Mail Men

by Adrian Addison

  Let me tell you, it’s not a happy experience. I exaggerate not when I say ALL the figures, even those for papers cutting their prices, are worryingly in the red. We are, to use that exhausted cliché, in the middle of a perfect storm of horrifically rising newsprint prices, disappearing classified revenues, diminishing display advertising, the rise of cannibalistic and parasitic internet sites, the ubiquity of the frees and, now, most worryingly of all, readerships – their living standards reduced by the economic crisis – who have less and less disposable income to spend on newspapers.3

  The Daily Mail ’s circulation was at 2.3 million when Dacre delivered that Society of Editors speech in 2008, but it has been on the slide ever since. For an editor who was once used to selling newspapers in ever-increasing numbers, Dacre has had to content himself with the fact that the decline of his paper’s sales was not as great as that of some of its rivals. It is easy to blame the internet, but papers were already in trouble before the Web appeared.

  ‘The biggest conundrum for me, ten years ago [in 2003],’ said the current Lord Rothermere,

  was that we were seeing a decline in young people reading newspapers. It wasn’t anything to do with the internet, it was just a general apathy. They felt that newspapers didn’t speak to them or they were getting their news from the television, and so forth. And I think the internet, actually – and the proliferation of news as ‘content’ on the internet – has meant that young people are more likely to engage with our newspapers. So, it’s actually given us access to an entirely new generation.4

  MailOnline is the most visited English-language newspaper website in the world, with around 15 million or so unique visitors a day. And it is starting to generate cash to cover the decline in profits from the company’s newspapers. Daily Mail content is now read by more people – more young people – than ever before. And it’s always hiring: the old newspaper has a shrinking editorial staff of around 330, fewer than half MailOnline’s ever-expanding total staff of over 800.

  There has long been gossip in ‘Fleet Street’ about who will one day take over from Paul Dacre as editor of the Daily Mail. Whoever actually edits the newspaper day to day, few insiders would bet against Martin Clarke being the next supreme Mail being as editor-in-chief (or a more modern title for the same role). The chief digital Mailman already communicates directly with the proprietor, Viscount Rothermere. Clarke may have shed the Daily Mail tie in favour of washed-out jeans and refer to himself as a DJ instead of a conductor, but there is no denying he is Paul Dacre in digital form.

  Clarke’s brand of what he calls ‘journalism crack’5 has a long road ahead, and Clarke, as a personality, is far more David English than Paul Dacre. And his digital Daily Mail is, perhaps, exactly what a British tabloid newspaper would always have been had it not been kept in a straitjacket made from ink and paper. ‘Sometimes I think there are still things we do just because we used to be a newspaper and because that’s the way everyone’s always done it,’ said Clarke, ‘that we don’t need to do any more.’6

  Sunny Harmsworth spent big to make his Daily Mail what it was, and his heir, the fourth Viscount Rothermere, is spending big on MailOnline. The digital Daily Mail has many areas in which it can still grow – English is a dominant language in India and there are, of course, other languages; Spanish is vital not just in Spain and Latin America but in parts of the USA. MailOnline recently advertised for a Mandarin speaker to join the team7 – the capitalist British newspaper company even has a digital ‘content swap’ deal with the People’s Daily newspaper in China, the Communist Party’s official organ (MailOnline gets forty stories a week from the People’s Daily and vice versa).8 MailOnline already carries lots of video content to dress up stories – used in much the same way as photographs – and live blogs are regularly launched for breaking news and sporting events. Television too is migrating to the internet and Martin Clarke has plans for bespoke TV content.

  Jonathan Harmsworth, the fourth Viscount Rothermere, was asked by advertising journal Campaign where he thought his company’s ‘future power’ lay: ‘MailOnline,’ he replied. ‘I feel very optimistic about that. If we make the right calls and invest more in content and grow our traffic, it can be a bigger business than the Daily Mail – financially, in terms of reach, and everything else.’9

  A note of caution, though, would be wise around now – things can and do go wrong, horribly wrong; the Daily Express had a daily sale of 4,328,000 in 1961, and it now sells around 408,000.10 It took the Express half a century to shrink to a tenth of its size. The loyalty newspapers historically enjoyed from their readers is a lot harder to achieve these days online. Indeed, many people reading a story on a screen don’t know, and don’t care, what brand name is sitting there at the top – especially as they didn’t pay for it. Failure can come a lot faster in the digital world; social networking pioneer MySpace, for example, was way out in front of Facebook around a decade ago – at a time when the Daily Mail barely had a website at all. Myspace was sold to Rupert Murdoch and fell away. Even Google was once a digital minnow to the mighty Yahoo! (which was bought by Verizon in 2016).

  DMGT, the parent company, issued a profit warning to investors in May 2016 after a 29 per cent fall in profits in the six months to the end of March that year for DMG Media – the arm that holds the Daily Mail, Mail on Sunday, Metro and MailOnline. Advertising revenues for its print titles fell by 13 per cent (and this decline actually increased to 15 per cent for the first quarter of 2016) – total revenues for the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday fell 7 per cent, from £260 million to £242 million. In the same period, though, digital advertising grew 23 per cent on an underlying basis, with total MailOnline revenues climbing to £44 million.11 Those numbers tell it all, really; the newspapers are still in command . . . but the future is digital.

  ‘MailOnline could be an incredibly dominant business for a long time to come,’ former Mailman Richard Addis, who was editor-in-chief at the Express group, told the author. ‘That number-one position is so powerful in the media. It can last you for fifty years. It’s fascinating to watch that transition, how a title can change from being very rooted and very politically engaged with British national life. The Daily Mail and British life, they’re just synonymous, aren’t they? In the future, it could be completely detached from Britain – nothing to do with Britain at all.’12

  Dacre is editor-in-chief at Associated Newspapers and, therefore, ultimately in charge editorially of MailOnline – Clarke, technically, answers to him. ‘Nominally Martin still reports to him but Martin really takes no notice of Paul,’ said insider ‘Sean’. ‘And they have quite a tricky relationship in the sense that Paul never wants to contradict him and doesn’t want to overrule Martin. So, if there’s an argument over staff then Paul nearly always gives way. Partly I think that’s because Rothermere wants MailOnline to be his baby and he’s underwritten a very substantial investment in MailOnline which he hopes one day will pay off (it keeps losing money, by the way – it’s lost a ton of money). That’s partly why I think Paul is nervous of Martin. So they have a slightly tricksy relationship because Martin is a hard character.

  ‘They all think that Martin’s a barbarian and uncouth and un-house-trained and there’s truth in all of that actually. He’s quite an unpleasant person. He’s really, really talented but he’s not a likeable chap in any way, shape or form.’13

  That loss of power surely stings. But Dacre is an ink and newsprint man to his sensible shoes. The idea of him viscerally forcing together a webpage and counting its real-time clicks is absurd; the supreme Mail being has no real abiding love for the World Wide Web. It is a fact, though, that his Daily Mail newspaper is in decline – he has now presided over eight years or so of steadily falling sales of the newspaper that has been his life’s work.

  His pay packet, though, must help alleviate the pain.

  Dacre is the best-paid editor in British newspaper history; he had an especially good year in 2014, when he earned £2.4 milli
on, up a quarter on the previous year. Though that did fall by a million in 2015 – largely because his annual bonus was redirected to the company’s long-term incentive plan.14 He has invested wisely too; the Dacre family own a 17,000-acre Scottish estate – where people pay to shoot grouse and stalk deer – which, incidentally, has received hundreds of thousands of euros in EU subsidies for the editor of a newspaper that campaigned so vociferously for Brexit.15 Both his sons went to Eton.

  ‘His farm in Scotland has probably broadened his range of interests – he does go shooting,’ added an insider. ‘But that was something he took up quite belatedly, about 15 years ago because young Lord Rothermere is a keen shot . . . The relationship between Rothermere and Dacre has kept very close, but it’s clear that Paul’s power is not what it was when Jonathan was a much younger man. Rothermere and the board will decide who the next editor will be, not Paul. Once Paul leaves that job, what’s he going to do? There’s no other job he wants to go on to. That’s part of the reason there’s a bit of paralysis there . . . It’s not like he wants to go and be a peer or run a think tank or a charitable foundation. All he wants to do is edit the Daily Mail. I don’t even think he wants to go up to the boardroom. I don’t think he’d be a great success up there. And Paul is quite an insecure man. His knowledge is newspapers and that’s where his power base is. He’s got no interest in moving off that job. I think he will keep making the case to Jonathan that he should stay in that job until he’s seventy-five!’16

  The editor-in-chief ’s weekday abode is a pretty £4.5 million17 mews cottage with hanging baskets full of plants down a little cobbled lane behind the Portuguese Embassy in Belgravia, from where his chauffeur picks him up and takes him on the eight-minute drive to work and, on occasional evenings, to the Garrick Club, where Dacre can mix with its male-only membership: Cabinet ministers, senior bureaucrats, decrepit judges, and actors Damian Lewis, Hugh Bonneville and his biggest fan, Stephen Fry. The Garrick has been described as ‘more daycare centre than a club’,18 due to the age of its members.

  Some would argue that Paul Dacre left the middle classes far behind long ago and has almost made the leap of the Harmsworths, though they don’t hand out peerages to men of the Press like they used to (Sunny Harmsworth, though, was already hugely wealthy when he founded the paper and he remained effectively editor-in-chief until the day he died).

  Dacre may still be doing rather well, but his staff have been feeling the pinch in recent years. Section heads were told in 2014 to take at least one story off their long lists – the paper lifeboats that get them safely across Dacre’s carpet in conference. ‘There’s still an embarrassment of riches, in terms of what’s presented to the, you know, the fucking “Emperor”,’ snorted ‘Jo’, ‘the tray of features from which he can choose.’19 But freelancers haven’t had a raise in years, and ‘kill fees’ – the money paid for a story that didn’t make it into print (that were once more than other papers paid for a story they ran) – have also been frozen or cut.

  ‘I think the more they trim back, the less the Mail can ask because the Mail expect so much more. There’s no feature for the Mail that doesn’t have a trail of drama behind it in terms of checks, queries,’ a regular freelancer told the author. ‘And yeah, the Mail pay twice what the Express does but you can knock out a story for the Express in a couple of hours.’20

  The smartly attired middle-class folk who populate the paper are also slowly losing their dress sense. ‘The hair and make-up budget is being slashed to ribbons,’ said ‘Penny’, ‘and it’ll be interesting to see what impact that has on the people in the paper! I’m no management consultant but I could go in there tomorrow and in about two hours save them two million quid. Just the picture budget alone is huge, the hair and make-up. The re-shoots. The vast amount spent on polishing “the Daily Mail myth” is just nuts.’21

  Sir David English loved a good foreign tale in his paper, it helped differentiate his Daily Mail from the filthy red-tops, but the foreign desk is not what it once was, as one retired foreign correspondent told the author: ‘Dacre was – is – much, much more “little England” than David English. The last proper foreign editor quit about five years ago: since then the foreign desk has been downgraded to a few “phone answerers”. His view on a foreign tale is, unless it can be reflected through the prism of Brexit/Middle England, he seems really not interested at all. For all his money, experience and foreign homes, he is a true little Englander.’

  Sub-editors too, the folk who toil away long into the evening far from natural light constructing the paper – the last set of eyes to peruse those words before the reader – have also been hit. Margaret Ashworth joined English’s Mail in the mid-1970s and worked her way up to become the sub in charge of the front page until she retired in 2012. Whereas David English was proud to have ‘the finest table in Fleet Street’ and would reward a sub who wrote a great headline with a case of champagne, his successor Dacre ‘has never really grasped what subs do, apart from, as he sees it, holding up production’, she told the Press Gazette. ‘I think he fears subs rather as people in the Middle Ages feared monks, because they were the only ones who could do the magic reading and writing.’22

  Fear, that word again, always seems to follow Dacre around. At least he can escape his troubles at the family holiday home in the British Virgin Islands, from where he returns a month or so later with a nice deep tan and a tank refilled with rage. There are plenty of things that still make him very, very angry indeed: the BBC and its imposing of ‘a liberal, leftish mono-culture’23 upon society; he doesn’t much like newspapers that are propped up by a trust (the Guardian) or wealthy owners (The Times) either; he truly loathes some senior judges who seem to be creating a privacy law by stealth; and, of course, the Express’s proprietor, the ‘pornographer’ Richard Desmond, has a special place in his heart.

  Though the Daily Mail may well be on its way to selling half as many copies a day as it did during Dacre’s peak years, its power – or more correctly, its perceived power – remains as high as it has ever been in the modern era. It is the first newspaper that many desk editors at the BBC and the Guardian reach for in the morning. Indeed, perhaps the most interesting thing of all about the Daily Mail is not even the Daily Mail itself but the reaction to it: it is truly despised by many people, people who are not – and were never intended to be – its core readership. And yet it seems those who hate it the most are those that believe most in its power.

  Paul Dacre has managed to keep himself tucked safely away in the shadows for most of his reign. But he was forced out into the light, a little, in a row over former Labour leader Ed Miliband’s father, the Marxist academic and writer Ralph Miliband.

  Geoffrey Levy, a Mailman in his seventies who is firmly part of the Dacre ‘old guard’, wrote a piece eighteen months before the general election – which Ed always seemed destined to lose – in May 2015. ‘The Man Who Hated Britain. Red Ed’s pledge to bring back socialism is a homage to his Marxist father . . .’24 The story got far more coverage after Miliband reacted angrily to it and demanded – and received – a right of reply (alongside which the Mail cheekily reprinted the offending piece). But the best part of the row was a live debate on the BBC’s Newsnight programme between Blair’s former media chief Alastair Campbell and Mail deputy editor at the time Jon Steafel, who turned out to be a polite and portly middle-aged Mailman with an almost perfectly spherical head. Campbell wanted to make this fight personal, wondering out loud – very loud – why Dacre himself was absent. ‘What you’ve got to understand about the Daily Mail,’ growled Campbell, is that ‘it is the worst of British values posing as the best. If you do not conform to Paul Dacre’s narrow, twisted view of the world – as all of his employees like Steafel have to do – you get done in. All I say, to all the politicians in Britain, once you accept you are dealing with a bully and a coward you have absolutely nothing to fear from them.’ Campbell suggested Dacre was ‘losing the plot’ and Steafel and Rothermere knew
it. ‘The real poison comes from people like Dacre. He’s a coward. He’s a bully. He doesn’t have the guts to come and defend himself against anybody and the sooner he’s gone from British public life the better.’25 Steafel left the paper in the summer of 2016 shortly after having being shunted aside to make way for Dacre’s new deputy and potential successor, Gerard Greaves, from the Mail on Sunday.26

  Dacre doesn’t do telly but he did respond later, writing a piece for the Guardian headlined ‘Why is the left obsessed by the Daily Mail ?’ and seemed slightly paranoid, suggesting it may even have been a dark bid by Miliband and the BBC to ‘neutralize’ Associated Newspapers.

  ‘The screech of axe-grinding was deafening as the paper’s enemies gleefully leapt to settle scores,’ Dacre wrote; ‘any newspaper which dares to take on the left in the interests of its readers risks being howled down by the Twitter mob who the BBC absurdly thinks represent the views of real Britain . . . Not to put too fine a point on things, we were right royally turned over. Fair enough, if you dish it out, you take it.’27

  Ever more people now know the name ‘Paul Dacre’, including 50,000 people who signed a petition in June 2016 calling for him to be sacked over his paper’s support for Britain leaving the EU and for spreading ‘misinformation and fear’ over migration.28 Another ‘fan’ is Stephen Fry . . . they may both be members of the Garrick Club but it’s a fair bet they don’t lounge together upon a leather sofa.

  Dacre is, all those who have had the misfortune to work for him assure me, just about as loathsome, self-regarding, morally putrid, vengeful and disgusting a man as it is possible to be . . . He absolutely despises me and thinks I stand for everything that is wrong about Britain and I think exactly the same of him.29

  Dacre does have his fans, though, and it is worth reiterating: 1.5 million people still put their hand in their pocket and pay (as of autumn 2016) 65p – 90p on Saturdays – for his newspaper in a fast-declining market. The actual number of readers – more than one person tends to read each copy of a newspaper – is estimated to be around 3.35 million.30 Most of those people don’t know – and don’t care – who its editor is. Stephen Lawrence’s mother praised Dacre for raising the profile of their son’s murder case, and the mother of computer hacker Gary McKinnon is sure the paper’s campaign on his behalf helped force the Government to withdraw his extradition to face charges in the US in 2012.