Mail Men

by Adrian Addison

  ‘Christ almighty,’ added ‘Jo’, ‘have you ever tried to wrestle a size 22 woman into a wrap dress and kitten heels? I had to do it all the time! They might have an incredibly vivid story but it doesn’t matter if they don’t look right. The make-up artist and hair – they’re enormous budgets – and they’re being sent every day, several times a day, to several stories. That’s happening every day of the week; there’ll be at least two or three out there right now, on jobs for Femail and features. You know, “ju-jing” people up. And that ethos, for sure, stems from Paul Dacre; this story will only be meaningful if he thinks it’s “someone like us”.’11

  Sometimes reality bites back, of course, such as the time when the paper paid a lot of money for the people inside one big story of the day – the central character of which, unfortunately, happened to be splattered in tattoos. The paper’s make-up girls did an amazing job in turning this man into somebody suitable for the pages of the Daily Mail, and the editor didn’t notice that he wasn’t his kind of man as he selected the best photographs that night for the paper. ‘They’d put him in the blue shirt and the chinos – which is the default setting for the kind of “let’s make this man look middle class” – and some kind of chino-style blazer,’ chuckled ‘Penny’. ‘And then Dacre saw him on Daybreak [a morning TV show] two days after we’d run our piece, in all his tattooed glory and went crazy because he hadn’t realized quite how much he simply wasn’t really “one of us”!’12

  Columnists too can cause a bit of a conundrum when Dacre makes up his paper; they are paid a lot of money, of course, and are guaranteed precious space. But placing those opinions on a page can be akin to laying a ticking stink bomb on a page that is sure to go off in the morning – if not on the breakfast table of Mail readers (very few Mail readers, actually, ever complain about their paper), then certainly in the newsrooms of the Guardian and the BBC, and these days lead to a cacophony of agitated tweets on Twitter. Probably the most famous in recent years, however, was not even placed in the paper by Dacre’s own hand in October 2009 – he had taken a rare few hours’ leave from the paper, as he’d promised to treat his wife to a night at the opera. Somebody else signed off columnist Jan Moir’s comments about the death of Boyzone singer Stephen Gately that evening. Gately, who’d been ‘outed’ as a gay man by The Sun in 1999, was found dead on the sofa of his house in Majorca by his boyfriend and a man the couple had met the previous evening in a nightclub. The singer had, it seems, smoked a joint that night – the supposed threat from cannabis is an ongoing Mail obsession; its health risks are debatable but one spliff does not knock a man dead. Likewise, two men – even three, four, fifty-five – having protected sex doesn’t tend to kill the participants; though the thought of such abominable acts could give an old Mail reader in the shires a heart attack. Gately was only thirty-three but died from an undetected heart condition. But this didn’t stop ‘Fleet Street’ – not just the Mail – commenting on his ‘lifestyle’ before his family even had the chance to bury their boy.

  ‘All the official reports point to a natural death, with no suspicious circumstances,’ wrote Moir, who is not a coroner nor a qualified physician.

  The Gately family are – perhaps understandably – keen to register their boy’s demise on the national consciousness as nothing more than a tragic accident . . . But, hang on a minute. Something is terribly wrong with the way this incident has been shaped and spun into nothing more than an unfortunate mishap on a holiday weekend, like a broken teacup in the rented cottage. Consider the way it has been largely reported, as if Gately had gently keeled over at the age of 90 in the grounds of the Bide-a-Wee rest home while hoeing the sweet pea patch. The sugar coating on this fatality is so saccharine-thick that it obscures whatever bitter truth lies beneath. Healthy and fit 33-year-old men do not just climb into their pyjamas and go to sleep on the sofa, never to wake up again. Whatever the cause of death is, it is not, by any yardstick, a natural one.13

  The Press Complaints Commission – the press monitor of which Dacre chaired the Code Committee – received a record 25,000 complaints, its website buckling under the weight. And Stephen Fry wrote on Twitter: ‘I gather a repulsive nobody writing in a paper no one of any decency would be seen dead with has written something loathesome and inhumane.’14 Guardian writer and broadcaster Charlie Brooker added: ‘Jan Moir’s rant about the Boyzone star Stephen Gately is a gratuitous piece of gay-bashing . . . I’m still struggling to absorb the sheer scope of its hateful idiocy. It’s like gazing through a horrid little window into an awesome universe of pure blockheaded spite.’15

  Dacre admitted that the piece could have used a bit of ‘judicious sub-editing’ but insisted the column was fair comment. ‘I would die in a ditch to defend any of my columnists’ rights to say what they wish, and my right to suggest that occasional sentences or words could be adjusted . . . Ms Moir, who used to work for the Guardian by the way, hasn’t a homophobic bone in her body.’ Dacre’s paper later published an attack on Moir’s words by another columnist, Janet Street-Porter, who ‘profoundly disagreed’ with Moir’s piece.16

  Newspaper columnists are ten a penny but great columnists – the ones that are utterly in tune with the readers of their paper (though they’d often be completely out of place on other organs) – are incredibly hard to find. The three pillars of English’s new Daily Mail were gone – Wooldridge and Dempster had followed Lee-Potter into the great newsroom in the sky in 2007 (a later English signing, Keith Waterhouse, also joined them in 2009).

  Dacre hasn’t shown quite the same talent-spotting gifts as his predecessor. Richard Littlejohn is the current columnist said by insiders to best reflect Dacre’s own views but Littlejohn is a Sun creation really – it was on Rupert’s red-top that the policeman’s son from Essex first made his name as a columnist in the early 1990s (and he actually went back to The Sun, only to return again). ‘Paul would be the first to admit, I’m sure,’ said one insider, ‘that you have to make best use of the talent you have at hand. Ian Wooldridges and Lynda Lee-Potters don’t grow on trees.’17

  Lynda Lee-Potter has been the hardest to replace – Alison Pearson did it for a while but she left and went to the Telegraph. Dacre gave the paper’s literary editor, Sandra Parsons, a bash, against the advice of senior colleagues, and she didn’t last. ‘She didn’t have that “voice”,’ an insider told the author. ‘She didn’t have the warmth. A columnist is a kind of weird alchemy, isn’t it? You have to be consistent yet surprising. That’s incredibly hard to pull off.’18

  Mum-of-two Sarah Vine is the current choice as Lynda Lee-Potter’s replacement. ‘It makes me chuckle now that Sarah Vine has been brought in,’ said ‘Jo’. ‘What’ll be fascinating to watch is how long that great love affair between Vine and the powers-that-be lasts. As with almost all love affairs, it will almost certainly sour.’19 Indeed. Lynda Lee-Potter was a housewife with a doctor husband who was the son of an air marshal – but Jeremy Lee-Potter was never a prospective Prime Minister. Vine’s future as the Mail ’s ‘Wednesday witch’, media pundits thought, was on rocky ground in July 2016 when Prime Minister David Cameron stood down over Britain’s exit vote from the EU. Vine’s Tory MP husband, Justice Minister Michael Gove, betrayed Brexit frontman Boris Johnson and put his own name forward instead to become Prime Minister. Gove, once the news editor of The Times – who admitted during his bid for PM that ‘whatever charisma is I don’t have it’ – didn’t make the final round of voting and was promptly sacked by incoming Prime Minister Theresa May, while the man he’d ‘stabbed in the back’, Boris Johnson, was made Foreign Secretary.

  Gove had been egged on by his wife, it seems, who misfired an embarrassing email to him and his advisers into the inbox of a member of the public in which she’d claimed her boss would support his bid to get a top job in any government led by Boris.

  Crucially, the membership will not have the necessary reassurance to back Boris, neither will Dacre/Murdoch, who instinctively dislike Boris but t
rust your ability enough to support a Boris Gove ticket. Do not concede any ground. Be your stubborn best.

  Several newspapers published the email and Dacre backed Theresa May – not Boris Johnson nor Michael Gove. Whether Vine lasts as long as Lee-Potter is yet to be seen, but she most certainly is ‘one of us’ in the internal Daily Mail sense, as pretty much all staff have to be – or at least pretend to be – if they want to keep working on his newspaper.

  One female features journalist, for example, was poached after one of Dacre’s most senior Mailmen was impressed with the words under her byline on a broadsheet newspaper. But she didn’t fit in, insiders claim, with the Mail ’s own idea of what a female looked like. ‘She’s a brilliant writer,’ said ‘Jo’, ‘but she was very much not a Daily Mail “poppet”, if you know what I mean; there’s a certain look to most Daily Mail female writers, they’re all very well groomed and usually quite attractive – of a certain “type”, I think you can fill in the rest – and this girl was quite loud and bolshy. And it wasn’t very long before she was gone. Your face has to fit there, no question. Everything has to fit the template . . . even the people!’20

  ‘I think that sense of you’re either with us or against us runs incredibly strong on the Mail,’ former lead Femail ‘Penny’ told the author. ‘This sense of loyalty is ferocious. You’re either one of them or you’re not. And if you’re one of them you’re expected to conform to a largely unwritten set of rules, and that’s why it’s got that slightly Mafia-style feel . . .! Well, nobody writes the rules down for the Mafia either, do they? They’re just understood in a very basic way and, like the Mafia, they are subtly reinforced, albeit not by violence. It’s interesting, they’re clearly very aware of who they want to be on the inside of the fortress.’21

  Another Femail executive was put under so much strain that she put on a lot of weight.

  ‘You can’t show weakness there – once they sniff it, you’re fucked,’ said ‘Elsa’. ‘It’s a kind of collective effort. I think if Dacre undermines you in conference, the others sense weakness and it’s kind of “nature red in tooth and claw”. And she was just too nice for the Mail. I remember thinking from the very beginning when she first commissioned me, “you’re too nice” – she was just so eminently reasonable – and I thought . . . “You’re never gonna last.” And she left very abruptly. She went for lunch one day, and just never came back.’22

  A granite-hard Femail editor called Lisa Collins, who was thought by some to have what it took to actually be the Daily Mail ’s first female editor, fell out of favour with the supreme Mail being in the end. ‘I saw Lisa Collins in tears in the toilet a couple of times,’ said ‘Jo’. ‘And she was tough, she took no prisoners. I would just see her under enormous stress, you know. Barking orders. And it was all a legacy of the conflicts in the conferences, where it all stems from. The demands that were made in conference would filter out and filter down. I never attended conference but you didn’t need to because you felt it all around you. All the time.’23

  Collins left the paper despite Dacre giving her the relatively cushy job of editor of Weekend, the Saturday magazine Dacre had founded.

  Of an evening, the Mail ’s editorial cycle rises to a crescendo in the newsroom as the conductor waves his baton pencil manically in the air and stabs at copy – stories are killed, pictures are chosen, headlines have been written and approved – and most of the pages begin to be battered into place. But it is ‘seat of the pants’ stuff most evenings as edition time rapidly approaches – it can only be left so late until it becomes a real panic; if the paper runs late, the presses run late, the trucks leave late . . .

  ‘Dacre often won’t even ask what the front-page splash is until about 8 p.m.,’ said ‘Mo’. ‘And whenever any of the senior execs complain about the hours or threaten to leave he always says that he doesn’t want people to work late, to be exhausted etc. . . . but it’s not true. If you try and leave at, say, 8 p.m. and he sees you he’ll make a big point of shouting it out across the newsroom, “Oh look, Mo is going home! Nice of you to pop in.” You know, that sort of thing. Dacre often doesn’t decide what he wants to go on the features pages until 8 p.m. too, then at 9 p.m. he is screaming at the production editor for being late off stone.’24

  ‘The paper that eventually emerged . . . would be viewed as a disaster until [Dacre] got involved in it,’ said senior Mail hand ‘Sean’. ‘I think he really saw himself as coming to the rescue: it was shit in everybody else’s hands until he got involved himself at nine o’clock at night.’25

  Dacre stays until the first edition has been sent after 10 p.m., when he strolls down the ‘corridor of power’ for his briefcase and jacket and heads to the lift, presses the button and goes down into the car park and off into the dark night by chauffeur-driven car . . . only to phone his back bench when he gets home, complaining bitterly about stories in the first editions of other papers that have been couriered hot-off-the-press straight to his house. The Mail is clearly what he – not him alone, sure, but certainly more than any other human being – feels. Editing the Daily Mail is a visceral, emotional experience for Paul Dacre. And he is in total command of his product after a quarter of a century as editor. He loves what he does, he loves his Daily Mail.

  I’m blessed to have some of the most talented journalists in Fleet Street around me . . . I think they’d say he’s a hard bastard but he leads from the front. And that he works as hard as them and possibly harder. And that’s fair. I’d hope they’d say that anyway.26

  Well, some would and some wouldn’t. Some former Mailmen and Femails still carry the scars from their Mail days. It got way, way too much in the end for long-term reporter ‘Cyn’, and, whether Dacre worked harder than her or not, he is the man she blames.

  ‘They were dubbed the “crying steps” by the young writers,’ she told the author, ‘a depressing, grey fire escape through a set of double doors leading off the Femail department in the Kensington offices of the Daily Mail. At some point nearly every day when I was there one of the journalists – female usually – would quietly push open the doors, sit on the steps and sob. At the very least they would walk down the three floors to the fresh air and freedom of Derry Street just to try and shake off their sadness for a brief moment before walking slowly back up to their desks. Perhaps they still do, for there is no doubt the same, insipid nasty bullying culture remains on the paper. The reason? Editor-in-chief Paul Dacre. He is still setting a culture of bullying and hate in the building. Yes, “hate”. An atmosphere of insecurity, bitchiness and fear permeates the entire paper. It’s a hideous, joyless place to work. His distaste for large parts of the world – working women, gays, immigrants to name just a few – will come back to bite him.’27

  ‘Cyn’ quit and senior Femail ‘Penny’ did too, though she feels less emotional about the impact the Daily Mail and its editor had on her life personally. There is no bitterness, just a slightly stunned curiosity at her experience of working with the man.

  ‘What I find fascinating about him is the disconnect between the world and the value system he espouses and the way he appears to relate to people day to day. There is an enormous disconnect, isn’t there? I mean, calling people cunts to their faces and instilling terror and yet, in your paper, you are constantly rolling out spreads of “here’s a street in the 1950s when Britain was a better place where everyone respected each other”. For a clearly enormously intelligent man, I find it fascinating that he . . . the kind of recognition of the slightly schizophrenic nature of his approach to life. He must see it.’28

  There are signs, however, that Dacre isn’t always as overbearingly confident as he seems. One legend about him relates how he emerged from his lair as the edition went to press one evening unhappy about the main op-ed feature. The assistant editor in charge of features (in most versions this is Richard Addis) sat through the normal thirty minutes of blistering insults and broken pencils as Dacre scratched holes in the proofs and etched his own words th
rough the paper and on to the shaking desktop beneath. As the emotional storm subsided and the page was sent to press, the battered underling is supposed to have stopped Dacre and said quietly but firmly, ‘You are mad, you know, Paul.’ Dacre said nothing.

  The next morning at 8 a.m., so the story goes, the telephone rang on the assistant editor’s desk. ‘Come and see the editor please.’ All signs indicated a summary firing for incompetence the night before for the features chief. Insubordination . . . and a direct, public insult to the editor. The normal pre-dismissal words followed when he arrived at Dacre’s room: ‘Sit down and shut the door.’

  Then came a surprising twist. Dacre’s brow was said to have wrinkled up; his entire face shrouded with pain and doubt, he said: ‘Look. You know what you said last night? I’ve been thinking about it . . .

  ‘I’m not really mad, am I?’

  18

  The Death of the Newspaper

  It’s rude to publish an obituary before there is actually even a corpse to bury or burn but still: the end appears truly nigh for ink on newsprint – the numbers say it all. In May 2016, the Daily Mail newspaper sold 1,551,4301 copies a day – a full million less than at its peak at the end of 2003. Its circulation graph is pointing inexorably to the grave, shedding at least 4 per cent of its readers every year: over 60,000 fewer copies a day – that’s an annual loss of more than the whole daily sale of the Independent of 55,000 when it ceased printing in March 2016. Sunny Harmsworth’s first ever Daily Mail 120 years earlier on 4 May 1896 sold 397,215 copies. Crudely – and, indeed, conservatively – if the numbers behave the same, the Daily Mail will have fallen below this level by its 150th birthday in May 2046.2

  ‘Every Wednesday at about 6 p.m., I, in concert with other editors, receive a chart of Fleet Street’s circulation performance for the previous week, on a year by year comparison,’ Dacre said in a speech.