Informed 09 Spotlight All change at Te Mail…


but, as Charles Gris reports, its most combative and long serving leader Paul Dacre is back at the helm


Had Paul Dacre fallen dead at this desk on his 70th birthday in November 2018, his obituaries are easy to imagine. As editor of the Daily Mail for 26 years, he piloted Britain’s arguably most successful newspaper of the era. He achieved a record circulation, over 2.5 million, and enjoyed, for a newspaper, unparalleled political influence. Colleagues would doubtless recall his splenetic outbursts at conference – known as the Vagina Monologues – for his propensity to use a particular four- leter word. And his keen sense of the concerns of middle England would have been celebrated.


“His nickname in the newsroom is


DayLate Dacre,” recalls James Chapman, who served as the Mail’s political editor for seven years. “Paul would say we’ll do … (the story already published


elsewhere) effing beter than anybody else, and we will make it get it to the top of the news, and we will get it raised in Prime Minister’s questions just through force of argument and presentation.” Tat is not how the commencement of his eighth decade played out, however. Instead, Dacre, aged 73, has spent a frustrating three years manoeuvring to assume the chair of Ofcom, the regulator of the BBC (among others). In this he was thwarted, to his very obvious fury. In an extraordinarily biter piece he blamed, among others, Te Guardian, ‘the blob’, ‘the man from the ministry’, and ‘tickbox political correctness’. Today the gap in his life has been filled


aſter a night of the long knives at the Mail. Dacre’s successor, the popular, less strident, Geordie Greig, is gone. Daily editorial control is now in the hands of long-time Dacre deputy, Ted Verity, and MailOnline’s head, Martin Clarke, has announced his departure from the titles. Dacre is now editor in chief with an


‘active role’ overseeing all the company’s titles. Has a greater comeback ever been grasped from the dust, the rest of Fleet Street may wonder? Behind the scenes, however, staff fear that the easy certainties of the past will not serve the Mail well. For all Dacre’s sales record, it


was set nearly 20 years ago. Since then, circulation has been in free fall to below one million. Te Mail’s enduring, and astonishing, clout is, in part, because its decline has been slower than that of rivals. Critically, it has now overtaken Te Sun, whose four million daily sale is a distant memory. Te extraordinary success of MailOnline has also masked the print title’s circulation woes. Run as an almost entirely separate operation, with its celebrity and royal led news and infamous sidebar of shame, it has grown to become the biggest news website in the world. Martin Clarke, its editor whose style is every bit as voluble as Dacre’s, has steered this remarkable ascent. For a company that depends for its future on success online, however, his is surely a grievous loss. Against this backdrop, the Mail’s hereditary owner, Jonathan Harmsworth, 4th Viscount Rothermere, has successfully delisted the company aſter nearly 90 years on the stock exchange. If his new senior management is a signal of the company’s future direction, fund managers may ultimately be grateful to have been relieved of their shares. As the clouds gathered over the party animal Prime Minister, the Mail took up the role of bombastic cheerleader. Over nine chest-beating pages, ploters were monstered, the defector pilloried and David Davies denounced. Like the Mail itself, it was a perfect marriage of outrage, nostalgia and angry spite. Dacre’s stamp was unmistakable. His improbable comeback, and the


surrounding corporate whirl, is certainly evidence that, whatever his age, Dacre has tricks up his sleeve yet. Indeed, his keenest reader in Number 10 may even dream that these alone are sufficient to assure Big Dog’s Downing Street tenure. However, believing this approach to portend a safe future for a venerable news platform requires a rather more challenging imaginative stretch.


REUTERS / Alamy Stock Photo


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