Mail Men

by Adrian Addison

  St Thomas’s Hospital is just across the Thames from Westminster, where many a politician has battled for the approval of those millions of Daily Mail readers right there in the middle of England – the ground where they fear elections are won or lost. Sir David faced his own battle, as he lay dying in a hospital bed with his friend Vere gently stroking his hand – a battle he knew his friend was losing. Lord Rothermere had dashed from Paris with his wife Maiko when he received the news, and would now never get the chance to scoot along to make room for his friend on the padded red leather benches at the House of Lords. ‘It was so very, very sad,’ Maiko, the Dowager Lady Rothermere, told the author, ‘we could even see the Houses of Parliament on the other side of the river from his bedroom. Vere was devastated. Heartbroken. He loved David so much, I always thought of them as like a cat and a dog. David was a cat, so feline and female, and Vere was a big cuddly doggy. They were so very, very lucky to find each other.’14

  Chris Rees and his family were closer to the Englishes than pretty much anybody. They regularly went on holiday together, and Rees had even joined the Mail in the seventies, from where he rose to be managing editor of the Daily Mail and then deputy editor of the Mail on Sunday. ‘We were with him when he actually died in the hospital, David’s three children were there and my wife and I were there,’ Rees told the author. ‘He gave a little gasp and he was gone.’15

  A little while earlier, Tony Burton had taken a call at dawn in upstate New York from Sir David’s eldest daughter, Nikki, to tell him her dad had collapsed with a stroke and was in a coma. ‘I booked a seat on the next flight to London but before take-off learned that he was dead,’ he told the author. ‘I went anyway and spent some time with his family but declined an offer to see his body; I didn’t want to see him lifeless – he was such an electrically energetic character. And I didn’t wait for the bullshit of the funeral either, my sister-in-law offered to drive me to Heathrow and since Nikki lived on the way to the airport she invited us to stop off at her house.’

  Burton is heading on towards his ninetieth year now, and the term ‘grizzled old hack’ could well have been coined in his honour, yet, nevertheless, he is human and the pain surfaces most when he recalls the impact of Sir David’s death on the family of his friend. ‘That was the only time I ever met David’s grandchildren, still not in their teens. They were devastated, crying and bewildered. Nikki played a video of David having fun with the kids; he was prancing around in the garden with a German helmet on his head while the kids shrieked with laughter.

  ‘David English was just about the most fascinating character I have ever met in my life . . . I loved the man.’16

  The newspapers, of course, ran their obituaries and the tributes flowed in from everyone from Tony Blair to the Prince of Wales. English himself had once said of this moment: ‘I wouldn’t want any highfalutin things said about me but I would like journalists to say: “He was pretty good and, frankly, he ran a tough ship, but he wasn’t as bad as they say he was. His bark was worse than his bite, and he actually did lead people rather than drive them.”’17

  Yet Sir David, who was a wily old hack at heart far more than an editor – possessed, as he was on occasion, with his own particular brand of ‘truth’ – did actually keep one line back for himself that was missed by all of Fleet Street’s finest, including his own Daily Mail; they all had him dying just a couple of weeks after his sixty-seventh birthday. Not true. He was, actually, sixty-eight;18 English had knocked a year off his true age for his Who’s Who entry sometime before.19

  The newspaper presses stop for no man, whatever his age, and Paul Dacre soon took Sir David’s place as editor-in-chief at Rothermere’s right hand, overseeing the Evening Standard and the Mail on Sunday as well as the Daily Mail. But the short stretch of road they shared without Sir David was far rockier for Paul Dacre than the one travelled by English and the Mail proprietor. Rothermere had already stated pretty clearly – at least for the usually enigmatic Vere – before the election that Dacre was safe . . . so long as circulation didn’t suffer.

  Another warning was to follow very soon after Sir David’s death: don’t go downmarket. Vere didn’t want the Mail to dumb down any more as the price of victory in a new circulation battle. By then, the Daily Express was far behind, selling over a million fewer copies than the Mail, but the Daily Mirror’s plump red buttocks were now within biting distance, selling only around 100,000 copies more than the Mail. Again, like the Express, the Mirror’s demise was largely because it had also fallen into the same kind of malignant, corporate management that managed to forget the readers along the way – the Mirror had miraculously managed to shed 500,000 readers in the same period Dacre had increased the Mail ’s circulation by 700,000.20

  Lord Rothermere actually cared, deeply and emotionally, about his family’s Daily Mail and he had chosen his path three decades before and stuck with it; Vere Harmsworth had invested and kept investing while his enemies committed slow circulation suicide. In 1971, he had inherited a moribund Daily Mail, a dying Daily Sketch and a fading Evening News, but by 1998 his business was in bloom, vibrant, the leader in its field; he owned three successful and highly profitable newspapers: the Daily Mail, the Mail on Sunday and the Evening Standard. The cost-cutting waves whipped up by the bean-counters of other newspaper groups never swamped the Mail. The accountants surely must have tried, only for Vere to file their memos where they belonged: in the bin.

  It could have all gone horribly wrong, like it did for the Express when Beaverbrook’s playboy son took the wheel. It’s worth noting, however, that the Daily Mail has never, in its entire existence, sold close to 4 million copies a day like the Express once did; the Mail didn’t ruin the Express, the Express ruined itself. And Rothermere’s father, of course, nearly sank the Mail by spinning the wheel this way and that, then repeatedly dropping anchor in unfamiliar waters, sacking editors and allowing his second wife Ann to act like the editor-in-chief. Northcliffe’s Mail only ever had one editor – other than Sunny himself and, perhaps, Kennedy Jones (but neither held the title). Vere’s Mail only had two . . . the first was never sacked and his second is still there, a quarter of a century after his appointment. None of the offspring of the other old-school Press Lords now owns a national newspaper in Britain. Only the Harmsworths remain. In 1997, Vere was, according to the Sunday Times Rich List, Britain’s ninth richest man – worth £1.2 billion.21 It was not quite third richest like grandfather Bunny, but it wasn’t bad going, especially considering that for Vere, just like Northcliffe, it had never been about the money; the Mail could have generated far more raw cash for the Harmsworth coffers.

  Nobody called Lord Rothermere ‘mere Vere’ any more, but Viscount Rothermere wasn’t your average newspaper proprietor or even remotely close to your average Mail reader; he was a Buddhist billionaire who liked to refer to himself as a ‘nobleman’ yet thought the royal family were finished; he had little interest in buying a collection of huge homes, boats or private aircraft. ‘Vere was an instinctive genius and hugely unconventional, I mean he was a Buddhist! Or, he thought he was a Buddhist anyway,’ ex-Mailman and one-time monk Richard Addis, who was by then editor-in-chief of the Express group, told the author. ‘Vere was often very mysterious and very perceptive.’22

  The Daily Mail could have tumbled downmarket behind The Sun and the Daily Mirror in the 1970s chasing mass circulation, had Vere so desired. In an interview with the Daily Telegraph not long after Sir David’s death, Rothermere worried that Dacre’s Daily Mail was doing exactly that – dumbing down to meet the red-tops:

  I don’t agree with him [Dacre], and I’ve told him so. We’ve gone too far down-market and I want it to stop . . . What I say to Paul is: ‘The market is moving towards us. If we go down to meet it, we’ll endanger our own market position.’ It’s fine to be catching up with the Mirror, but not at that price. At the moment Paul is playing a very dangerous game of footsie. He has to be very careful.23

  Paul Dacre was
also playing a very dangerous game with his career, some at the time believed. ‘I speak to Paul Dacre every day, but I believe in leaving successful editors alone,’ Rothermere had told the Telegraph, ‘and Paul is independent . . . to the degree of his success.’24 Peter Preston, the highly respected media pundit and former editor of the Guardian, added those italics at the time in a piece for the Observer pondering whether Vere Harmsworth was ‘baiting a fiendish trap’ for his new editor-in-chief; if Dacre’s Daily Mail pulled ahead of the Daily Mirror, the tabloid ‘sensationalism and slovenliness’ Vere so reviled would be tacitly confirmed. But if the Mail didn’t pile on the readers, then the ‘degree of his success’ could be questioned. ‘Catch 22-as-catch-can,’ wrote Preston.25 Then again, this may well just have been Viscount Rothermere’s own particular kind of joke.

  Vere Harmsworth had been very fortunate to find the perfect editor for his Daily Mail and David English had been very lucky to find the perfect proprietor. Theirs was a symbiotic tale and it seems one could not exist without the other, just like an oft-told story that has appeared in many a local newspaper over the years; an old married couple had met as youngsters and stayed together for half a century or more of loving wedlock. Then one spouse dies . . . and the other dies swiftly afterwards. The surviving partner cannot stand alone in the world. And there is actually plenty of evidence in science for ‘broken heart syndrome’. So it was to be, in a way, with Vere Harmsworth, the third Viscount Rothermere, and Sir David English, the editor who had almost joined him in the Press Lord club.

  A friend once said that Lord Rothermere loved newspapers, women and dogs ‘in that order’,26 and it was dogs that had brought Vere Harmsworth and the second Lady Rothermere – a Korean hand model who was born in Japan called Maiko Lee – together. Maiko loved canines too, and had helped organize a dogs’ charity fundraiser in New York in 1978 that was to be held the same day Vere arrived on Concorde from London. Vere was invited by a friend to the party at which he, at the age of fifty-three, struggled to cope with the disco tunes. ‘The music was very loud,’ Lady Rothermere, who was twenty-nine at the time, told the author, ‘and Vere’s friend said [in the squeezed, back-of-the-throat accent of the true English aristocracy], “This is Vere,” and I thought he said “Bear”; and he looked just like a great big teddy bear! With a beautiful face and a big happy tummy, and I knew at that moment that God had sent this man into my life. And I was with him until the day he died.’27

  Two decades later, as Vere prepared to leave his home in the French countryside on what was to prove to be his final business trip to London, that day was about to come – and it seems Rothermere’s best friend knew it.

  ‘Vere had a dog, an Akita called Ryu-ma,’ said Lady Rothermere, ‘and Vere was so much in love with this dog. And the dog adored his papa. But Ryu-ma was in such a mood, such a mood, he was just hiding under the table. I said: “Roo-mee boy, come here! Daddy’s going today to England. You’re not going to see him for a little while, you must come! Rhoo-mee, come on, boy!” But no. He wouldn’t come. Normally Ryu-ma would jump in the car and enjoy the ride with Vere and the driver to the airport. But he was in such a mood, he just wouldn’t go. Dogs sense these things; he knew his papa was going to die.

  ‘So I went with Vere to the airport instead, so he could get on a small private plane that was waiting for him there. It was so strange, at the airport, I said, “Vere, thank you very much for the beautiful life you gave to me.” And I don’t know why I said it. And Vere, I’ll never forget it, said: “My dear Maiko, you have given me the most beautiful life – I shall miss you so very much.” And then he gave me a cuddle – we had a long, long, long cuddle together – and then he took the plane and he went.’28

  When he arrived in London, being a good Englishman, the viscount went for a nice cup of tea at his daughter’s house before heading to his son’s place at Eaton Square for dinner; he began to complain of a severe pain in an arm at the dinner table and collapsed with a heart attack.

  ‘His son Jonathan rang me at nine o’clock in the evening,’ said Lady Rothermere, ‘and he said, “Please sit.” So I sat. And he said, “Daddy’s dead.”’29

  The third Lord Rothermere, Vere Harmsworth, died in the same hospital as Sir David on 1 September 1998 – just twelve weeks after his partner.

  15

  At the Court of ‘King Paul’

  The two founders of the modern-day Daily Mail were no more; Dacre had been appointed editor-in-chief by Vere before he died but he had not been given English’s more senior post as chairman of Associated Newspapers – Vere had resumed that himself. Anyway, the chairman of a newspaper company need not be an editor – and Paul Dacre is an editorial man to his socks; he has reigned supreme over content ever since. But he does not, of course, make the Daily Mail on his own. A multitude of Mailmen and Femails have helped Dacre define and remake it daily over the last quarter of a century – newspapers are not shapes tipped from a mould, they are hammered into shape every day by living men and women. The Mail has long been the best-staffed newspaper in ‘Fleet Street’, and some of those men and women offer a fascinating insight into how the post-David English-era Daily Mail actually functioned.

  Dacre and his senior team, much as they must surely hate it, have themselves been observed by trained observers for years: men and women whose job it is to study people for a living and then write it down for the consumption of others. Inside the Mail there have been people who did – and still do – truly believe in the Daily Mail cause, whatever it happened to be that day. These hacks tend never to speak publicly about their trade, either on principle, which is fair enough, or because they’re afraid of retribution. Paul Dacre himself explained this principle best in the British Journalism Review:

  Our biggest fault is our compulsion to shit on our own [kind]. The way British newspapers – and the so-called quality papers are the worst offenders – so venomously slag each other off never ceases to depress me. We have a dismal enough image with the public as it is without fouling our own nest.1

  Then there are those for whom working on the Daily Mail was only their trade, not their religion, and they were neither afraid nor in awe of Paul Dacre nor anybody else at the Daily Mail; they were simply hard-working people who now feel strongly that the same incredulity and journalistic cynicism they’d apply to any story outside the office is also – absolutely – applicable indoors. The Daily Mail is only a product and Paul Dacre is not a cartoon monster – Dacre is just a man and he is also, actually, just an employee: Dacre might make it in his own image but he does not own the Daily Mail.

  The Daily Mail is a pyramid at the top of which sits the fourth Viscount Rothermere. Jonathan Harmsworth, however, rules from a distance – many staffers have never met the man; he is not a physical presence in the Daily Mail newsroom like young Sunny Harmsworth was in his day. Bunny’s great-grandson exists upstairs.

  Some Mailmen and Femails are bolder than others, however, and every now and then one or two peel away from the pack to take an insane career risk by sneaking up to the sixth floor at Northcliffe House in Kensington . . . just to take a glimpse inside another world; up there is Harmsworth territory – it is from the sixth floor that his young Lordship Jonathan reigns.

  One Femail, ‘Elsa’, was guided up the stairs behind the art-deco façade (newspaper owners adore art-deco façades) of the old Barkers department store building one evening by a colleague. They knew they were safe because all the chiefs were distracted down below by a leaving do. ‘This guy was a mate of mine,’ she told the author, ‘and he whispered, “I’ve got to go up to the sixth floor, do you wanna have a peek?” And it was literally, literally, another world. It’s unbelievable up there, like walking into an amazing hotel. They’ve got this astonishing boardroom with oak panel walls and oil paintings all around. If you were gonna shoot a Barbara Taylor Bradford novel of the, you know, “the office of the great retail magnate” – this is the place. I just couldn’t believe my eyes; down be
low it’s all grey Formica and this shit utilitarian carpet, and you go up there and it’s absolutely striking. I felt like I was in a completely different century, never mind a different floor.’2

  ‘Elsa’ had a point; the Harmsworths are from a completely different century, and by the start of the new millennium, when she went exploring those upper floors, it had been 112 years since the middle-class boy Sunny Harmsworth had launched Answers to Correspondents, the organ upon which this family empire was constructed. Bunny’s ‘Rothermere’ title was, of course, tooled in a different era too, and the name ‘Viscount Rothermere’ follows the hereditary principle and so is attached to Harold Harmsworth’s heirs for the foreseeable future. It fell first to Esmond, then to Vere and then . . . it was a matter of confusion. Three decades before, in 1966, it wasn’t exactly clear on whom it could next be bestowed.

  Vere had two daughters he adored, but he had no son and therefore – under the still-active rules of feudal England that hand everything to the eldest male child – no heir. Yet Vere’s father, Esmond, the sixty-nine-year-old second viscount, had remarried and his young wife soon fell pregnant with Esmond Jr. This would mean, after Vere, Esmond Jr – the second viscount’s second son – would have become the fourth Viscount Rothermere. Far more importantly – due to the complex system that Bunny Harmsworth had constructed – Esmond Jr would also have inherited the family firm (the company, effectively, follows the Rothermere title). Vere’s first wife, Patricia – nicknamed ‘Bubbles’ by satirical magazine Private Eye for her effervescent, champagne personality and love of a party – however, wasn’t about to let that happen. Bubbles had suffered severe complications and – most likely – undiagnosed postnatal depression after the birth of daughters Geraldine and Camilla, and her doctors had told her to have no more babies. However, she ignored them and read up on how some people claimed the sex of a child could be influenced and soon fell pregnant with Harold Jonathan Esmond Vere Harmsworth, who arrived in December 1967. This boy, Jonathan for short, would be the next to receive the Rothermere name and control of the company that held the Mail. Jonathan’s parents’ marriage, though, soon fell apart and by the end of the 1970s his father was with another woman.