Mail Men

by Adrian Addison

  ‘I fell in love with Maiko,’ Vere told the Observer, ‘but I did not cease to love Pat. Maiko’s love is so calm and peaceful. Pat was tempestuous and exhausting, like a tropical storm that takes its energy from its surroundings.’3

  The Harmsworths were firmly part of Britain’s elite by the time Jonathan came along; Jonathan went to Prince Charles’s old public school, Gordonstoun, up in Scotland, and then on to Duke University in the US – his mother advising him against impaling himself upon the spires of an olde-English university: ‘If you go to Oxford, Jonathan, people will only come to your room and take drugs and get depressed,’ she told him. ‘Go to an American university with all that open air.’4

  It didn’t really much matter where or what he studied, as Jonathan was being groomed by his father to take over the family firm from birth. He worked briefly as a reporter and sub-editor in Glasgow before joining the Harmsworths’ local paper interests in the Home Counties. When his father passed away in 1998, he had already risen to be managing director of the Evening Standard. Unlike his dad, this incarnation of Viscount Rothermere could hardly have inherited a healthier ship and, at thirty, Jonathan was exactly the same age as his great-grand-uncle5 Alfred when he’d founded the Daily Mail.

  This is not the only similarity between the two Harmsworths born 100 years apart . . . Jonathan also sired a son to a girl who was employed to help his mother, just like Sunny had with his mother’s nurse Louisa Jane in 1882. Bubbles had an assistant, a girl from New Zealand who – according to the Daily Express – was not particularly impressed by the viscountess’s lofty title. ‘Bubbles was a big woman and always complained about having sore legs and sore calves,’ another Rothermere employee told the paper. ‘They made her life a pain and everyone would sympathize and make her feel like a patient but when she asked this girl what to do the response was: “Go on a diet.”’6

  Lady Rothermere, who died in 1992 after an accidental overdose of sleeping pills, liked this no-nonsense approach from the Kiwi girl and so did her son. The pair are said to have fallen for each other during a road trip across the USA and then moved into an apartment together in North Carolina while Jonathan studied at Duke in the mid-1980s. Then, after two years as a couple, she fell pregnant and returned to New Zealand – apparently at her own insistence, and they split up. Harmsworth went on to marry Claudia Clemence, the daughter of a property developer, in 1993, and the couple have five children.

  Unlike Sunny Harmsworth, however, whose lovechild was a secret to even his closest relatives, all this became public in 2001 shortly after the Express newspaper group was acquired by Richard Desmond. Desmond, again like Sunny Harmsworth, is another Hampstead boy who began with magazines . . . though not quite the same ‘useless information’ that got the Harmsworths started. Desmond’s organs were of the type men held firmly in one hand, titles such as Asian Babes, Big Ones International and Horny Housewives. Celebrity pap, though, was where the real money was, and Desmond launched OK!, a rival to the ‘aren’t you wonderful’ gushings on sale in Spanish-born Hello!

  Paul Dacre is apt to use the ‘P’ word – pornographer – whenever Desmond’s name pops up in conversation or, indeed, in his paper; in which another outraged former Express reporter and top Mailman, Geoffrey Levy, described Desmond as ‘the People’s Pornographer’ when the Express sale to Desmond went through.7 It was also, for Paul Dacre, another P word – personal: his dad spent most of his working life on the Sunday Express and Dacre himself, of course, got his first job straight from university on the Daily Express.

  ‘I’m not going to mince my words,’ Dacre told his old student newspaper. ‘I thought it was a very sad day for Fleet Street when a pornographer was allowed to buy a once-great national newspaper.’8 Adding in another interview: ‘As long as I’ve got energy in my body, I’m going to devote everything to try to see him off.’9

  Desmond, who happens to be Jewish, doesn’t much like being referred to as a pornographer and he responded in kind in the pages of his Express by taunting the Mail over the first Rothermere’s Fascism. His papers also began to expose the personal life of Jonathan Harmsworth, the fourth Rothermere, on the grounds that Dacre’s moralizing Mail preached the kind of ‘family values’ that its proprietor had seemingly failed to live up to. This was Blair’s Britain, though, not Victorian London, and there has never been any suggestion that Jonathan Harmsworth denied his son or behaved dishonourably in any way. It is simply a fact of life that children are sometimes born out of wedlock and parental relationships break down. Indeed, Harmsworth stated clearly with regard to the Desmond spat that he ‘wasn’t that offended by it’.

  He [Desmond] seemed to think the fact that I have an illegitimate son is of some concern. In fact, my son . . . I’m very proud of my son, he’s a member of my family, we go on holiday together and my children are very proud to call him their brother, so I don’t make a secret of it and frankly the idea that I’m offended by it is slightly offensive.10

  It all got slightly ridiculous when the Mail ’s chief executive at the time, Murdoch MacLennan, stepped in to try and negotiate a ceasefire that never held. ‘I think the proof is in the pudding, so to speak,’ Rothermere said at the Leveson inquiry. ‘The Express continued to attack me.’11 From the same stand, Desmond had also described the Daily Mail ’s editor as the ‘fat butcher’, adding ‘only two weeks ago Dacre vilified me in his horrible rag’.12

  This was all great sport for the neutral observer and media commentators, though it’s doubtful many Mail or Express readers cared much about all this out in Middle England. And Viscount Rothermere certainly doesn’t reside in Middle England; Rothermere technically isn’t – for tax purposes – even English. He’s ‘French’, just like his father. Great-grandfather Bunny Harmsworth was the master of numbers and he set the tone for – quite legally – paying as little tax as possible by creating trusts and offshore companies to actually hold the firm. The Daily Mail now belongs, effectively, to a company in Bermuda called Rothermere Continuation Ltd, and Vere bequeathed to his son not just the title ‘Viscount Rothermere’ – he also passed down his non-domiciled ‘tax genetics’.13 Thankfully for all the world’s Mailmen, unlike Great-grandpa Bunny and Grandfather Esmond, Jonathan Harmsworth does genuinely share Northcliffe’s and his father’s deep love for the Daily Mail newspaper. Though he’s not in his office on the sixth floor of Northcliffe House every day.

  Former Mailman ‘Terry’ has been invited up there by his Lordship on several occasions. ‘He has this office with very, very thick carpet, it’s like walking on jelly up there,’ he told the author. ‘It’s just so incredibly anachronistic. This idea of the super powerful press baron at the top of the office with very thick carpets and old-fashioned furniture and “seven” secretaries and everything. It’s . . . you almost wanna give him a smack like – “wake up and smell the mustard”. This is not how the world is. My view is that Jonathan enjoys the pomp and circumstance. And that he’s too weak a character to make any change to it. He’s not a radical, he’s a very conventional thinker. I mean, conventional to the point of, well – being a bit thick. That’s what a lot of people think.’14

  They used to say the same thing about his father, ‘mere Vere’, and, anyway, downstairs on the Daily Mail editorial floor there can be but one ruler, and editor-in-chief Paul Dacre is an intelligent man – and he is as loyal to young Jonathan as he and Sir David had been to Vere. Dacre is the man who makes the Mail, not Rothermere. And the Associated Newspapers editor-in-chief works damn hard for his Harmsworth masters – he certainly puts in the hours down below in Daily Mail HQ.

  Associated Newspapers left Fleet Street at the end of the 1980s for a building that was purpose-built as a department store after the Second World War and, though it was never quite in the league of Harrods up the road, Barkers was Kensington’s answer to Debenhams or C&A: a place where the middle classes went shopping for everything from a pair of socks to bedlinen or a nice new coat. In the late 1960s,15 women wo
uld peruse the store’s wares on the third-floor aisles, shuffling through rack after rack of nylon slips and wedding gowns, Scottish tweeds, and wool dresses, ladies’ Burberrys and Aquascutum coats . . . and it all somehow seems rather apt that this is now the editorial engine room that propels the ‘female-friendly’ Daily Mail machine forward.

  Every weekday morning Paul Dacre’s chauffeur glides a large company car down into the basement car park under that old store – now called Northcliffe House and also home to a Whole Foods Market – and drops him off by the lift. The Mail ’s editor-in-chief pushes the button and emerges upstairs on to the Daily Mail editorial floor carrying his red ‘Cabinet minister’ style briefcase, then strides on down the ‘corridor of power’ (or the ‘boulevard of broken dreams’ as it is also called by some older hands) and into his office while his senior staff fidget at their desks fixing their lists.

  It is inside various meetings – or conferences, as they’re called – that ‘prudish and prickly’ Paul Dacre forms the next day’s Daily Mail around his, and his top team’s, worldview (and it’s entirely plausible that this was, in fact, the exact same spot by the window where 1960s women shuffled through racks of knickers, tights and sexy stockings).

  Up until about 11.30 or so each morning the senior staff sit out on the editorial floor anxiously awaiting a secretary’s voice over the Tannoy calling the first conference of the day. ‘You could always tell what sort of a mood Dacre was in by how agitated and stressed Lesley, his PA, sounded,’ said ‘Mo’, who spent many years shuffling into the editor’s office in answer to that call. ‘Dacre takes all conferences from behind his very large oak desk in his huge office. It’s very plush and chintzy, a bit like a hotel room. Posh, thick beige carpet, curtains, flat screen telly, lots of sofas. A big bookcase. Pictures of country scenes on the walls. He guzzles cups of tea and pops various pills throughout but he doesn’t even have a computer in there and he doesn’t know how to work the system. Stories are printed out for him to read, on paper.’16 After an initial meeting of senior editors, the news editor and picture editor join in and the meeting ‘usually descends into Dacre having a go at the news editor for all the stories he thinks the paper missed or didn’t cover well’.17

  ‘Paul has very few ideas himself but surrounds himself with loads of people who do at pre-conference,’ former senior MailMan ‘Sean’ told the author. ‘And he always envies things in other papers which the Mail doesn’t have so those might become ideas too. He listens to the [BBC Radio 4] Today programme and watches the BBC at 6 p.m. He has very few contacts. The Prime Minister Gordon Brown used to provide stories. Iain Duncan Smith still does. But he went through a spell of refusing to even take David Cameron’s phone calls.

  ‘Paul, and he got this from Sir David, they both saw themselves as being completely across the waterfront – and that was one of the challenges of any exec there – the paper had to have all the fun and the froth of The Sun and all the serious stuff that was in The Times and all the sex and smut and aristo stuff that was in the Telegraph. It was never enough to just say we out-Sunned The Sun today or [that] we’ve beaten the Telegraph. Paul and Sir David saw themselves as being in competition with the entire print network which meant that it was very hard to win every day because you can’t beat everybody every day. It’s quite unforgiving from that point of view. There was always something to bite an exec on the backside.’18

  For those on the Mail staff not in love with life under artificial light, being shut away for hour after excruciating hour in Dacre’s bunker can be torture: ‘Half the day is taken up with endless conferences,’ ‘Mo’ added, ‘one after another from 11.30 until about 2 p.m. It’s the bane of every section head’s life and the reason why everything runs so late and the working hours there are so insane. He bangs the desk a lot and swears. Oddly though he rarely swears – directly – at women. He’ll swear in their presence and while he’d call the features editor (male) a “cunt” he would never call the Femail or books editors – women – one. And he does get very angry. He does this weird thing where he throws himself back on his chair. One time he lost his balance and fell right over, landing on his back!’19

  The representatives sent from some departments are more welcome than others, with showbiz being the lowest life form, explained ‘Robin’: ‘You’d walk in there and be treated like some sort of bimbo who’s got all this fluffy meaningless news. It’s a weird one because it’s massively important to the Daily Mail package but it gets no respect.’20 Sport has long been a massive draw, with many men, in particular, buying the paper solely for its football coverage, which David English thought was massively important from when the paper first went tabloid. But in-depth debates about the political climate of the day or the big news story or some celebrity’s cellulite would require little input from the sport department, despite the section head having to sit through it. Paul Dacre, although he’s been known to take in the occasional international game of rugby, is not a massive sport fan. ‘Sport always came last in conference,’ former head of sport Bryan Cooney told the author. ‘And it was a poor last because it was considered like the comics, you know – the games show. One day, I didn’t have time for all this haranguing and questioning. So I took a double-page spread in with me and I utilized my time by not listening to what was going on – because I knew I was last – and I started drawing up the spread I had in mind. And every time I looked up, Dacre was watching me. I could see it. So, right at the end when he said “Sport!” and I began my spiel he said: “Oh, uh, would it help you if we moved sport forward to first on the agenda?” And I said: “Immeasurably.” He said: “Right.” So thereafter sport became the first thing on the agenda.’ As soon as he’d gone through his list, Cooney would dash for freedom.21

  Unfortunately for ‘George’, a conference regular, he always had to stay until the end. ‘I have developed my own theory about Paul Dacre over the years, and that’s that he is very much this shy and awkward, slightly scared chap who has built this weird fucking feudal court around himself to make himself feel more secure in the world, you know? And he really is the Absolute Ruler. I’d watch him sitting behind this huge desk in conference, harrumphing at the news list, with all these weird courtiers trying to win points, it seemed to me. Screeching away about “Alan Rubbisher” [Alan Rusbridger, then editor of the Guardian] and anything mildly liberal. Year after year, on and fucking on it went. They were utterly obsessed with the bloody Guardian, it defines exactly what they do not want their Daily Mail to be. Dacre would grumble away himself under his breath about “Polly fucking Toynbee” [the Guardian writer] as he marched to the lift. Everything Dacre learned about the world outside, it seemed to me, came from these courtiers. The more rabid loons in conference would just whisk Dacre up into a frenzy, and convince him there were hordes of Romanian refugees marching up High Street Ken – which Dacre could well believe, because he barely left his fucking office. The Stephen Lawrence story was one of those very rare exceptions where he actually met a member of the public – a plasterer working on his home!’22

  Some Daily Mail staffers often joked that the Lawrence case came about because Dacre had had a ‘near life experience’, in the same way another campaign against plastic bags was launched after Dacre was infuriated after seeing one stuck in a tree in the countryside. The obsession with the Guardian, say some, is easily explained by the need to have something to rail against in the absence these days of any real mid-market competition, since the demise of the Daily Express.

  Conference sets a far more fearful tone than it did in English’s day, say insiders. ‘Paul is not somebody who, for instance, takes public transport,’ said former senior MailMan ‘Sean’. ‘He’s not somebody who goes outside of his bubble. You know it’s a paper that’s sometimes very critical of people inside “media bubbles”. But Paul was completely in a media bubble of his own.

  ‘It always amused me that, you know, his shoe leather never wore out. Because every day he was on a carpet
in the office; he strode out the door and was in a car which deposited him either at home or a restaurant. But it was not like he ever crunched gravel anywhere. He never did any shopping. He would be horrified at what modern Britain had become but he was never part of it. And [he] travelled most of the time in his car – with the doors locked! On one occasion, the conversation in conference turned to cash machines and Dacre didn’t know what an ATM machine was. It occurred to me that this is somebody that is quite sheltered,’23 he added.

  One particular couple were discussed frequently in conference for years: Tony and Cherie Blair. Dacre didn’t seem to like them at all; he never really trusted Blair. A Northcliffe House story, shared by many, was that Dacre had taken offence one day when Cherie had openly breastfed their new son Leo at a Daily Mail summit on the sixth floor as the country geared up for the general election in 2001, which the Prime Minister won. After the election, the Daily Mail front page simply declared: ‘He’s Back. Disaster for the Tories as Blair powers to historic second term but the real winner is . . . apathy.’24

  Domestic politics, though, soon fell away when the global political landscape totally changed one Tuesday afternoon in 2001 – September the 11th. The day started off the same as any other day in the Daily Mail newsroom, the endless conferences were almost over and the machine was in motion for the construction of the next day’s paper . . . until the first World Trade Center tower was struck at just before 2 p.m. London time. Any decisions taken about the next day’s paper were ripped apart for a special edition with thirty-two pages of coverage of the 9/11 attacks.