An interesting, slightly sideways take on the man was actually offered by the paper’s astrologer, Jonathan Cainer, who died in 2016. Dacre signed Cainer from Today in his first year as Mail editor, but Cainer later saw it in his stars to join the Express and then the Mirror before returning home to what he once described as ‘a newspaper dedicated to the subtle propagation of bigotry’. Cainer was a spiritual, liberal, peace-loving – and hugely wealthy, thanks to his tailored forecasts and phone lines – man who often disappeared for weeks to India. Yet he did find common ground with the editor of the Daily Mail. ‘Working with Paul Dacre is very interesting,’ he told the Observer. ‘He’s a living legend and a very shy man. He’s also incredibly passionate: of all the mystics and intuitives and clairvoyants I’ve come into contact with, Dacre has a vibe about him of a magician.’31
Dozens of senior Mailmen and Femails spent years watching this ‘magician’ at close quarters as he expended almost his entire existence upon the Daily Mail. ‘It must be psychological – we’d need Freud in the room,’ said ‘Terry’, ‘but very crudely it must be something to do with having lots of brothers and not feeling very important. And then feeling that you’re a bit of a clutz as an adult. Then a desperation to “be someone” and then find yourself in a system which was extremely clear and simple. That’s the great thing about a newspaper; it’s just like a ship. There is one captain. You go up the hierarchy until you become the captain: the editor. Then you have total power. It’s a total dictatorship.
‘Yet his passions and the latent violence in his language and behaviour must be based on panic, fear – upon really, really deep emotions. I’ve always thought his rage was bluster to disguise a frailty – whatever the frailty is. And his political positions are so visceral, that’s the only way to describe them; they’re not logical or scientific or analytical at all, it’s just “I’m feeling this.” Again, it must be closely related to real fears . . . all those things to me are signs of insecurity. But I was never afraid of him at all. I’m still not. I just think he’s a “complicated” human being. In many ways I’m very, very fond of him.’32
Sir John Junor, editor of the Sunday Express for three decades, was, it seems, the primary source for what young Paul Dacre thought an editor should be. But J. J. was a monster who bullied his two children and belittled and cheated on his wife, as his daughter Penny wrote in her biography of her father, Home Truths.
The father I knew as a child was a much more likeable character than the volatile, didactic man he grew into. The intolerance of age obviously contributed to that, but I think the power he wielded as editor of the Sunday Express for all those years changed him.
The Mail editor actually agreed to one of his very few interviews to help Penny Junor with her book, and she wrote: ‘Paul Dacre, as a powerful editor himself, agrees it’s a danger that goes with the territory.’
‘He had huge political power,’ Dacre told her,
and huge respect and reverence by his own company and by politicians. That’s a dangerous, heady mix. You have a job to which you devote a hundred hours a week, and you’re used to everyone dropping everything for you, doing everything at your beck and call, never questioning your judgement – and people didn’t question JJ’s judgement, he didn’t like it if they did. Going home after that can be very difficult.33
Yet go home he must. And though Paul Dacre is not remotely the same kind of animal as John Junor – who died of gangrene of the gut after a lifetime of hard liquor and womanizing – Dacre was forced to stay off work in the early summer of 2015 as he convalesced after ‘a routine operation’. When he’s not working, he is generally at the Dacre family’s main home in the countryside, near the village of Ticehurst in East Sussex. As he told BBC Radio Four in the only proper broadcast interview he has ever granted, ‘I’m a very ordinary man.’
I am so boring. I go home. I wander around my garden which I love. I read. I listen to music. I go to the pub and have a drink with friends. And I retire to the bosom of my family. From which I draw great strength.34
Most weekends, if the weather’s fine, Paul Dacre is a picture of the typical, ageing middle-class Englishman sitting beside the lawn in a sunhat holding a nice cup of tea, rising gently to snip a rose for his drama teacher wife, Kathy, the girl from Liverpool whom he met at Leeds University. She is, says an insider, ‘very much the power behind the throne’.35 Most weekdays she is in their country pile and he stays at his mews house in London but they speak frequently on the phone. It’s an interesting union and Dacre is clearly besotted by her, as he told the BBC’s Sue Lawley.
I do firmly believe that you cannot become a strong editor unless you have a strong family behind you and you understand the problems of a family. And no man can become a success unless he has a wife to pick him up when he’s down, to put up with his shouting when he’s tired and to encourage him in the dark moments. And my wife has. I’ve been very blessed in having that wife.36
Kathy Dacre is a drama teacher, not a screaming, foul-mouthed editor of a tabloid newspaper; the arts tend to be populated by people of a liberal bent, folk far more likely to take the Guardian than the Daily Mail, and their son James, who is a successful theatre director, clearly has his mother’s genes. ‘I have no idea if Kathy is left wing,’ insider ‘Sean’ told the author, ‘but you’d have thought she’d be a “luvvie” knowing her circle . . . But the love of the theatre is not something that she’s transmitted to Paul. He has very little interest in the arts or theatre other than a bit of opera; he goes to the Glyndebourne opera festival in Sussex every year. But the theatre just didn’t seem to move him at all.’37
The editor likes big weighty biographies and works of history, which are collected in for him by the Mail ’s books department and which he reads on holiday. And he is, say insiders, a keen box set watcher – Breaking Bad, The Sopranos – and will often arrive on a Monday morning and discuss Sunday night’s television at length.
At the end of that interview on Desert Island Discs – as per the format – the one book he chose to take to this mythical island was the Royal Horticultural Society’s A–Z Encyclopaedia of Garden Plants and his luxury item was a year’s subscription to the Guardian.
It’s a brilliant paper in so many ways but its patronizing, ‘right on’ sanctimonious political correctness gets me so angry. It would give me the energy and the willpower to get off that island and come back to England and I could sell my story – my Robinson Crusoe lifestyle story – to the Daily Mail for a fortune. And retire to my garden.38
Paul Dacre celebrated his twenty-fifth year as editor in 2017, a year before his seventieth birthday, yet it seems highly unlikely that he will voluntarily swap his mark-up pencil permanently for his garden snips any time soon – if he has the ability to push his lawnmower or get on his knees to weed, he would surely rather spend that energy on his Daily Mail.
‘Paul is like all editors,’ Vyvyan Harmsworth, whose great uncles founded the paper, told the author. ‘They don’t like giving up at all. David English went on right to the end (as editor-in-chief ) too – with a very sick wife whom he adored. So I wouldn’t speculate at all on Paul Dacre giving up any time in the near future. And this is the secret, probably, of the family business. This is, what, now the fourth generation? The skill of being a proprietor is to appoint your editor and let him get on with it and not to interfere.’ And even if the word ‘newspaper’ does become just a metonym like ‘Fleet Street’, Vyvyan believes his family will be involved until the very end. ‘The Harmsworths will be there as long as newspapers are there, in one form or another. We’re moving with the times, as it were, with MailOnline – which has a tremendous and astonishing readership. As long as that progresses, we will go on publishing. I’d be very surprised if “newspapers” ever ended and the Daily Mail and our group wasn’t the very last to stop publishing.’39
As his current editorial heir tends his English country garden, another Mailman’s grassy plot hasn’t seen a fresh
flower in decades. Alfred C. Harmsworth’s grave in a north London cemetery is looking pretty sorry for itself these days, and the two words ‘Viscount Northcliffe’ have all but faded from his headstone.
Sunny Harmsworth was the boy who liked to press ink on to paper and created a very simple formula for his Daily Mail while trying always to speak directly to his readers – without caring a damn about its critics. Bunny & Son may have been Harmsworths but they lacked Northcliffe’s editorial gene, and Beaverbrook’s Express stole his formula . . . then David English and Vere Harmsworth stole it back again. And despite Paul Dacre’s quarter of a century in the top chair, the modern Daily Mail remains, say some who worked for both men, David English’s darling. It is still his ‘compact’ template that Dacre colours in each day.
The paper’s founding father may well have been dead for almost 100 years but Northcliffe’s voice, retuned to speak to the class in the middle of the modern era, still rings through in the paper and online. Sunny Harmsworth’s Daily Mail – love it or loathe it – seems sure to live on for a long time to come.
KEY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
BOOKS
Conrad Black, A Matter of Principle, McClelland & Stewart, 2011.
Richard Brooks, The Great Tax Robbery: How Britain Became a Tax Haven for Fat Cats and Big Business, Oneworld Publications, 2013.
William E. Carson, Northcliffe, Britain’s Man of Power, Dodge Publishing Co., 1918.
Tom Clarke, My Northcliffe Diary, Victor Gollancz, 1931.
Paul Ferris, The House of Northcliffe: The Harmsworths of Fleet Street, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971.
Richard Griffiths, Fellow Travellers of the Right: British Enthusiasts for Nazi Germany 1933–39, Oxford University Press, 1983.
History of the Times: The 150th Anniversary and Beyond, 1921–1948, published by The Times, 1952.
Kennedy Jones, Fleet Street and Downing Street, Hutchinson, 1920.
Penny Junor, Home Truths: Life Around My Father, HarperCollins, 2002.
Cecil H. King, Strictly Personal: Some Memoirs, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1969.
Lynda Lee-Potter, Class Act: How to Beat the British Class System, Metro Books, 2000.
F. A. McKenzie, Mystery of the Daily Mail, Associated Newspapers, 1921.
Louise Owen, The Real Lord Northcliffe: Some Personal Recollections of a Private Secretary 1902–1922, Cassell & Co., 1922.
Max Pemberton, Lord Northcliffe: A Memoir, Hodder & Stoughton,1922.
Reginald Pound and Geoffrey Harmsworth, Northcliffe, Cassell & Co., 1959.
Jean Rook, The Cowardly Lioness, Sidgwick & Jackson, 1989.
Roger Thomas Stearn, War Images and Image Makers in the Victorian Era: Aspects of the British Visual and Written Portrayal of War And Defence c. 1866–1906, PhD thesis, King’s College University of London, 1987.
S. J. Taylor, The Great Outsiders: Northcliffe, Rothermere and the Daily Mail, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1996.
S. J. Taylor, The Reluctant Press Lord: Esmond Rothermere and the Daily Mail, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998.
S. J. Taylor, An Unlikely Hero: Vere Rothermere and how the Daily Mail was Saved, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2002.
J. Lee Thompson, Northcliffe: Press Baron in Politics 1865–1922, John Murray, 2000.
Keith Waterhouse, Streets Ahead: Life After City Lights, Hodder & Stoughton (Sceptre paperback), 1995.
H. G. Wells, Experiment in Autobiography, 1934, Project Gutenberg Canada ebook no. 539.
R. McNair Wilson, Lord Northcliffe: A Study, Philadelphia, J. B. Lippincott, 1927.
NOTE ON SOURCES:
A number of background checks (births, etc.) were carried out by Gregor Murbach of Murbach Research – an independent researcher recommended by the National Archives who has worked for several media organizations including the BBC (http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/irlist/default.asp?action=1&slctcatagoryid=5). Gregor Murbach’s website: http://murbachresearch.com.
NOTES
Introduction
1John Cleese and Eric Idle at Live Talks Los Angeles on 18 November 2014. ‘So, Anyway...’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsEeBNonbZQ.
2Monty Python Live (mostly), O2 Arena, July 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psmcz2vYKjs.
3Gary Lineker’s Twitter feed, 1 October 2013: https://twitter.com/garylineker/status/385167178586005505
4‘More than 50,000 sign petition calling for Daily Mail editor to be sacked’, Guardian, 22 June 2016.
5Paul Dacre, ‘The Debt We Journalists Owe Sir David’, Daily Mail, 11 June 1998.
6‘The Minx’ media diary, Daily Telegraph, 4 October 2002.
7Author interview with ‘Terry’, former senior Mailman, London, 6 October 2014.
8Newsnight, BBC Two, 1 October 2013. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-GMTxycAXY.
9Paul Dacre, Desert Island Discs, BBC Radio Four, 25 January 2004.
10Paul Dacre, ‘Why is the left obsessed by the Daily Mail?’, Guardian, 12 October 2013. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/12/left-daily-mail-paul-dacre.
11‘National press ABCs: Daily Star and Times boost sales while Trinity Mirror’s Sunday tabloids take a tumble’, Press Gazette, 18 August 2016.
12The average yearly rate of decline between January 2010 to January 2016 in ABC circulation figures was 4.69%. At this rate, the circulation would drop below the million mark in July 2025.
13‘Independent prints souvenir pullout as it moves to online only’, Guardian, 25 March 2016.
14‘National press print ABCs for January: Mirror losing ground against cut-price Star ahead of new launch’, Press Gazette, 18 February 2016.
15Author interview with Vyvyan Harmsworth, senior member of the Harmsworth clan (he is descended from Vyvyan Harmsworth, brother of Alfred and Harold Harmsworth, the founders of the Daily Mail ) and former Head of Corporate Affairs at Daily Mail and General Trust, 2 December 2016.
Chapter 1
1Reginald Pound and Geoffrey Harmsworth, Northcliffe, Cassell, 1959.
2H. G. Wells, Experiment in Autobiography, 1934, Project Gutenberg Canada ebook no 539.
3Pound and Harmsworth, Northcliffe.
4ibid.
5Paul Ferris, The House of Northcliffe: The Harmsworths of Fleet Street, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971.
6Max Pemberton, Lord Northcliffe, A Memoir, Hodder & Stoughton, 1922.
7ibid.
8Ferris, The House of Northcliffe.
9Pound and Harmsworth, Northcliffe.
10Answers to Correspondents, 16 June 1888, bound back issues at the British Library, London.
11Pound and Harmsworth, Northcliffe.
12Answers to Correspondents, 30 June 1888, bound back issues at the British Library, London.
13Pound and Harmsworth, Northcliffe.
14S. J. Taylor, The Great Outsiders: Northcliffe, Rothermere and the Daily Mail, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1996.
15Pound and Harmsworth, Northcliffe.
16Cecil H. King, Strictly Personal: Some Memoirs, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1969.
17Pound and Harmsworth, Northcliffe.
18ibid.
19Back issues of Answers to Correspondents, the British Library, London.
20Pound and Harmsworth, Northcliffe.
21Ferris, The House of Northcliffe.
22Pound and Harmsworth, Northcliffe.
23Back issues of Answers to Correspondents, British Library, London.
24Ferris, The House of Northcliffe.
25Kennedy Jones, Fleet Street and Downing Street, Hutchinson, 1920.
26‘Through Failure to Fortune’, Daily Mail, 25 November 1898.
27Pound and Harmsworth, Northcliffe.
Chapter 2
1Daily Mail, 4 May 1896.
2Ferris, The House of Northcliffe.
3Lord Northcliffe, ‘The Rise of the Daily Mail’, Daily Mail, 4 May 1916.
4Pound and Harmsworth, Northcliffe.
5Jones, Fleet Street and Downing Street.
6Pound and Harmsworth, No
rthcliffe.
7G. W. Steevens, ‘Bank Holiday – The Migration of London’, Daily Mail, 4 August 1896.
8Lord Northcliffe, ‘The Rise of the Daily Mail’, Daily Mail, 4 May 1916.
9G. W. Steevens, ‘What War Feels Like. No Emotions and No Moral’, Daily Mail, 10 June 1897.
10Pound and Harmsworth, Northcliffe.
11‘Lord Northcliffe – His Views, Plans and Career’, New York Times, 11 October 1908.
12Pound and Harmsworth, Northcliffe.
13Arthur Keppel-Jones, Rhodes and Rhodesia, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1983.
14Daily Mail Archive, British Library.
15 Journal of Historical Review, Volume 18, Number 3, Institute of Historical Review, 1999.
16Ferris, The House of Northcliffe.
17‘Pandering to Sentiment’, Daily Mail, 23 July 1901.
18‘Pro-Boer Methods’, Daily Mail leader page, 24 January 1902.
19‘The Need for More Men’, Daily Mail, 23 February 1900.
20‘Woman’s Suffrage Meeting’, Daily Mail, 27 June 1896.
21J. Lee Thompson, Northcliffe – Press Baron in Politics 1865–1922, John Murray, 2000.
22‘Suffragettes in Parliament’, Daily Mail, 24 October 1906.
23Lady Charlotte, ‘When Women Vote – What Will Happen?’, Daily Mail, 19 February 1907.
24Thompson, Northcliffe – Press Baron in Politics.
25Pound and Harmsworth, Northcliffe.
26ibid.
27Ferris, The House of Northcliffe.
Chapter 3
1Harmsworth’s net worth was £886,000, say several biographies of Northcliffe. The thisismoney.co.uk (owned by the same company as the Daily Mail ) historic inflation calculator gives a figure of £97,360,853.94 for 1901 to 2015 (the Bank of England site gives a higher figure of £98.2 million).
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