Mail Men

by Adrian Addison

  By the middle of the 1990s Dacre’s Daily Mail circulation was on the rise due to his fresh, features-led approach. The numbers were also boosted by an influx of readers from the mid-market Today newspaper, which was killed off by Rupert Murdoch at the end of 1995. At the end of 1993 he launched a magazine of TV listings, soft gardening and cookery features to be slipped into the Saturday paper. The front-page blurb the day before launch promoted it as ‘WEEKEND the magazine that makes your weekend last all week’.18 Saturdays began to get extra-special attention, with strong double-page spreads being commissioned especially or held back to make the Saturday paper really shine.

  Dacre’s paper was winning awards too. The successes were trumpeted in the paper in February 1996 as ‘Awards hat-trick for the brilliant Mail’; the paper won two separate National Newspaper of the Year titles and was acclaimed as ‘Medium of the Year’ by the advertising industry. It was just ahead of the paper’s 100th birthday and the gongs marked ‘one of the most dynamic periods in the paper’s 100-year history. Circulation last month soared through the two million barrier, notching up the Mail ’s highest January sales for nearly 30 years.’19

  The choice of ‘nearly thirty years’ as the benchmark was, surely, significant; in an article that actually quoted Dacre himself, it was a date from prior to English’s reign, which had begun twenty-five years before. It was a message from the editor, perhaps, that the apprentice had now truly become the master. And, again, another newspaper proprietor liked what he saw in those numbers. In a ‘cloak and dagger meeting one evening’, the owner of the Daily Telegraph, Conrad Black, offered Dacre the editor’s chair on Britain’s leading broadsheet. And Black didn’t much mind Dacre turning him down and using his offer ‘to better his own lot’ on the Mail, but found his ‘self-righteous public claims that he had dismissed our overture’ tiresome. Dacre had actually, wrote Black, ‘enthusiastically accepted the job in principle’.20 The events were not entirely dissimilar to how Murdoch had thought he had secured Dacre’s services for The Times.

  By 1997, there was no doubt who was in command of the Daily Mail, and after almost five years at the wheel, Dacre was to show exactly how strong an editor he had become by writing a headline that has come to define his career. It was a landmark in the British media.

  The Daily Mail is not a court of law nor even a police force, yet it was about to accuse five men – in bold capitals across its front page – of being murderers.

  Stephen Lawrence, the victim, was a strong and healthy boy – as well he should’ve been; he was only eighteen. And as he stood at a south London bus stop with a friend in April 1993, he could reflect upon his hopes and dreams as his whole life stood before him. On occasion, he helped his plasterer dad out, doing a bit of work on houses here and there, but he was aiming higher and he wanted to actually design those houses himself by becoming an architect. He was bright, aspirational and self-reliant. Stephen Lawrence was a Daily Mail kind of boy.

  It was a testament to how fit he was, said the pathologist, that he managed to run over 100 metres from that bus stop as pint after pint of blood pumped out of his body from a pair of deep knife wounds that had both severed arteries; it was testimony to the long and healthy life he might have expected, had he not been murdered by a gang of white thugs – for being black.

  Five white youths were duly arrested not long after Stephen’s murder but the investigation stalled and they were released, with the Lawrence family accusing the police of racism and corruption. It took time and a twist of fate before Dacre actually lifted the murder case into a fully fledged campaign by his paper for justice for Stephen Lawrence.

  Shortly after Stephen’s death Hal Austin, at the time the paper’s only black reporter, had initially struggled to get the news desk interested in the story; it at first had seemed to be just another south London murder, perhaps gang-related. There had, in fact, been at least two racially motivated murders and several stabbings21 in the area in the months before Stephen’s death that received far less coverage than the Lawrence murder was about to receive. The Lawrence murder did not cause a massive reaction within the Daily Mail newsroom until a connection was made by Stephen’s dad, Neville Lawrence, a link that made it personal for Paul Dacre in the same way the Moonies had become personal for English when it involved a neighbour’s son a generation before.

  Mr Lawrence had done some plastering work on Dacre’s Islington home a while before Stephen was killed, but he only realized his client was the Daily Mail editor after he and his wife Doreen met Nelson Mandela in May 1993, a month after Stephen’s death. As Mr Lawrence told the BBC: ‘There had been a riot the weekend before and the Daily Mail had this story about the riots and in the middle of that story there was stuff about Stephen and the fact that we had met Mandela.’ And Mr Lawrence wasn’t too pleased when reporters from the Daily Mail arrived at his door to try to interview him. ‘The first thing I said to them was: “Why did your editor put my family in the middle of all that violence, we are not about violence.”’

  Still furious the next day, he picked up the phone – after realizing from reporter Hal Austin that the polite gentleman whose house he’d helped fix up was the editor of the paper that had so annoyed him.

  The following morning I rang the Daily Mail ’s office to speak to Paul Dacre. He said to me: ‘Neville, I didn’t know it was you.’ I said: ‘But Mr Dacre, you’ve met my kids. I used to take my children to places where I work.’ He had met Stephen and [his other son] Stuart.22

  Stephen’s family did see three of the men in court for murder (the charges against the other two were dropped) after bringing a private prosecution, but they were acquitted in April 1996 through lack of evidence. Many decent police officers and journalists feared that they had now, for sure, got away with murder, as the ‘double jeopardy’ rules at the time meant they could not be tried again.

  The next legal hurdle left for the accused men to face was surely a formality. All violent deaths are subject to an inquest by a coroner to establish how the person died, and the inquest into Stephen’s death was held before a jury at a coroner’s court in February 1997. It was a proceeding through which the men smirked and refused to answer questions while protestors gathered outside, hoping to see some kind of justice served. And, in a way, it was – as the jury went way beyond their instructions and, after only half an hour’s deliberation, ruled that Stephen was unlawfully killed ‘in a completely unprovoked racist attack by five white youths’: effectively accusing the men of murder. The coroner, though, couldn’t do much about it as this was only an inquest. He was not a judge presiding over a murder trial at the Old Bailey – his role was only to record a cause of death. True justice seemed blind to these boys.

  Immediately after this inquest, however, their luck changed.

  A man wielding a different kind of raw power sat in his office as big as a classroom, a fat pencil in his hand instead of a knife, and watched a report on the evening news on the TV of the jury’s rapid decision and how the men had refused to answer any questions. Paul Dacre was furious, along with thousands of other viewers, thousands of Daily Mail readers. Dacre knew the details of the case well, of course, and he knew Neville Lawrence personally. And he had also had lunch with a senior police officer earlier in the week of the inquest and the police chief ‘very eloquently told me it was his personal opinion they were as guilty as sin’.23 Fury at the sheer injustice of the case had been brewing in the Mail ’s conferences, and Dacre’s mind, for some time.

  Dacre finally snapped. Personal connection or not, few people are prepared to act as judge and jury in a murder case, yet the outraged editor of the Daily Mail was prepared to do exactly that. The criminal justice system had singularly failed over many years to deal with these men and it was time for his Daily Mail to act on Stephen’s behalf. He pulled a newspaper make-up pad across his desk and began to scratch out a headline with the kind of marker pencil used in newspaper offices for over 100 years: ‘MURDERERS,’ he wrote.
‘The Mail accuses these men of killing. If we are wrong, let them sue us.’24

  I showed it to the senior sub-editors. There was a kind of nervous laughter but then contempt of court is drilled into every newspaper executive’s thinking. And this was contempt of a cosmic order. They obviously thought I was mad. Someone muttered libel and I remember snapping – ‘The bastards haven’t got any reputation to lose.’

  There is a central tenet of the legal process, drummed into all journalists, that restricts what the media can report on active cases (i.e. when a suspect has been arrested and charged) – in case the information published could impact upon a future trial; a potential juror could have already convicted the accused person before he even shows up for jury duty because the accused had already been found guilty in the press. Many court cases have collapsed because information was published which meant the accused could not expect to receive a fair trial. For a newspaper, or anyone, in fact, to break this rule is contempt of court – journalists have been jailed for contempt in the past. But the Lawrence case, at this point, was technically not ‘active’ – nobody was currently charged and facing a trial.

  ‘I remember Paul saying to the lawyer, can we do this, can we do this?’ one long-term Mailman told the author, ‘and the lawyer said, “Yes, yes, you can.” And Paul didn’t seek Sir David’s or Lord Rothermere’s approval, as far as I’m aware they only found out about it the same as every other reader did – when they read the paper.’25

  Love or loathe the Daily Mail, support or deplore Dacre’s decision – it took supreme confidence to publish that headline that night. Dacre could, he feared, have been jailed himself, with the five men he’d accused of murder laughing at him from the other side of the iron bars. And the father of David Norris, one of the men he accused, was the son of notorious south London gangster and drug baron Clifford Norris; tabloid editors bleed too. Yet if they actually did sue, the Mail would get the chance to challenge in court their actions and whereabouts on the night Stephen bled to death and effectively put them on trial for murder. The editor had a lot to think about before he sent the page off to the printers; if this story backfired, then tomorrow the career to which he had dedicated his entire life would be cat litter, just like that day’s newspaper.

  The paper was due off at 9.45 p.m., and by now it was 9.30 p.m. – the loneliest time of the day for any editor when only one man can make a decision. Of course, I was desperately aware of the enormousness of what was being proposed. It’s not up to newspapers to accuse people of murder or act as judge and jury . . . After about five minutes on my own, I walked back on to the floor. The ‘Murderers’ page was made up with an alternative front page next to it. The mood was electric. ‘Let’s go,’ I said. ‘You can always come and visit me in jail . . .’ I went home and rang my wife to tell her what I’d done and how dangerous the men concerned were. As always, she totally backed me. That night I took a sleeping pill. Despite it, I woke up at four o’clock in the morning – the time when all the decisions of the previous day suddenly assume terrifying proportions. I was drenched in sweat and convinced my career was over.26

  The next day, the reaction to the Mail ’s headline was split: the Daily Telegraph effectively called for Dacre to be jailed and carried a cartoon of the Mail editor flicking ink upon the Old Bailey’s scales of justice, and a former senior judge, Lord Donaldson, was horrified by the paper’s actions and accused Dacre of contempt of court. Another judge, however, Lord Denning, congratulated the Mail for ‘a marvellous piece of journalism’, while Stephen Lawrence’s mother, Doreen, said the front page was ‘wonderful’. The Lawrence family’s local MP also backed the paper, as did, a few days later, the Prime Minister, John Major.

  The five young men, of course, never did sue. Just as in Sunny Harmsworth’s day, whereas other newspapers covered and commented upon the Lawrence case, the Mail raged. And the Mail ’s sense of outrage had been harnessed to supreme effect, said former Mailman Tim Miles, who covered many gruesome murders himself in his days as the paper’s crime reporter. ‘This was a black boy,’ Miles told the author, ‘and it stands there in black and white that Paul Dacre is no Nazi like some are so desperate for him, and his paper, to be. That was an extraordinary front page. You would never – never – have seen that on page one of the Guardian. Never.’27

  Dacre didn’t sleep too well until a week later, when a fax arrived at the office confirming he was not going to be charged with contempt of court.

  The story has, to many, come to define his editorship, and it was the only front page that hung in a frame for years in his office.

  Stephen’s murder had also led to a public inquiry in 1998 that concluded that the Metropolitan Police was ‘institutionally racist’. A change in the law of double jeopardy – in which an accused person could not be tried twice for the same crime – followed in 2003, applicable in murder cases for which new and compelling evidence emerged.

  Then, almost fifteen years after that headline in January 2012, two of the men were finally found guilty of Stephen Lawrence’s murder after a cold case review by forensics officers uncovered DNA evidence that put them firmly at the scene of the crime. It was a sweet day, a day to savour for Paul Dacre. The Mail editor has never given a TV interview in his twenty-five years in the job, but Dacre did finally appear on camera – in a video filmed for his own website. In this scripted monologue, Dacre sounded like the proud head teacher of a minor public school, a string of spittle on his lip that perhaps his school prefects off-camera were too afraid to alert him to.

  I always tell people who ask that the secret to editing is to be both bold and cautious. It’s knowing when to be which that’s the problem. That day in February 1997 I think we were bold in a way that the Mail can always be proud of. 28

  Here sat perched on the edge of a desk one of the most loathed, invisible men in Britain and – though he did seem something of a zealot with lips nipped tight for battle – he was all too human.

  Only a month after the ‘MURDERERS’ headline, the Daily Mail was gearing up for the biggest political story of the year when John Major called the 1997 general election. Dacre now faced probably the most difficult political decision of any Daily Mail editor since its birth: could the paper turn its back on the Conservatives after 101 years of support?

  Tony Blair’s rise to power had caused consternation in Kensington High Street, with many Mailmen and Femails personally backing Blair. The Daily Mail, though, was born a Tory. Even so, on the other side of London, the once equally arch Thatcherite Sun did switch sides and backed Blair. The political tide had clearly turned in favour of ‘New’ Labour, yet Paul Dacre, unlike Rupert Murdoch, simply seemed incapable of turning with it; Murdoch had realized Blair couldn’t lose, it was a campaign he knew his Sun would win. Dacre remained unconvinced.

  For the man who paid Dacre’s wages, though, it was a very different story; Lord Rothermere had personally warmed to the Labour leader, seeing Blair as ‘a very capable, very charming, very astute man, full of enthusiasm and drive . . . He unquestionably comes from the British middle classes, as does his wife.’29

  Tony Blair was, nevertheless, a conundrum for Rothermere and his editor-in-chief, Sir David English; a few years after Rothermere and English had reinvented the Mail as a tabloid, the proprietor had made the paper’s politics very clear: it would always support the Conservatives.30 But Blair was a far different type of Labour leader from what the paper’s hierarchy had been used to dealing with, certainly since Thatcher had taken power.

  The Labour chief even came to dinner at Room One, Northcliffe’s big room for big ideas. Room One had been turned into a dining room where top politicians would come to dine and remark upon the quality of the cuisine. Harold Wilson, Labour leader from 1963 to 1976, was ‘a frequent and popular visitor’31 who was even capable of sharing a joke or two with these Tories. But the Labour Party leader of the 1980s, Neil Kinnock, always declined Sir David’s polite invitations. Wilson, of course, won three g
eneral elections. Kinnock won none. When the Daily Mail left Fleet Street, Vere had Room One dismantled panel by panel and reassembled at the Mail ’s new offices in Kensington, but Kinnock still declined these invites and discouraged other senior Labour Party members from fraternizing with the enemy.

  ‘In the end, only one member of the Shadow Cabinet had the guts to defy the Whip and enter our lair,’ wrote Sir David in the Spectator in 1995.

  That man was Tony Blair. It was a pretty refreshing start to a relationship with a Labour politician. But we all liked it and him. And so Tony became a regular visitor, at that time our only link to the paranoid and neurotic Labour Party of Neil Kinnock. It wasn’t until Blair took over that lunches with a Labour leader became fun once again. Much more fun, incidentally, than when members of the current [John Major] Government came gloomily to dine. In contrast Blair – whether he was alone or with his minders – radiated frankness and honesty.32

  Blair spoke the Mail ’s language, and he had no desire to tear down all that Thatcher had built. For instance, English was a governor of his old grammar school in Bournemouth and liked Blair’s attitude to education; the Labour man believed in choice and had no plans for a one-size-fits-all school system. Blair also said the days of the print unions would not return under a New Labour government. At one lunch, Dacre challenged Blair on the social and welfare costs of single mothers and the potential damage the breakdown of the traditional family was causing to society as a whole. To Dacre’s surprise, wrote English in the Spectator, Blair said he shared his concerns, adding that the situation was betraying a generation of children.33