‘On September 11th 2001, I saw Dacre on the floor the most he ever had been’ in the daytime, senior reporter ‘Cyn’ told the author. ‘That same night I saw him quite stressed laying out the paper and he was annoyed at Jon Steafel [the paper’s news chief, who later became deputy editor before falling out of favour] for some reason. I was nearby and I heard him say to Steafel: “Don’t disobey me!” And I thought at the time “disobey” was a rather patriarchal word to use.’25
The Mail ’s coverage began with a stark and hugely effective front-page photograph of a vast cloud of dust where the twin towers of the World Trade Center had once been. It was a front page reminiscent of the iconic Daily Mail edition during the Blitz that had captured St Paul’s standing tall against the Nazi firestorm, except this time the iconic structures were no more. ‘APOCALYPSE, New York, September 11, 2001.’26
‘The nightmare is beyond exaggeration,’ the paper said in its Comment column. ‘Yesterday, September 11, 2001, is a date which will live in infamy as surely as the day Japan attacked Pearl Harbor . . . And nobody – not the Afghan Taliban, Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi or any other instigator of terrorism – can hope to escape retaliation, once culpability has been established. That said, this is a time for cool heads.’27
On page eight, the British Prime Minister’s position was clear from the start: ‘“This is our battle too,” pledges Blair.’28 Military action against Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda soon followed in Afghanistan, but then, less than eighteen months later, the focus had shifted to Iraq and Saddam Hussein’s suspected cache of weapons of mass destruction.
Dacre’s peers admired his paper during this period, and his Daily Mail won National Newspaper of the Year at the British Press Awards in 2000 and again in 2002. Dacre’s tenth year in the top chair was also marked with a personal accolade when he was handed the Media Society Award for the individual or organization judged to have made ‘the most outstanding contribution to the media’. The fifty-three-year-old supreme Mail being was, by then, already the longest-serving editor in ‘Fleet Street’.
‘It’s been ten exhilarating years,’ he told his paper, ‘and I am honoured to receive this award, not only on my own behalf but also on behalf of all the brilliant and dedicated journalists who devote themselves to the Mail.’29
Unfortunately for those ‘dedicated journalists’, the accolades meant that they were in for a tougher time than ever. Dacre loathed any kind of complacency and the worst time for executives was often directly after the paper won an award. ‘There was never a question of you walking in and being told that was a great story or that was a great paper,’ former senior Mailman ‘Sean’ told the author. ‘Any praise was very cursory. He didn’t hand out praise at all, actually. Almost never. It wasn’t a happy clappy place to work because, from the very top, he saw himself as the enemy of anything that indicated that you were resting on your laurels. It’s fair to say that Paul took that on from Sir David who had been very much like that too.’30
By this point Tony Blair and the Daily Mail were not exactly friends, partly because Dacre thought Blair was unpicking some of Thatcher’s reforms and also because his Government had waved through Richard Desmond’s purchase of the Express newspapers. But mainly because Dacre simply didn’t trust the man and loathed his PR advisers, led by chief ‘spin-doctor’ and former Daily Mirror journalist Alastair Campbell. As Dacre told the British Journalism Review that year in an interview marking his first decade in the job:
I think he [Blair] is a chameleon who believes what he said to the last person he talked to . . . Now, I don’t have a good relationship with him, although I get messages from senior ministers every other day with a view to seeing if there is any common ground we can discuss . . . I’m afraid I feel rather strongly that we have a Government that is manipulative, dictatorial and slightly corrupt. No. 10, in particular, cannot stand dissent. It has broken the second chamber, weakened the Civil Service and sidelined Parliament.31
The circulation figures for January 2003 were to be Paul Dacre’s all-time high at over 2.5 million. By the spring of that year, the paper said, Britain was ‘Stumbling along the road to war’.
That America and Britain will win the shooting war against Iraq is beyond doubt. But just as certainly, they are losing the propaganda war. Indeed, the closer military action looms the less convincingly warranted it seems. And the more ethically dubious the case that Mr Blair puts for it appears.32
The bombs fell on Baghdad and only two years later Tony Blair won his third general election. The Mail had been urging its readers to give Blair ‘a bloody nose’ and had published a definitive guide to tactical voting the day before the polls opened.
Paul Dacre would surely insist that his Daily Mail is not a tabloid newspaper in the red-top sense of the word: it’s not the Daily Star, The Sun or the Daily Mirror. Yet, on polling day itself, the only mention of the election on the front page was an election day sweepstake kit . . . Seven years after the deaths of Sir David English and Lord Rothermere, the paper looked as though it indeed was becoming the slovenly tabloid they had feared it would.
‘Yes You Did Give Him A Bloody Nose! Blair had paid a heavy price for his lies over Iraq last night as a voter backlash devastated his Commons majority,’ the paper said when the results came in.33
Blair’s majority was slashed but he was back in Downing Street for a historic third term; yet the paper was already considering the Prime Minister’s future on its front page by asking ‘How Long Can He Go On?’34 Which was exactly what many inside the Daily Mail were wondering too about their editor-in-chief. There seemed to be no stopping the man.
After his office emptied following his conferences, the absolute ruler had time to sit back in his big room for big ideas, but some Mailmen speculated that, on occasion, he might kick off his sensible shoes and have a cheeky little power nap on a sofa; he still had, after all, a very long day ahead of him. But some busy executives found themselves in a bit of a bind when they strolled down the ‘corridor of power’ to his office and had to work out whether or not to enter the boss’s lair: busy people with lots to do, they didn’t want to take a number and sit and read a magazine.
‘It can be a dilemma,’ said Mailman ‘Mike’, ‘if the door is shut, you come back later. If it’s open – knock, and in you go. But if it’s ajar? One day it was ajar and I just thought “fuck it, I’m busy” and I knocked and sallied forth clutching some papers. Dacre used to park his briefcase behind his chair in the corner and he’d been brushing his hair with this huge fucking brush – he almost needed two hands to wield the fucking thing, it was like a bloody broadsword. And he just about fell off the chair in a scramble to get it back in his case before I saw it. He had rapidly receding hair and I remember thinking to myself, “Christ, Paul, you don’t need that fucking thing to deal with what you’ve got there on top”. . . and he wouldn’t have liked that.’35
Most of Paul Dacre’s life since 1992 has been spent in this office, fourteen to eighteen hours most weekdays. Though his holidays have got longer over the years, most of his waking hours have been dedicated to the Daily Mail cause. That’s something like a dozen years solid if added together into one sleepless shift spent – up to the time of writing, he’s still going strong – mostly in one room; though it be a comfortable room. Papillon didn’t do that kind of time. Yet Dacre does expect others to work similar kinds of hours. ‘He wanted people to work twenty-four hours a day,’ said former feature writer Jane Kelly (who later fell out with Dacre). ‘He’d grind people down. He’s even worked at Christmas, he wanted people in on Christmas Day and Boxing Day, New Year, New Year’s Day. One guy came in on Boxing Day and the editor was there and he said, “Why have you been out for lunch?” Even on Boxing Day! And they had a big argument and this chap left, in the end.’36
The intense work rate he holds himself to has, though, had an impact on his health. In 2003 Dacre spent several months off work due to a heart problem and was even too ill to g
o to his own father’s funeral service at the journalists’ church, St Bride’s. Dacre senior’s friend and former Express colleague David Eliades did, however, attend. ‘Paul’s wife Kathy was there and she said he couldn’t go because he was in hospital with some sort of heart trouble, heart murmurs – some kind of heart disturbance. He was working eighteen-hour days in those days and I think he probably still is. I asked Kathy, “Are you gonna stop him working these hours?” And she said: “He won’t do those hours again, I’ll tell you!” But he does and he’s been doing it for a long time now. I don’t think he has an awful lot of anything else in his life really. Whereas David English did, for instance – David liked jazz, we had mutual friends who were jazz musicians.’37
It seems nothing much changed for Dacre when he returned from his stint on the sick. He just went back into his big office and sat at his big desk. ‘He usually eats lunch there too,’ said ‘Mo’, ‘made for him by an in-house butler service and served on silver platters . . . He tries to eat more healthily since his heart surgery and eats these fruit kebabs every lunch time.’38
For a while, Dacre did actually go outside and take in some fresh air at a little square garden around the back of Daily Mail HQ. ‘There was a regime,’ said former senior Mail executive ‘Gavin’, ‘that we called the Lunch Walk which I think was as a result of doctor’s orders. But it was a very, very solitary walk. I saw it take place a few times, it was more like a march with Dacre not engaging with anyone or anything. But, of course, that all fits, doesn’t it? You don’t want to go outside if the place where you have meaning is in the Daily Mail; you really don’t want to go out of that because you lose your meaning. And it certainly indicates that there wasn’t a great deal of inner confidence there, you know; the ability to just be ordinary and disappear in a crowd.
‘It’s funny though because it does become very addictive, working at the Daily Mail. To feel that it all really – really – matters. I think a lot of people get a sense of meaning from working at the Mail, the importance [with] which everything is invested every day; you’re grappling with things, fighting with people. It’s a kind of corporate madness, I think. And people do sometimes find it quite hard when they leave the Mail and enter a world which is much more boring, and balanced and you realize that nothing matters that much . . . And you don’t actually matter that much either.’39
After conference the bosses of each department stride down the ‘corridor of power’ and out on to the editorial floor, and back to their seats, where they begin forming a newspaper in the image sketched out in the air over that rather large desk by their absolute ruler. These top Mailmen are usually, but by no means always, the true believers in the Daily Mail cause and they generally do similar hours to Dacre in the ruthless pursuit of the paper’s goals.
Mailmen and Femails may have had to be ‘first on the story and the last to leave’,40 but often stories that hacks were already working on outdoors were swiftly killed or seriously wounded in conference and fresh ideas had to be pursued. Some executives, especially anyone who had received a bit of a roasting over Dacre’s desk, would arrive back in the newsroom ‘totally wired, pale and manic’.41
‘So, these editors would emerge blinking into the light post-conference,’ added ‘Penny’, who’d generally be out on the road by this point, ‘and you’d get this call with some story idea that has suddenly become the most important thing on planet earth. But it can be three o’clock before you actually receive it because they spend so much fucking time gassing in conference that the message doesn’t actually get transmitted for ages.’
‘As a junior, on the road, it could be very, very tough,’ she added. ‘But it then actually got to be very easy because the Mail ’s angles are so narrow. It was a formula; we lived in a very clean and clear, black and white “1950s” idyllic world. You loved these people for your paper, or you loathed them. Just flick the switch. It was nothing personal. And once you grasped that kind of logic, life did get much easier in terms of the reaction to what you filed. But, of course, we all know the world is not really like that; we live in it too. Well, at least . . . some of us do!’42
Paul Dacre has always had a firm grasp on British politics but his abiding interest is not in the fleeting nitty-gritty ‘news of the day’, say many who have worked directly for him over many years; he remains a features man at heart. That said, he often whips his news desk the hardest. ‘The news editor’s job on the Daily Mail is probably the toughest job in Fleet Street,’ former Mail executive ‘Sean’ told the author. ‘This bloke has to go into conference with thirty or so stories on his news list but Dacre would ask very detailed questions about any one of them, and he had to know the answers and be able to explain those stories succinctly to someone with a very short attention span. Heaven forbid if he lacked knowledge or underplayed or overplayed a story. The editor would be very quick to spot that. He had to talk equally knowledgeably about everything from a health story in the British Medical Journal to what had come from the eleven o’clock Downing Street briefing to some human story involving a horse in the West Country. The only way to answer those questions was to brief himself thoroughly on absolutely everything. It’s a damn tough job.’43
Perhaps the toughest news editor of Dacre’s reign was Tony Gallagher (now editor-in-chief of The Sun), who’d worked for the paper in New York and was brought back initially as deputy news editor – just like Dacre. Gallagher ran the news department from the end of the 1990s through to the mid-2000s and shared his boss’s phenomenal work rate as well as lots of US entry stamps in his passport. Unlike Dacre, however, Gallagher was highly rated as a writer and an on-the-road hack.
‘Tony Gallagher looked like the fucking grim reaper to me,’ said ‘Robin’. ‘I always thought of him as like this figure of death, he always looked so pale and so withered, you know, like a villain in a fantasy movie, a Lord of the Rings kind of villain. He seemed to aspire to that kind of B movie culture, you know, “the news editor who never sleeps”.’44
Gallagher put the fear of the devil into his reporters and was the polar opposite of Tim Miles, who had been a news editor capable of quickly forgiving a reporter who had tried but failed. Gallagher, say his staff, was murderously tough on them. He would rise early and read the final editions of the newspapers at home before going for a run. He’d arrive well before 9 a.m., eat a packed lunch at his desk – allowing himself precisely fifteen minutes for a coffee in the mid-afternoon – and stay until after 10 p.m. when the first edition was done.
For news reporters, it could actually be tougher when in favour, as the best young operators were sent out on ever-more-important stories and all reporters, being human, eventually fail. ‘At the time you are in that world of living to please this machine – a machine that only later you see couldn’t actually care less about you,’ former reporter ‘Cyn’ told the author. ‘The pace was relentless and exhausting. Utterly. Yet for young, ambitious souls tasting exciting national paper success it was also utterly thrilling. Getting scoops and front-page bylines was such a buzz. But you felt you just had to act invincible and strong to stay at the top, to be admired by the desk. Working on the Mail could be a sort of lonely hell.’
Many, but not all, of Gallagher’s reporters were utterly terrified of the man and his sackings became legendary. He had little time for some senior hands whom he felt were past their peak, but he was no less brutal with younger hacks – many of whom had quit a comfortable job on a local paper to seek a golden future on ‘Fleet Street’ yet often had only a tenuous freelance relationship with the Mail. Gallagher is said to have told one bright young thing he was ‘a low flyer’ and another that he ‘wasn’t bashing doors down for the Daily Mail ’. ‘Young reporters were taken into Gallagher’s bunker and fired,’ ‘Cyn’ told the author. ‘But instead of letting them go gently with maybe a positive “look this a tough place and maybe it’s just not for you, you just need more experience” or whatever, he would tear them to pieces. One guy, who
was such a lovely gentle giant, was so upset by being roasted by Tony on his last day – next morning after being sacked – he was literally sick on the desk. I felt so sorry for him. And, okay, he clearly wasn’t tough enough for the Daily Mail but he didn’t deserve that.’45
‘I was bollocked regularly by Gallagher,’ sighed ‘Ray’. ‘And I always remember the time that a good friend wrote a really good scoop, and I said to him, “Wow, well done, mate! Did anybody say anything about that great story?” And his answer was [that the news desk had said] “You got anything decent for us today or are you a one-hit wonder? Oh, and tuck your shirt in.” It was a weird fucking place to work, the Daily Mail – I’d worked on other national newspapers and there, if you did a good job or came up with a good story you’d be rewarded with a nice lunch or something. It could be friendly. You could get bollocked occasionally too, of course, but there was definitely a carrot and stick kind of culture. At the Mail there was no carrot. There was either stick or absence of stick. Any day where you got no stick was a good day. I remember two girls, news reporters – there was a corner where the big machines to print off all the bits of paper were, and they were sitting behind the printers just sobbing and sobbing after being publicly dressed down – one by Gallagher and the other by his deputy Chris Evans.’46
In Gallagher’s defence though, most of the youngsters that were let go were actually coming to the end of a short-term contract that was not being renewed rather than being ritually dismissed, and he didn’t shirk from delivering the bad news himself. Other Mail department heads, over the years, have simply left this unpleasant task to the managing editor’s office.
Even a brief stint as a Mail hack looks good on a CV; many who failed to make it at the Daily Mail have gone on to have very successful careers elsewhere. ‘The Daily Mail remains the best newsroom in Britain and reporters who can work there can work anywhere,’ former senior hand ‘Sean’ added. ‘But it is true that it is a tough, tough place to work. It is. Only the best thrive there and if a reporter was not good enough they’d get found out very quickly. It’s a hard place to work and not everybody makes it. Fleet Street is littered with people who didn’t quite make it on the Daily Mail but went on and prospered elsewhere.’47
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