Mail Men

by Adrian Addison

  Lynda Lee-Potter died in October 2004, aged sixty-nine, on a Wednesday – the day of the week on which her column had appeared for three decades.

  16

  The British Invasion

  The Daily Mail at birth was itself an innovation: Sunny Harmsworth combined elements from his magazines and the ‘new’ journalism of his day to create something new in a fusty newspaper environment. And it took off. Later, he was the first to spot that broadsheets were physically just too big for the train and created the tabloid size. Every innovative step the Mail has ever taken seems to have somehow been heralded in some way by Sunny Harmsworth. And he spotted one more thing over a distant horizon that would be the future shape of his Daily Mail: the online newspaper.

  Sunny often talked of a thing called the ‘simultaneous newspaper’1 – the same paper, essentially, published across the whole of the USA and Great Britain. Why not the world? ‘Given the man, the capital, the organization and the occasion, there seems to be no reason why one or two newspapers may not presently dominate,’ he wrote in 1901. ‘Is it not obvious that the power of such a paper might become such as we have not yet seen in the history of the Press? I am convinced that the press has its best days to come.’2

  By 2016 his paper was indeed a global phenomenon called MailOnline, the most visited English-language newspaper website in the world.

  Yet the Daily Mail was awfully late to the digital party – perhaps not surprisingly, seeing as its editor-in-chief doesn’t even have a computer on his desk. Everything is printed out for him to read on paper – even, reportedly, his emails. ‘He actually does have a computer in a corner but he never uses it ever,’ said Mail insider ‘Sean’. ‘It’s three yards from his actual desk. He does, however, have a big computer screen off to his left which constantly scrolls through MailOnline all day and the poor old news editor is then summoned in if he’s missing something that Paul sees four feet down the home page. He doesn’t do email at all but relies on his PA Lesley to send emails on his behalf.’3

  Dacre didn’t think much of the Web threat in 1999 in his monotone speech at the Mail ’s annual staff frolic at Hampton Court the year after David English and Vere Harmsworth died. These were the days when the Mail ’s circulation was still rising towards its ultimate high. ‘A lot of people say that the internet is the future for newspapers,’ he told his staff. ‘Well, I say to that: bullshit.com.’4

  Five years later and the Mail ’s digital offering was generated by a massive staff of six:5 Mail boys and girls who essentially reproduced a few of the paper’s stories online. But by 2006 it was perfectly clear that the World Wide Web was now very much an existential threat to the future of the Daily Mail and all newspapers; something had to be done. And it turned out that those half-dozen or so youngsters in the corner cutting and pasting those pages were seeds for the future, perhaps even more so than Femail had been almost forty years before. The Daily Mail ’s limp digital offering needed to be retooled and refuelled; the tiny little editorial backwater required a period of sustained investment if the Daily Mail name was to live on. And young Viscount Rothermere began spending big in the mid-2000s.

  Jonathan Harmsworth had already proven himself willing to take bold risks with the family firm, not long after his dad died in 1998; it was clear to the brand-new Press Lord that free newspapers being pushed into people’s hands were about to become a fact of city life in London and beyond. Harmsworth decided that if his company didn’t launch a free sheet, his competitors would. So he asked Dacre and his team to create Metro. It took a huge bite out of the company’s Evening Standard but it’s much better, surely, to have these clumps of flesh digested in-house than by some Swedish player that was in the market at the time or by Rupert Murdoch, who had also spotted the opening. Metro became hugely profitable but it also, probably, restricted the Mail ’s growth potential. The fourth viscount was clearly following in his father’s footsteps – Vere had risked all by going tabloid. And Jonathan sacrificed his Evening Standard to fight off the freesheets (the first Associated newspaper Dacre ever edited was sold off to a Russian businessman, former KGB agent Alexander Lebedev, in 2009 for one English pound – and itself soon became a freesheet).

  ‘I think Jonathan and Vere are quite similar,’ Vyvyan Harmsworth – who also works with the current Lord Rothermere on the family’s charitable foundation – told the author. ‘Jonathan is very astute and he’s got his finger firmly on the pulse. And being a younger man, from a totally different generation, he probably understands how the media works better than you could have expected his father to have understood it. He took over very young, in a very difficult time and it’s a very difficult job. He realized that the world was moving forward and he’s kept in step with it.’6

  Maybe the ultimate sacrifice will eventually be the Daily Mail newspaper itself, in favour of the vast global market online. ‘For Associated, the whole is very much larger than the sum of its parts,’ said Dacre. ‘Similarly with MailOnline. Yes, the Mail was late to the internet revolution – though through our tardiness, we avoided losing the millions that others expended on the web in those early days . . . But there’s money in those MailOnline figures and, again, hopefully the whole will be bigger than the sum of the parts.’7

  Rothermere accepted that it would take years for MailOnline to generate enough cash to pay its own way – never mind turn a profit – and this brand-new twenty-first-century Daily Mail vessel clearly had to have a skipper who wasn’t phobic about computers.

  Mailman Martin Peter Clarke took the helm in 2006; he was given his own budget and his own staff. MailOnline was to be an entirely separate operation from the newspaper from the start – mostly to protect the mothership Daily Mail newspaper, the Mail chiefs fearing that the energy of the paper’s staff would be dissipated in the infinite space online (a fundamental mistake made by bean-counter managers on other British newspapers).

  Clarke was born in Dartford,8 a town to the south-east of London, in August 1964 – just as local boys Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were giving blues music back to white America with their Rolling Stones. Dacre’s digital shadow comes from much lower down the social pecking order than the comfortable middle classes of his master; his dad, Robert, was an accounting machine mechanic when he married mail order firm worker Doris. Their boy went to Gravesend Grammar before heading west to the University of Bristol, where he was editor of the fiercely left-wing student paper Bacus.

  Bacus soon got in trouble, however, over a story about a secret strip show at a university building ‘where the performer allegedly “undressed one unfortunate, and very drunk, member of the 25-strong gathering intent on showing him what audience participation was all about”’. The story was retold in the university’s current magazine nonesuch in the winter issue of 2008:

  The front-page report was variously described as ‘totally untrue’, ‘grossly inaccurate’ and ‘fictitious’. Bacus was now regularly getting out of hand and the Union began to question its £3,500 funding of the mischievous paper . . . Thus in 1985, Martin Clarke (now BA 1985) quit from his position as editor after only one month in the job, when the Union refused to guarantee funding for the paper beyond Christmas.9

  Clarke graduated from Bristol University the same year as that other Mailman Tony Gallagher – the brutal former news editor who went on to become deputy editor of the Mail, editor of the Daily Telegraph and editor-in-chief of The Sun. Clarke went on to work for a press agency in Bristol before joining the Mail in 1987 at the age of twenty-three. Clarke, and later Gallagher, were among the raft of Mail boys who arrived in the dying days of Fleet Street when Sir David English was still editor but actually matured into Mailmen under Paul Dacre. Unlike Stewart Payne and others from the previous generation, who viewed Dacre as far more comical than he ever intended to be, to this new intake Dacre was the boss.

  For years Clarke was a ‘picture taster’, the junior Mailman who’d trawl through thousands of wire and staffer photographs and se
lect a dozen or so for the picture editor to present to the editor in conference. Few hacks rise to be senior editors from the picture desk but Martin Clarke was keener – and more explosive – than most. Former Daily Mail photographer Clive Limpkin recalled how this young junior desk hand briefed him to get a shot of Susan Hampshire outside her Chelsea home – the actress knew the Mail were after her and did not want her picture taken.

  ‘Martin told me to get there “at the crack of dawn” and when I arrived around 6 a.m. her car had already gone so, realizing I’d missed her, I went for a coffee and read the papers. When I told the picture editor that Hampshire must have driven off in the middle of the night, Martin overheard and said it wasn’t in the middle of the night . . . as he’d checked the mews on his way into work at 5 a.m., when her car was still outside her home. It was the first – and only – time I’ve ever experienced a picture desk man show such dedication. And it was not lost on the management – who soon moved him upwards to higher things.’10

  After the picture desk, Clarke spent time inside Dacre’s features department and the news desk before leaving the Mail fold in 1995 to further his career as news editor on the Daily Mirror. ‘I always got on well with him,’ one of his former Mirror reporters told the author, ‘but he did drive the newsroom very hard when he came here.’11 Clarke didn’t drive the Mirror reporters hard for very long, though; he earned the tag ‘Mickey Rourke’ after his stint at the Mirror – as he was only the paper’s news editor for ‘9½ Weeks’.12

  He returned to the Mail – up in Glasgow, as editor of a new Scottish edition at the age of thirty; Paul Dacre spotted, rightly, the potential for circulation growth outside the Mail ’s traditional heartlands in the south of England and also an opportunity to nurture this young talent. Scotland was a tough, cut-throat newspaper game with too many papers chasing too few readers when Clarke first crossed the border. He cut the Mail ’s price and quickly trebled its north-of-the-border sales (from a very low base). He also nailed the Mail ’s core market in Scotland by toning down its Middle England bias and making it more palatable to a certain kind of Scot: middle-aged, middle-class women.

  Sir David English’s former features editor Sue Douglas was watching the growth of this new Mail incarnation from fifty miles away in Edinburgh, where, in 1997, she worked as a senior executive for hotel billionaire twins Frederick and David Barclay – who had recently acquired the Scotsman, Scotland’s fusty old ‘newspaper of record’ (the Barclays now own the Telegraph). Douglas, with the Barclay brothers’ top media man Andrew Neil, appointed Clarke its editor.

  ‘He “Mail-ized” it and made it accessible,’ Douglas told the author. ‘He attacked that terribly posh Scottish “Edinburrrrr” attitude on the Scotsman, which was just not gonna wash with us.’13

  Clarke began to earn a reputation on the Scotsman as a truly brutal old-school ‘Fleet Street’ editor after senior writers and sub-editors found themselves ‘being showered with expletives’. The Scotsman’s picture editor quit after being ordered to get better pictures from his ‘fuckin’ monkeys’; Clarke thought its investigation unit was a ‘crock of shit’ and disbanded it, so its boss quit. Associate editor Lesley Riddoch – whose articles kept getting spiked – brought a claim for constructive dismissal.14 She was awarded £11,000 in an out-of-court settlement. She later told the author: ‘I met him after a Press Fund lunch a few years later and went up to thank him for the £11k. He said, “You always were a ballsy bastard – do you want a drink?”

  ‘I hadn’t quite counted on that but couldn’t refuse. We spoke for about two minutes – or rather I listened while he told me what a “total fuck-up” the Scotsman had been, then he abruptly left. I turned round and saw the entire Scottish press corps watching. Apparently they fully expected one of us to deck the other.’15

  ‘He was a total bastard,’ one hack told the Guardian in 1998, ‘a maniac who seemed to enjoy making our lives hell.’16 ‘The stories were always “mince” or “shit” and a typical conference might end, “You are all fucking cretins and this is all crap,”’ another hack added. ‘He once said to me: “You’ve got to go and shout at the bastards or they won’t respect you.”’17

  Clarke’s staff may have felt like a monster had been let loose in their newsroom but his boss Sue Douglas thought he was marvellous. ‘Look, at least Martin’s a character,’ she told the author. ‘Most editors these days are not. They’re just bland, boring corporate types. Martin is a character, and I liked that. And I liked the fact that he had a real reputation and a bit of madness, and people loved him or hated him. Martin Clarke is utterly driven, and ambitious beyond belief . . . He really cared about getting there and so, yeah, he would trample on people all the way. And I suppose the most difficult thing about him is he’s got a real temper and people didn’t like that. But it wasn’t the nasty bullying of David English. Martin would just fly completely off the handle.’18

  Myths began to merge with the man, the best of which being one yarn in which a rock-hard former soldier-turned-journalist didn’t exactly cower at the shoes of this red-faced Mail-trained bully. According to a profile of Clarke in the Independent on Sunday in 2006, the tough Scot simply asked for a wee word in private. ‘The man took him outside,’ an insider told the paper, ‘and we understand he threatened to kill him. Whatever happened, Martin never spoke to him like that again.’

  One day when staffers went to investigate hammering against the wall of the editor’s office, they found Clarke bashing the phone against the walnut panelling – apparently in conversation with ‘Donald fucking Dewar’, the Secretary of State for Scotland. ‘He can be an energizing, dynamic force, but he’s not a stickler for accuracy and he’s not at all rigorous about detail,’ another Scotsman hack added. ‘He shook up a moribund newspaper,’ added another. ‘But in the course of it, he spent too much, drank too much, smoked sixty Silk Cut a day, went clubbing so much he was badly hung over in the morning, and alienated staff in the most dramatic way.’19

  Clarke also met and, in 1998, married Veronica – a local woman six years his senior who had three children to a previous husband she’d married when she was nineteen. The couple would later have a son of their own.20

  After a year or so at the Scotsman, the Mirror group hired Clarke back to become editor-in-chief of their Scottish Daily Record and Sunday Mail. The Mail monster roamed this newsroom with much the same impact as at the Scotsman. ‘I don’t run democracies,’ Clarke himself was quoted as saying in a profile in the Guardian, ‘I run newspapers.’21

  This is precisely the attitude that can get one a full Fleet Street editorship, and some hacks began to talk of Clarke fast becoming a national newspaper editor south of the border; he was soon called down to London by the Mirror’s bosses. However, instead of being given the editor’s chair at their Daily Mirror, Sunday Mirror or Sunday People, his employment with the group abruptly ended.22

  So he again returned home to Associated, relaunching and editing the newly acquired Ireland on Sunday in the same inimitable Mailman style and causing uproar among the staff. Clarke, apparently, would stub his cigarettes out on the carpet floor and ritually humiliate colleagues – howling out across the newsroom: ‘Are there any journalists out there or did they all win their jobs on the back of a Rice Krispies packet?’

  By the time he returned to London to be executive editor of the Mail on Sunday, he had done it again – circulation had trebled. Martin Clarke was the best, most battle-proven Mailman in Dacre’s stable of junior talent, and the fact that Clarke was appointed by Lord Rothermere to run the digital operation in 2006 was the surest sign of just how important the threat from the Web was now being taken.

  ‘He is a much more sophisticated human being than he appears,’ said a workmate from his days in Scotland. ‘I didn’t understand, until I met Paul Dacre, that everything Clarke did was modelled on the behaviour of his hero [Dacre]. He believed that was the way you did it.’23

  Clarke’s new office was kitted o
ut with a lot more computers than Dacre’s, and he used them to begin to fashion a website he’d like to read, not entirely unlike a digitally enhanced version of David English turning the old broadsheet Daily Mail into a ‘compact’. His picture desk credentials came to the fore from the start – his photograph-heavy approach was to reap the rewards for Viscount Rothermere when his revamped, replenished and reinvigorated MailOnline was relaunched.

  The shop window of Clarke’s digital Daily Mail is a single ‘tabloid’ front page. A very, very long tabloid front page. Story after story after story, photo after photo, just keeps rolling on by. It’s a scroll not a newspaper. If a snapshot of a moment’s digital Daily Mail ’s stories were printed out on tabloid-sized newsprint and rolled out down the street, it’d be well over sixty feet long. If Clarke climbed on to the roof above the sixth floor of Northcliffe House and dropped it – it would still curl up several times on the street below. And that’s before a reader has even clicked through to read a single story or look at a picture or perused the sport or Femail sections or even read their horoscope. It’s an approach that devours a massive amount of content; the digital Daily Mail publishes around 1,000 stories a day, and 10,000 pictures.24 ‘We come from a print background,’ Clarke told an ad:tech conference, ‘and we weren’t, to be frank, that sophisticated in digital terms when we started out. So we just kept it simple.’25

  It would be missing the point to view Clarke’s creation as just an old-school newspaper on the Web, a mistake those with a dead-tree kind of mind who run other newspaper groups are prone to make. As Clarke himself explained in a live video ‘hangout’ with Australian marketing website Mumbrella: