strange man of half-Spanish, half-Scottish extraction who seemed to be wearing someone else’s face and it didn’t quite fit.
‘The Dacre call was that Major would be dumped and the front page of the Mail that day [suggested that]. It wasn’t “he’s gone” because we didn’t know that but it implied that Major was finished,’ senior Mailman ‘Duncan’ told the author. ‘And of course Major won the vote. It was a bad, bad call and I felt that day that Dacre’s job was on the line; he was very, very dejected and downcast. My guess is that English and Rothermere called him upstairs that morning and warned him that the Mail couldn’t get things so wrong.
‘He’d fucked up, badly. His news judgement was just plain wrong. It was never what was likely to happen. It was what he wanted to happen. He desperately wanted Major to be defeated and he allowed that desire to cloud his actual news judgement whereas English was much too clever to let that happen. Whenever English launched a campaign, he’d only do the campaign once he’d been absolutely, categorically, told it was definitely going to happen by his friend Mrs Thatcher. So, the paper would come out with this massive campaign and sure enough, four days later, it would be announced that, whatever it may be, a tax cut or whatever – was happening. And then it would be “How the Daily Mail Won the Battle”. It was a great insight into how to do campaigns actually; you must only do campaigns when you’ve already won them because newspapers can’t be made to look like they didn’t make a difference.’3
Tensions were emerging between Mail father and Mail son, and it began to seem to some Mailmen and Femails that maybe the machine Sir David had built entirely to fit himself was a little too blunt and brutal in the clumsier hands of the younger, less experienced and far more uptight new editor.
‘Unlike at the Standard where Dacre had thrived, at the Mail you had “the Drone Army” who were just too obedient and didn’t have enough personality to create real fun, or real sparks,’ added Mailman ‘Terry’. ‘What they needed was a David English, mercurial and unpredictable and brilliant, and awful – all at the same time. And they got – they’ve still got – Paul Dacre. A very, very different kind of man.’4
The changeover from English to Dacre had all happened too quickly for some Mail people of the day, and many had thought, though Dacre was nominally editor, English would actually still be in charge as editor-in-chief. But English stepped back and did allow his new editor a free hand because, as he explained to the Independent at the time, ‘I helped build up the culture of editor power; I didn’t want to destroy it.’5
Some Mailmen thought the still-supreme Mail being simply had far more important things on his mind as Irene descended into dementia, so Sir David let go and settled into his big new office upstairs and busied himself with strategic projects within the company such as Teletext – news and information on a TV screen at the touch of a button – and its small, disparate television interests (few spotted the internet as the existential threat to newspapers it was to become; Britain’s first digital newspaper, the El
ectronic Telegraph, didn’t even launch until the end of 1994).
While Sir David was upstairs thinking strategic thoughts, downstairs his Mailmen were pining for him. ‘Dacre was just so incredibly different to David English,’ sighed Mailman ‘Duncan’. ‘David loved the world and revelled in delving into all sorts of worlds. He loved politics, he loved skiing. He loved all sorts of things. I think David English was just a much happier guy. He had much more fun. English saw life as a great big party that he just wanted to be at; wherever the fun was, he wanted to be there right in the middle of it – preferably organizing it. I felt Dacre just saw life – the world – as an awful, threatening place where he wanted to be in his bunker. Firing salvos out, you know – blowing up his enemies. That bunker mentality. English was always laughing and always full of mischief and he was, you know, very engaging. If truly a bastard, on occasion.’6
Yet Dacre, say some who were there, was actually a cautious editor at first precisely because he was working under his boss’s nose; it took about a year or so before he really began to get a firm grip on the editorial controls and as the months passed, his strength and his confidence increased.
‘You began to detect the underlying view that if English had done something, it was a bit crap,’ Mailman ‘Terry’ told the author. ‘It was no longer a good excuse to say, “Well, David English always used to do it this way.” It would be “I’m not David English, I’m not doing it that way.” And I think his relationship with English started off very much as the devoted son and then ended up very much the un-devoted son. It was all very predictable really. The proud, prickly Dacre didn’t want to be seen as the lesser editor to English. At the Mail there was always this “cult of the editor”. It’s a very culty place; there’s this feeling that being an editor is a mysterious thing only for a genius and everyone said English was a genius, and Dacre wanted to be the bigger genius. A bigger, better editor. A more successful editor.’7
‘I suspect towards the end,’ Dacre himself admitted, ‘when I was getting stronger and he was getting older, there were tensions – there always are between men at that level.’8
Some of those close to Sir David began to see these very tensions for themselves as, behind the scenes, English started to voice quiet dissatisfaction with the tone of Dacre’s paper, or at least its editorial vision. A couple of years after the handover, Sir David made one of his frequent trips to America and met up with the Mail ’s New York bureau chief, George Gordon, the man who had replaced Dacre and finally solved English’s American problem. English had his doubts about the Mail ’s new editor, telling Gordon: ‘I didn’t think I could do more to take the circulation higher, but maybe Dacre can. I don’t much like what he has done to the paper, but he is getting results.’
‘He asked me what I thought,’ Gordon told the author, ‘and I said I didn’t like it either. The paper was fanatical about celebrity trash and rife with hysterical right-wing columnists. In New York, one felt the Daily Mail was publishing “the Orpington man’s” [a 1960s term for the lower middle classes] views on how the US should be run. Dacre once said in morning conference, “Don’t ask George Gordon, he’ll only give the American point of view.”’9 George Gordon was ushered into retirement and replaced in New York with a Dacre man not long afterwards.
The paper, a year after Dacre took charge, also published an extraordinary headline for an editor who took great pride in reading every word in his paper – ‘Abortion hope after “gay genes” findings’. Scientists in America, wrote reporter Jason Lewis, said they had discovered definite evidence of a genetic link to homosexuality: ‘isolation of the gene means it could soon be possible to predict whether a baby will be gay and give the mother the option of an abortion’.10
It was enough to incite a small reaction in Middle England, with a couple of readers writing in to the Letters page, at a headline implying that people were waiting for a cure to stamp out homosexuality. ‘I take tremendous offence to such careless interpretation of facts,’ wrote Andy Seale. ‘As a happy young gay man, from a loving family, it is appalling to think that an opinion-forming national newspaper should be allowed to assume people would want to find a cure for homosexuality as a matter of course. Headlines like this feed ignorance, fear and hatred to a population . . . gay people are not aliens.’ Another reader added: ‘I abhor the implication that parents would choose to have their unborn child aborted just because the foetus carried a gene which predisposed it to be gay. How can the Daily Mail stand by such a homophobic and insensitive headline?’11
Out on the editorial floor, Dacre was very much proving to be ‘insensitive’ to some of his staff as he prowled his domain. The word ‘cunt’ remained his favourite expletive, to be fired at anyone who displeased him. Yet ‘cunt’ is such a bullet of a word; to be called a ‘cunt’ in anger to one’s face generally elicits a proportionate response, unless, of course, the person calling one a ‘cunt’ is one’s boss – the man who decides on one’s career prospects and the salary that pays off one’s mortgage. The new editor of the Daily Mail ’s rants would come to be dubbed ‘the Vagina Monologues’ by his staff – after the stage play of the same name – because nobody else could get another word in when Dacre went off on one.
‘There was a glass box where the editor in charge of features used to sit, about the size of a billiard table,’ said former Mailman ‘Terry’. ‘And if you were lucky, you’d get to see the windows vibrate when Dacre was in there with some poor unfortunate person that was getting a really bad row. The glass would just shake a little bit. You couldn’t really hear but you could see the red face and everything, so we used to monitor that. It only happened about once a month and was always quite exciting, like a big thunderstorm or something, a geological event – a weather event – that we’d look forward to.’12
Mailmen and Femails who had never suffered under Dacre when he ran the news-desk were getting used to this new creature who had arrived to take total control of their newspaper. Some, such as features hack Jane Kelly, thought the man she’d known as the gauche yet pleasant enough chap who ran the features department (features was always calmer territory than news) had turned into a monster. ‘As soon as he got made Mail editor he changed so much,’ she told the author. ‘I’ve never known anyone change so much actually. I’d heard he’d been a terrible tyrant when he was on the news desk but I hadn’t seen that myself and now he was just a tyrant to everybody. All the time.’13
The back bench of senior Mailmen felt the worst of the blunt force of Dacre’s tongue.
‘Dacre was doing the traditional thing towards the end of the day where he’s looking at proofs and bollocking everyone for the headline not being good enough,’ ‘Duncan’ told the author. ‘And he called someone a “cunt” and one of the few women on the subs desk looked up and so he said, “No. Not you, you cunt. Him!” You know, he’d get it so wrong sometimes. But that was kind of the charm of Dacre.’14
Another writer of the day found people once favoured by English were having a tough time proving themselves to the new boss.
‘I didn’t like Paul Dacre,’ ‘Roy’ told the author, ‘and Paul Dacre didn’t like me. I think it was because I’d been an English appointment, I was an English man not a Dacre man. And he was such a strange bastard, I used to watch him just before the first edition went to bed and he was like a fucking ape – screaming and swearing, shouting at the subs and the back bench . . . he would scratch his back so hard, he actually bled. The paper was always late off the stone because he’d commissioned far too many things for the number of pages and he couldn’t make up his mind which story was the one he wanted. The other pieces would just be chucked in the bin, all that effort and expense for nothing. A good editor? A strong editor? Or an editor who didn’t know what the fuck he wanted until the last second?
‘I was never afraid of him, I thought he was rather absurd and a lot of other people did too, especially the more senior hands from the English days. Some of the younger guys
who came through were in awe of the editor though and they began to become a version of him themselves in a way, some of them. Fine. But I found them absurd too and rather pathetic.’15
Mail executive ‘Terry’ would sidle up to the editor with page proofs for the next morning’s paper printed off on long rolls, with each story folded neatly on top of the next.
‘I remember the fury with which he would edit stuff on paper,’ he told the author. ‘You went along with your stories and he would go “No! No! NO!” and he would start scrubbing it out, and the bits underneath would then get the marks from the one on top, going through the top bit of paper to the next bit of paper. Often the pencil would go clean through the paper and start ripping it to pieces. And there’d be quite a lot of stabbing with the pencil. It was all very physical the whole thing. It was incredibly hard sometimes to piece together exactly what he actually wanted you to do when you walked away holding these shreds of paper!’16
Dacre later answered the frequent accusations of bullying himself in an interview for the British Journalism Review, when the interviewer, Bill Hagerty – himself a tough and highly respected national newspaper editor – asked him if he was ‘the ogre so often depicted by his critics’:
‘An ogre!’ he cries, followed by a hoot of laughter that rattles the windows. Well, perhaps tyrant is a better word, I suggest? ‘Tyranny? I’m privileged to be surrounded by a hugely dedicated and talented bunch of professional journalists. The day I tyrannise them into silence is the day this paper will die. Look, newspapers are all about energy. I like to feel I lead from the front and I work as hard as anybody, if not harder. There’s not a job on the paper I can’t do and I work with them [his staff] very closely. I think if you were to ask them, honestly, they’d say he’s a big-mouthed, loud-mouthed tyrant, but he does his fair share and he gets the paper off at night and we all go home pretty proud of it. Yes, there’s a lot of shouting and a lot of swear words, but it’s never personal.17
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