Mail Men

by Adrian Addison

  That brought us to welfare as a major issue. The debate was intense but it was Blair who cut through everything with the remark: ‘Well, we all agree the welfare state has got to be radically reformed. Who’s going to do it? You may find I am the only one who has the will to do it.’ A thoughtful silence followed. Of course, when the freshness and the charm of our exchanges with the inventor of new Labour recedes after his departure, we are not left entirely without scepticism . . . equally, we are not without scepticism towards the present Government.34

  It now seemed that the unthinkable could actually happen and the Mail might back Labour in the general election, with Lord Rothermere even telling the BBC he had ‘a suspicion’35 some of his papers would back Blair. Vere’s personal politics were never quite so clear as the Mail ’s. He was no politico and he never craved direct influence over events in the way Northcliffe and his grandfather had; this Harmsworth seemed perfectly content for his paper to follow its readers, as interpreted by its editor. ‘Now, when I appoint an editor, I only appoint people who I believe to be of great talent,’ he told the BBC. ‘And people of great talent have their own opinions. And they like working for me because I let them have their own opinions.’ His editors would, of course, seek the proprietor’s view. ‘. . . if you are the person who decides on their salaries they will naturally want to ask your opinion, I mean – even my dog does that.’36

  Dacre’s Daily Mail never did back Blair, but the paper’s backing of John Major was a limp affair. The Mail ’s editor, like the broken cogs that were grinding around inside the Tory Party machine, was far too busy obsessing over Europe, as illustrated in a dull, ill-defined and unwinnable campaign called ‘the Battle for Britain’.37 Then, the day before the election, its front page was wrapped in the Union Jack, across which was scrawled:

  There is a terrible danger that the British people, drugged by the seductive mantra ‘It’s time for a change’, are stumbling, eyes glazed, into an election that could undo 1,000 years of our nation’s history.38

  Tabloids tend not to publish long lists of names – because they’re boring. But, inside, the Mail printed a list of Tory candidates who backed the campaign and would rule out joining the single currency and ceding more power to Brussels. But once the pound had fallen out of the ERM, arguing for Britain to ditch the pound for the euro was pretty much a non-starter for both parties anyway. And Dacre’s leader page was beginning to feel as heavy as just about anything Bunny Harmsworth ever composed:

  It was the one issue that brought this drear election to life. Two weeks ago the Daily Mail published a front-page editorial, headlined The Battle for Britain, which started with the words: ‘There is a deafening silence at the heart of this election and its name is Europe’ . . . Our article argued that this election could be the last opportunity for the British people to decide on whether they wished to remain an independent sovereign nation . . .39 [Etc.]

  English’s paper had never sounded this dull; Sir David’s words were usually bright and naturally free-flowing, the words far less fussed and agonized over – just like those of Sunny Harmsworth. Some staff had begun to, quietly, call Dacre ‘the Grim Tweaker’,40 due to his fondness for angrily, endlessly, fiddling with every word on every page. Mail readers were urged to stick with Major partly because Blair had never served in government, which in itself was absurd; he was only twenty-five when Labour was last in power and didn’t become an MP until 1983. On polling day, 1 May 1997, the Tories, and maybe the Mail ’s editor, were truly clutching at straws.

  Tony Blair leads New Labour into today’s General Election buoyed by a record-breaking lead in the polls. The Tories were praying last night that another record statistic – the army of an estimated four million ‘don’t know’ voters – could still sink his chances and provide the biggest political upset this century.41

  Most Mailmen and Femails, even the truest and bluest Tories sitting there in the open-plan office, knew Tony Blair was heading to Downing Street. Some even slipped out to vote Labour; Lynda Lee-Potter certainly voted for Blair,42 and maybe even Sir David English – the boy brought up in Bournemouth and encouraged towards a career in newspapers by his staunchly Socialist grandfather – put an X in the box that would usher in the Blair years.

  Election day was a bad day at the office for Paul Dacre. As the results began to come in, and even Baroness Thatcher’s once safe Finchley seat fell to Labour, Dacre is said to have shouted across the newsroom: ‘What the fuck is going on? These are fucking Daily Mail readers!’43 It was the Tory Party’s worst result since 1832, and Blair, said the Mail, was ‘Sweeping to power on a tidal wave’.44 Tony Blair was the youngest Prime Minister in almost two centuries, a few days shy of his forty-fourth birthday. Paul Dacre, forty-eight, is said to have picked up his red Cabinet minister style briefcase and gone off on holiday.45

  Some Mailmen thought Dacre had truly blown it after his proprietor had firmly and publicly backed Blair, and Vere’s enthusiasm for the new PM only increased. Viscount Rothermere – unlike grandfather Bunny – rarely wrote articles for his newspapers, yet a couple of weeks after Blair was swept into Downing Street he picked up his pen in favour of the new Prime Minister – not for his Daily Mail but for his Evening Standard.

  Max Hastings, the Standard ’s editor, had been free – the same as Paul Dacre – to do as he pleased, and he backed the winner. Vere even announced in the Standard that he was about to shuffle over from the cross benches in the House of Lords – those Lords unaligned with the main political parties – to sit with the Labour lot. Though Rothermere rarely went to Westminster, as it was a little too far from his Paris home and, anyway, he thought hereditary peers such as himself were dinosaurs that should be made extinct, it was a symbolic gesture.

  The Tories, he wrote, were ‘like a magnificent salmon, that, overcoming all obstacles, spawns the next generation and drifts spent and ruined back to the sea’.46 And Labour had caught ‘the developing popular mood’, exactly like popular newspapers are supposed to do. Blair ‘understands absolutely the temper of the times and the spirit of the age’.47 He offered Blair’s administration his full support. ‘Tony to me is like a breath of fresh air, a new spirit,’ he later told the Observer, ‘he’s a modern man who understands the need for social caring and who understands also the need for prosperous business.’48

  To some on the Mail editorial floor, Vere’s words felt like their ship had hit a mine, and many feared – and plenty of others hoped – Dacre was doomed. But Dacre’s position was pretty much blast-proof, having presided over a circulation increase of around 300,000 – almost 20 per cent – in the five years since he took over from English.

  ‘I am quite clearly in favour of a common market but I am not in favour of a federal Europe. Nor is the Daily Mail,’ Vere told the Financial Times three days before the election, yet added that perhaps his editor did go too far. ‘Sometimes I think Paul would like to tow England out into the middle of the Atlantic. I am not sure that is what I want to do.’49

  The Daily Mail is a business, and it’s in the business of selling newspapers. And the post-election Mail may have seemed to be steaming furiously around in circles in the middle of a big blue ocean politically, but other newspaper owners would surely have given Dacre command of a newspaper had Lord Rothermere pushed his skipper overboard. After the 1997 election, Rothermere praised Dacre on BBC Radio, saying he was ‘probably the most brilliant editor in Fleet Street’ . . . and he was entitled to express the anti-European views his proprietor didn’t share . . . but, he added ominously, ‘if they start to affect circulation, that will be different’.50

  14

  Two Funerals and a Promotion

  It had been a busy, defining year, for Paul Dacre with his outrageous ‘Murderers’ headline and the beginning of the Blair years in power. By the summer of 1997 he had truly established himself as the most formidable editor in Fleet Street, but the Daily Mail had yet to face probably the biggest story of the decade at the end
of that August . . . and 1997 was to turn out to be Sir David English and Vere Harmsworth’s last full year alive.

  Just as with the J. F. K. cliché, most people seemed to be able to recall where they were when they heard the news that Princess Diana had been killed in a car crash; Daily Mail columnist Lynda Lee-Potter, for instance, was shaken awake in the early hours of the morning when a BBC producer rang her home, but they weren’t seeking a comment – they were actually trying to find her radio presenter daughter Charlie to ask her to present a programme of special coverage. She drove into the office listening to her daughter host the show on her car radio. The Daily Mail building is just down the road from the princess’s Kensington Palace home, and Lee-Potter arrived as men and women headed up to Kensington Palace from the Tube station carrying bouquets of flowers.

  ‘She spoke for everyone’s need for hugs and contact,’ Lee-Potter eulogized. ‘She forged passionate feelings in us all. I have both praised and criticized her. Last week I wrote harsh things. Now that it’s too late I am full of regret and shame and guilt. But I thought the rest of her life lay ahead and there would be time to redress the balance when the time was right. Now I will never have another chance.’1

  Indeed. Britain’s most vitriolic housewife (and all the tabloid press) had in recent weeks been hounding ‘the people’s princess’, as Britain’s youthful new Prime Minister Tony Blair would christen her in a speech after her death, over her relationship with Dodi Fayed – the man who would be killed alongside her in a Paris underpass. Lee-Potter had been one of the few to be broadly supportive, at first, of Princess Diana’s affair with her new playboy lover in the summer of 1997,2 and then, just four days before the crash that killed them both, she wrote: ‘Princes need a modest mother.’

  Teenagers want their mother to be modest, ordinary and scandal free. They can’t bear any hint of her having a sexual life. The sight of a paunchy playboy groping a scantily-dressed Diana must appal and humiliate Prince William. Unfortunately she appears determined to reveal to the world that she and Dodi are lovers and can’t keep their hands off each other. I suggest they show a little self-control when they are on public view on the deck of the luxurious Fayed yacht.3

  That was fairly mild compared to some of what the Daily Mail ’s most important voice had written about the princess in the years before her death; some of her words were downright nasty. For instance, in the winter of 1995 she wrote: ‘Praise – that’s all Diana really wants . . . Princess Diana has an addictive nature and is clearly now addicted to the old, the poor, the dying and publicity.’4 And only a month before the princess’s death she warned: ‘Don’t be taken in by Diana . . . Diana is a fine actress. She can act being hurt, vulnerable or in despair. She can act being utterly natural and unspoilt. She can bewitch old and young, male and female. She can play poor little me to perfection. Unfortunately, she acts so much she’s lost sight of the truth.’5

  The princess was known to be utterly obsessed by her own press and read every word Lee-Potter wrote about her, indeed she once even phoned Paul Dacre when there was an international debate about whether or not Princess Diana had cellulite. ‘I’ve just seen your Ms Lee-Potter in Marks & Spencer,’ the Princess told the Mail editor. ‘I bet she’s got cellulite!’6

  Lee-Potter had worried in the past in print about the future of Prince Charles and Princess Diana’s marriage long before they split, writing that ‘the corrosive spotlight continually on their marriage must at times be monstrous and at the moment, it seems to me, is on the verge of being wicked’.7 The Daily Mail spotlight, of course, radiated no heat.

  Yet the reputation of the Press as a whole was at an all-time low after the death of ‘the people’s princess’. To many it was the Press who killed her, hounded as she was in those last hours by paparazzi snappers in hot pursuit. It was the tabloid newspapers and celebrity magazines who paid the bounties to these lawless freelance photographers; they created the market and would regularly outbid each other for these pictures, generating ever higher fees.

  Upstairs at Northcliffe House, Sir David English – as chairman of the newspaper industry’s Code of Practice Committee – tried to limit the damage, moving quickly to draft a new Code to try and suppress the market in photographs. And Viscount Rothermere’s ‘own sense of outrage’8 led him to lay down the editorial law in a way he’d never done before: no paparazzi photographs could be bought by his newspapers without his personal consent (which he was most unlikely to give). Sir David had actually been widely praised a couple of years earlier for measures that had allowed thirteen-year-old Prince William the right to ‘walk, study and play’ when he started school at Eton without press intrusion, measures that largely held throughout his childhood.

  After the death of the princess, Sir David got the industry to agree to stamp out the taking of pictures in private places and banned the use of photographs generated by ‘persistent pursuit’. ‘Public opinion following the death of the Princess was telling us loud and clear that we needed to look to our laurels,’ Sir David said in the Daily Mail in May 1998, ‘and to make sure our own rules on privacy and harassment were as tough as they could be.’9

  It would prove to be one of his final acts.

  Sir David English loved a party.

  The bashes he liked best of all were the ones where he could sit at the head of a very long dinner table and incite argument, direct debate and generally steer the flow of the conversation in the direction that amused him most. And in June of 1998, the still-supreme Mail being was about to be handed an invite to the tallest press table there has ever been for a press man; he’d have a seat alongside Northcliffe, Beaverbook, Hartwell, Kemsley, Camrose, Thomson of Fleet and, of course, Rothermere himself: the Prime Minister was about to make English a Press Lord for his ‘services to journalism’.

  As well he might be. By the early summer of 1998 the Daily Mail he had rescued in 1971 was in rude health; Paul Dacre had adjusted the formula but he hadn’t radically changed it – the paper looked exactly the same and people still bought it to read English’s columnists Lynda Lee-Potter, Ian Wooldridge and Nigel Dempster. Dacre had put on something like 700,000 readers since he’d taken over from Sir David, a timeframe during which hundreds of thousands of readers had deserted weaker organs.

  Yet, even if circulation had collapsed under David English, some who knew both men believe that Lord Rothermere’s relationship was so tight with his editorial guru they would simply have gone down together with the Associated Newspapers ship as it sank into the abyss. They did have disputes now and again, but Harmsworth would never have sacked English and David English would never have quit in anger or left to edit The Times. Even five years after Dacre had taken the reins of his Daily Mail and had put on circulation and even won awards – the Daily Mail won National Newspaper of the Year at the British Press Awards in 1994, 1995 and 1997 – it was clear who was Viscount Rothermere’s supreme editorial being. It wasn’t Paul Dacre.

  ‘I think he [English] is one of the greatest editors ever to walk in Fleet Street,’ Rothermere told the FT in April 1997. ‘I don’t know any editor since Northcliffe who was such a total master of his art.’10

  Lord Rothermere would simply never personally feel the same for Paul Dacre as he did for Sir David. The Mail ’s compact double-act still ultimately ruled at Northcliffe House – they just existed on a higher plane than the editorial floor, where the Mail ’s editor was given a free hand to ritually abuse his staff and tear up the paper as deadlines hurtled up to meet them.

  Yet Viscount Rothermere, by now in his early seventies, spent most of his time in France and made it clear that he wanted to step away from his businesses and ‘find some sort of gentle decline’ so that he could hand over the family firm to his son, thirty-year-old Jonathan. ‘I want to spend the rest of my life living on a mountain top,’ he told the Observer, ‘skiing down it every morning and being carried up it every evening.’

  It was only Sir David English who kept him away
from that mountain. ‘We more or less agree that we will work on together for as long as we can,’ Sir David told the same Observer interviewer, Lynn Barber. ‘We’ve always worked as a team and we’ve decided to go on doing that.’11 Only three things could force Sir David away from the Mail group, he added: Vere quitting, extreme ill-health and death . . . the grim reaper would, indeed, come calling a year later. For them both.

  Some of Sir David’s best friends had been worried about him for months, and the last time his old friend Tony Burton saw him was at a big dinner party in upstate New York thrown in English’s honour shortly before he died.

  ‘He was very, very quiet, perhaps sad because of Irene,’ he told the author, ‘or – if you want to be silly – he knew it was all coming to an end and . . . listen, a central fact people must understand about David English was that he adored Irene and was devastated by her illness – he even set up a trust fund for her care, suggesting that he feared he might die before she did. My feeling is that he was terribly sad in his last months, largely because of Irene.’12

  So Tony Blair’s new Labour Government smiled benignly upon Sir David – despite the way his paper had ripped into old Labour – and the English name was added to the Queen’s Birthday Honours List, with his elevation to be announced on 13 June 1998. He needed to choose a name. Sunny Harmsworth had simply invented the name Northcliffe, and Bunny had followed his lead by creating the title Rothermere, but Sir David didn’t get the chance to conjure up his own; he collapsed a few days before the official announcement.

  ‘He’d had various ailments of a not particularly worrying nature, some form of internal upsets and he was having medication,’ his oldest friend, Chris Rees, told the author, ‘but he wasn’t ill in the sense that he was having time off work or anything. And then he collapsed in the bathroom one morning getting ready to go to work and was found there by his driver still conscious, sort of, and he was carted off to St Thomas’s. It was a stroke, a blood clot in the brain.’13