Mail Men

by Adrian Addison

  The trouble with news is that most of it cannot be controlled; a handle can be developed upon political news for which there are fixed points of reference, such as Prime Minister’s Questions, policy announcements, scheduled debates and elections every four or five years. Some preparation can be done for events, anniversaries and big court cases and the like, for which background studies can be meticulously constructed and published when the case begins or ends. Aside from stunts and campaigns, news is generally reactive not proactive. Shit, as they say, happens.

  Features and comment, on the other hand, can be controlled; a tone can be set and the editor’s voice can most certainly ring through – the overlord can colour in the paper’s heroes and ‘punish’ in print the paper’s villains.

  Space is at a premium on any newspaper, as there are only so many stories that can fit upon a page – so the competition between departments on the Daily Mail for that precious space is fierce. And of all the departments under Paul Dacre’s ultimate command, Femail – and the paper’s features aimed at females – is perhaps that which is most woven into the paper’s very DNA. But that doesn’t mean it gets any respect from other departments.

  ‘There was total and utter disdain for the people who work on Femail, and did all the featurey stuff,’ ‘Ray’, a former Mailman on the news desk, told the author. ‘It was one of those weird battles. Yet the fact is that Femail is often responsible for people actually buying the paper and when those “water cooler” pieces were given prominent space in the paper, then you could guarantee – you could absolutely guarantee – that the people who ran the news desk would be in a foul, foul mood and all their staff would be in for a rough time.’48

  The Femail department was physically removed in an annexe from the main newsroom, beyond a set of double doors – Femails seemed to enjoy just a little more light and air, away from the heat and smoke of the main Mail machinery. Other editorial staffers would watch those Femails go – male and female – as they strolled on through those rose-petalled doors, grumbling that what went on down there was just a load of old pap.

  ‘We were sheltered from some of the bigger thunderstorms but we felt the kind of trickle down,’ said long-term Femail ‘Penny’. ‘But Femail is where a lot of the main pressure of the paper is because, in a way, Femail kind of is the Daily Mail; those features are the paper’s beating heart.’49

  Another long-term Femail, who was respected by Dacre, was celebrated (behind her back) for the ‘coffee and croissants’ chats she would have with prospective Femail employees. Ahead of joining team Femail from outside, many a young reporter over the years – if they didn’t already know someone who actually worked there – was persuaded by an image of a jolly workplace where staff all lounged around chatting and coming up with ideas in a healthy working environment in which one’s opinions and ideas were always listened to, valued and discussed with respect. The executive would trill like a chatty hairdresser in a West London salon, telling these youngsters: ‘Oh, you know in the morning, it’s really nice. We sit around the desk with coffee and croissants chatting about the stories of the day.’50

  ‘Elsa’ worked for several hacks at Femail, but this woman is the only one who still gives her cold sweats. ‘I used to see it, over the years – time and time again – people would arrive into this silent, stressful zone of the commissioning desk,’ she giggled. ‘Total silence and stress. And you could see them thinking, “Err, where? Where’s? Where’s the coffee and croissants?” They’d arrive into this kind of fucking Mordor-type place . . . and “coffee and croissants” became this shorthand for the space between life on the outside, and life on the inside.’51

  Staff in other departments may well have thought those Femails were having an easy ride writing their fluffy features but it was, possibly, the toughest place of all to work.

  ‘All these stories must appear as if by magic for the editor,’ added ‘Penny’. ‘But he’s not a stupid man, and he even ran these departments himself back in the day. The Femail chief was great at saying,“That’s fine, I’ll make it happen” – but of course, she didn’t. It was us plebs that made it happen. She was ferociously hard. She was quite a nice person personally, but she was fucking ruthless. She had to be though. It’s incredibly masculine at the top of the Mail.’52

  That male control over the Daily Mail – a newspaper aimed specifically at women – took an interesting twist over marital breakdown with a piece written by a female lawyer at the start of the brand-new millennium: ‘Divorce: Why we women are to blame – Britain’s leading female divorce lawyer argues it is the aggression of her own sex that’s responsible for soaring rates of marital failure.’

  Twenty years as a divorce lawyer have finally led me to the disturbing conclusion that in most cases it is women and women alone who are responsible for the dissatisfaction in so many relationships.53

  ‘Women and women alone’ is certainly an interesting take, and any husband caught in bed with his secretary would surely get an interesting reaction if he reached under the pillow and handed it to his furious wife.

  ‘As for the women thing,’ former senior Femail ‘Elsa’ groaned, ‘they have such a complex attitude – I think Dacre must have mother issues or something; there is nothing but nothing they like more than a woman turning on other women. Basically their dream headline would be “Why I, as a career woman, am ashamed of my choices and envy my stay-at-home-mum sister because my career has given me cancer” – they have sort of done that, already: a hardy perennial is pitting two sisters against each other – one a stay-at-home-mum, the other a “career woman” with the headline: “Who do YOU think is happiest?” Guess what the outcome always is!’54

  That ‘divorce is caused by women’ story made it into the paper, but the vast majority of Femail ideas don’t survive conference. Long lists of commissioned stories for Femail – and other features in the paper aimed at female readers – would be laid before the editor but only about one in eight ever made it into the paper (and many would already have been commissioned and paid for from freelancers); the bar for a Femail kind of story has always been especially high, whether or not it is actually written by a writer working for Femail or one working for features – some staffers say there is no real difference between the two departments, though features like to consider themselves somehow ‘more profound’.

  Celebrities are sifted and selected by his Femails to have their personal lives examined by ‘Dr’ Dacre right there on his office desk like some kind of outraged gynaecologist, examining Middle England’s moral malaise – analysing their late-night partying, their love lives and their cellulite: there tends, say some who were there, to be a core handful of famous names that get shuffled on and off Dacre’s operating table every few months – or years – as their careers rise and fade. It is, in a way, a compliment if their name survives long enough on that list to actually be turned into a story in the paper. If they were deemed of little interest, Middle Englanders would never read about these people – not in the Daily Mail newspaper (the MailOnline bar for what constitutes ‘a celebrity’, on the other hand, is millimetres high – space, of course, is not at such a premium on the web). Dacre gave his diagnoses, and the Femail and features editors would scurry back to their desks elbowing each other on the way as they clutched the remains of what made it through conference.

  The names would change but the knife strokes would remain pretty much the same. ‘You have to understand,’ said former Femail ‘Jo’, ‘it can be very subtle. You didn’t actually have to be told anything but then it’d be “The Daily Mail Hatchet Job”. Basically, and I’m not joking, you’d actually just get a piece of paper sometimes. A writer would go to the toilet and come back and there’d be a cutting about Patsy Kensit or somebody . . . there was a certain group that they were obsessed with for a while, Patsy Kensit was one of them, Zoe Ball too, after she had her affair – and there’d just be a cutting on your desk and you would know you had to pull together someth
ing for Saturday, and it was always laced with a degree of misogyny. And you just had to – you didn’t need instruction, that’s the thing – you just knew what they wanted, this slight pulling apart of someone’s life.’55

  Patsy Kensit’s life was a fascination for Femail for many years, especially after she married Oasis frontman Liam Gallagher. Her tabloid life can literally be laid out in Daily Mail headlines: from ‘Life with the Oasis stars: Cocaine binges, all-night parties, porn and infidelity’,56 and ‘The egos, drugs and drink that killed Patsy’s marriage’,57 to ‘Maneater Patsy meets her match, as TV football pundit Ally McCoist turns his back on their affair, how the predatory Miss Kensit gambled and lost’,58 and on to ‘From Man-Eater To Matron . . . No longer pursued by men, no more the toast of the town, even TV roles are drying up for Patsy, single mum and very much alone.’59 These Patsy headlines may read like vindictive character assassination but it was rarely ever anything personal for the Femails who actually wrote these pieces.

  It did, though, eventually get to be too much for Femail ‘Jo’, after several years spent running a scalpel up and down the lives of the rich and famous. She quit altogether. ‘In the end, I just couldn’t do it any more,’ she told the author. ‘But there was always a degree of distance for me. I like to think I never wrote anything that I felt was horrifically unfair, I guess you can argue that it’s all a question of degrees. I think the only way I could do it was to retain a degree of neutrality – actually, you could argue this is worse – but it was very much “press button A”. It was a formula. You just needed a couple of pieces of new information, a couple of fresh quotes and the rest was a bit of a cuts job [old stories kept in a file in the paper’s library] laced through with this sort of Daily Mail style. I didn’t whip myself up, I would remain completely neutral – you just knew what was expected – and it was like assembling the pieces on a production line. And then sort of knit it all together, and sprinkle a bit of Daily Mail magic dust over the whole thing.

  ‘So, it was never a visceral “let’s get them!” thing – not for me. But that’s what’s utterly fascinating about it. If you were a success at it – you didn’t really need to be briefed or told anything. You just knew, as I say, just from a cutting being dropped on your desk and you’d be “right then, that’s my project for the week, is it?”’60

  Sometimes a Mailman or Femail would be in the dangerous position of actually meeting the famous target and finding they really liked them and, being human, that fact could filter into the words filed into the machine – a dangerous career move at the Daily Mail. One time ‘Elsa’ was told to interview a celebrity who had been paid to speak to the paper – these payments would give a writer permission, some staffers say, to have ‘a more intimate go’.

  ‘The trouble is, when you’re the person actually writing this stuff up, once you have spent any amount of time with most human beings – unless they are, literally, a psychopath – most people are really quite nice. There are very, very few complete wankers – out in the real world, there’s not that many utterly dreadful people. So, I came back from interviewing this lovely person and I injected the correct notes of cynicism into the piece but I hadn’t wielded the axe, you know. I was very fair and warm to them. And I remember my editor coming over and saying, “This just isn’t working, it isn’t strong enough.” And I found myself defending them, and the boss just said,“If you like these people, you’re working in the wrong fucking place,” and walked away.’61

  Another Femail ‘favourite’ whose life has been splayed out in headlines on his big desk for almost as long as Paul Dacre has been the Mail ’s editor is Victoria Beckham, Spice Girl and spouse to former England football captain David Beckham. Posh had craved attention after watching the American TV series Fame as a seven-year-old, but that little girl could not have realized that the price would be headlines such as ‘Last night Victoria Beckham looked painfully thin in another tiny dress. Today, Femail asks . . . What IS wrong with Posh?’62 The piece goes on to quote an anorexia expert, two mothers, a doctor and even includes ‘the man’s view’, by chubby and bespectacled future parliamentary sketch writer Quentin Letts, who thought Posh looked like a ‘scrawny chicken’.63

  Victoria Beckham didn’t kill, maim or even call anyone a ‘cunt’ in order to attain her fame, yet one attack, in the spring of 2004 after her husband’s alleged affair with a PA came to light, would have been more befitting of a serial killer – it wasn’t even Posh who was cheating. It was simply an old-fashioned beating in the playground by a school bully from Australia called Amanda Platell, the Mail ’s columnist and former Tory Party ‘spin doctor’, who offered her own ‘provocative view of why the Sisterhood had no sympathy for Mrs Beckham’ under the headline ‘Why We Women Hate Posh’:

  My first reaction on hearing that David Beckham may have been playing away with his former PA Rebecca Loos was, who could blame the poor soul? And I was not alone . . . When she [Victoria] started dating the brilliant yet shy David Beckham, she was like a spider devouring her mate after sex. She consumed him and then fed off his talent and his fame. She’s still doing it, and that gets to the crux of why women hate her . . . As a female role model, she is past parody; as a model of physical beauty, she is past plastic. Victoria is greedy, grafting and graceless. Everything about her is fake – the tan, the breasts, the lips, the nails, the hair. The only real thing about Victoria Beckham is her ambition. And that’s why women can’t stand her, and why we are all siding with David. That girl had it coming. She’s as brittle as her acrylic nails and about as Posh, too.64

  Platell’s pasting of Posh was too much even for the most fearsome Femail of all, Lynda Lee-Potter, who reached down into a cloud of pulled hair and broken fingernails to offer poor Posh a hand up off the ground. Lee-Potter was a housewife, not a pugilist, and would, fairly often, even regret what she had written and apologize publicly on her page – she seemed to know, mostly, where the line was. As well she should of course – she had helped draw it in the first place.

  Victoria Beckham has had a humiliating and devastating time, but in public she’s never faltered. She’s put on an outwardly proud and glossy face, and it’s been said that all women hate her, but I certainly don’t.65

  Lynda Lee-Potter was adored by Paul Dacre perhaps even more so than by the man who had created them both, David English.66 But some outside the Daily Mail fence couldn’t understand how the nation’s deadliest housewife could possibly ‘know’ all the things that appeared on her page, and disagreed with her flexible opinions on just about everything.

  ‘She drives me barmy,’ said journalist and future Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson in 2003, as he sent Lynda tumbling down into Room 101, the BBC programme into which interviewees get to banish their pet hates.

  I suppose it’s really professional jealousy – she just seems to have fantastic natural insight into her subjects. And I don’t understand how she knows quite so much about human relationships – particularly the details of marital relationships.

  Her ‘brilliant interpolations about peoples’ natures’ reminded Boris of a massively detailed Victorian-era model of a dinosaur – constructed upon the flimsiest of evidence. ‘She has not much to go on, just a fragment of bone or whatever, but she produces this great beast and I don’t know how she does it . . . How can she know this stuff about people’s private lives? How can she? The answer is that she doesn’t,’ he bumbled, ‘she can’t possibly. She doesn’t. It’s inconceivable that she does. It’s bluff, it’s bluff.’67

  The world’s first ever Femail herself still bears the scars from Lee-Potter’s pen. Shirley Conran had left the Mail shortly before it turned tabloid and went on to find fame with a book on how to minimize housework called Superwoman, plus a raunchy bestselling novel called Lace. Lynda and Shirley had both worked for the Mail at the end of the 1960s, and there was bad blood between these women.

  ‘Lynda Lee-Potter was a sort of showbiz writer, an interviewer, when I was on the Mail.
But she was on features, she wasn’t anything to do with me,’ Conran told the author. ‘Then she trashed me about ten times in her column and kept my ribs in her bottom drawer. She wrote something like “I would rather scrub London airport at dawn than ever work for Shirley Conran again.” Well, she never had worked for me – she worked for the features editor. I was quite sore about Lynda Lee-Potter for a while.’

  Some of Conran’s former Mail staff, the first ever Femails, wrote to the Mail to defend Conran, which the paper published on the Letters page. ‘And from then on she had her knife in for me. She said I was too fat to be wearing trousers when I was about to go on a book-signing tour . . . I was just on her blacklist. She was very good in her way, perfect for the Mail – just as in Western films you hired a gun; Lynda was a first-class, hired bitch.’68

  It was, however, all coming to an end for Lynda Lee-Potter, and Dacre-era Femails such as Amanda Platell, who’d given Posh that ‘relentless savaging’, would step in to try and fill the void.

  Every Tuesday at 10 a.m., the Mail ’s single most important voice would sit with Dacre in his office and they would gently discuss what she was going to put in her column the next day. The last piece of copy she’d handed her editor was in exactly the same vein as she’d started when she was a junior feature writer on the old broadsheet Mail – it was a warm interview69 with TV presenter Gloria Hunniford about the death from cancer of her daughter, the TV presenter Caron Keating. Lee-Potter had left Dacre’s office complaining of a headache: she never returned. The pain turned out to be caused by a brain tumour. Six weeks after her defence of Mrs Beckham, the message ‘Lynda Lee-Potter is away’ began to appear where her words had once been.