Paul Dacre: how his influence on Britain will endure, even though a Remainer is taking over his newspaper

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Love him, loathe him or fear him – and there were plenty who did the latter two – there is no ignoring Paul Dacre’s influence on British public life.

To his admirers – and there are admirers – he is the man who always spoke truth to power. But to his accusers, he is the power. He has been called “the most dangerous man in Britain”, accused of spreading a message amounting to “a national poison”.

What seems almost indisputable is that Mr Dacre’s decision to step down as editor of the Daily Mail after 26 years will bring to an end a reign during which – for good or ill - his influence spread way beyond his newspaper’s 1.4m readers.

Because if he was rarely loved, Paul Dacre was frequently feared, and sometimes quietly admired.

Journalists spoke with gallows humour of his “vagina monologues” of bollockings so fierce that the recipient would be “double c*nted”. Less publicly, politicians fretted about how their words and actions might be received – and pilloried - by “the Mail”.

But Dacre’s influence was way more pervasive, more subtle and probably more enduring than just those immediate chilling effects.

Even some of those who might have been expected to have loathed Dacre’s newspaper have seemed in awe of the wonders he did for its circulation figures.

Even one of his most outspoken public critics, Tony Blair’s former spin doctor Alastair Campbell has grudgingly acknowledged this success by referring to him as the “Alex Ferguson of newspapers”.

The Mail, news executives would tell you, was “a great product, really professional in what it does … Whatever else you might think about it.”

And so everyone in journalism looks at what the Daily Mail does. News organisations feel obliged, if not to copy it, then at least to follow up its stories.

And so, through the power of its success and a little in-trade awe about the legend of its editor, the Daily Mail can set the news agenda.

And how it chooses to do this has, to some, become a source of horror.

To pick a few examples of some of the more controversial headlines:

On July 31 2015, the Daily Mail splashed with headline “The ‘Swarm’ On Our Streets”, unashamedly – or fearlessly – siding with then prime minister David Cameron who had been criticised for likening “illegal immigrants” to “insects”.

An accompanying editorial spoke of “illegal immigrants” who continued to “storm the Channel Tunnel”, of migrants “laying siege to Britain’s borders”, and denounced criticism of Mr Cameron as “pathetic posturing by polytechnic politicians”.

On August 31 2009, a Daily Mail headline asserted: “One out of every five killers is an immigrant”.

“Up to a fifth of killers in England and Wales are foreign, police figures suggest,” the story told readers of Mr Dacre’s Daily Mail. “As foreign suspects are typically harder to identify and trace, meaning that crimes are less likely to be solved, the real proportion could be significantly higher.”

More recently the newspaper interpreted Theresa May’s decision to call a General Election last year as being motivated by her desire to “crush the saboteurs” of Brexit.

In November 2016 the Mail attracted more than 1,000 formal complaints to the press watchdog Ipso when it pictured the High Court judges who had ruled that parliament had to approve the triggering of Article 50, beneath the front page headline: “Enemies of the People”.

The splash was compared on social media to the 1933 front page in a Nazi newspaper which had carried photos of Germans whose citizenship had been revoked beneath the headline: “Traitors of the People”.

And indeed, the most offence is often taken at the tone of Mr Dacre’s newspaper.

The author and commentator Andrew O’Hagan seems to have captured many people’s feelings when he wrote of: “A bubbling quagmire of prejudice posing as news, of opinion dressed as fact, and contempt posing as contempt for that portion of the world’s population that doesn’t live in Cheam”.

Alluding to the executives who run it, Mr O’Hagan’s London Review of Books article continued: “The Mail, with its relentless outrage, its stifling sense of mission, its poker-faced determination to see everything as a non-laughing matter … [offers] no real humour but many hundreds of sneers, which is what passes for humour in that whispery world of frightened men who don’t know how to talk to women and wish they knew bigger words.”

Hinting at a certain apparent hypocrisy, O’Hagan added: “The Daily Mail ethos - strident, certain, mono-minded - smacks of the bully’s self-disgust. It is not a joyous newspaper, or a happy one, and Dacre’s worst effect has been to let it seem mired in the things it hates, as if society’s worst excesses were mostly an outgrowth of its own paranoid imagination.

“As with most warriors for decency, there’s something indecent in its obsessions.”

And yet other astute observers note that most of the outrage about the Daily Mail comes from without, not within its readership.

Dacre, it seems, knows his audience – to the extent that one (thoughtful, perceptive) former Mail executive declared him to be “the greatest editor of his generation.”

“He wasn’t easy to work for,” the former executive said. “He was incredibly demanding, but when Paul balled you out for something you’d done wrong, nine times of ten he was right.

“He was a brilliant newspaperman and his instincts were always spot-on.

“He didn’t care about being popular or kowtowing to authority. The readers were always at the heart of everything he did.”

So perhaps when he gets his newspaper to rail against the “bien-pensant views of the London liberal elite”, Dacre knows there are plenty of readers who worry about being dictated to or ignored, by people whom they can easily imagine sneering at them for being “suburban” or “provincial”.

And perhaps – just as loyalty to Donald Trump can be reinforced by criticism – these readers become ever more loyal when they notice how often the Mail itself is mocked.

Because there is no denying that the newspaper – and its readers – are sneered at, and often by those who deplore the Mail’s sneering at or “demonising” of others.

There are the TV comics mocking the readers’ comments on the Mail’s website, the T-shirt slogans: “I’m the one the Daily Mail warned you about”; “I think therefore I am not a Daily Mail reader”.

Which to Daily Mail readers themselves might make Paul Dacre seem like one of the few people willing to speak up for them.

His many critics, of course, scoff at the very idea of Dacre being close to his readers. They point to his seven-figure salary, his multiple homes, one in the British Virgin Islands, another a landed estate in Scotland which has reportedly received thousands of pounds in EU farming subsidies, for all his newspaper’s brexiteering.

These critics point less to a phenomenal work ethic, which for many years kept him shut up in the office reading every word of the paper before it came out, and more to the chauffeur-driven ride from luxurious home to comfortable office, shielded from the masses at every turn.

Dacre, wrote O’Hagan, “lives on carpets”.

Yet those who have worked inside the Daily Mail describe a culture where Dacre’s trusted lieutenants are expected to be obsessive about adopting the interests of “Middle England”.

Cocooned in luxury they may be, but senior Mail executives are said to feel compelled to toil at knowing every detail of TV shows like Strictly Come Dancing – whether they want to or not.

So maybe it shouldn’t work, but Dacre and his executives could be said to have remained in tune with “Middle England”.

Or perhaps it could be more accurately stated that they are in tune with a certain slice of Middle England and what that slice of Middle England yearns to be.

Paul Dacre and his readers, it sometimes seems, do not wish to be confronted by the sight of some of the vulgar realities of post-1950s Britain.

Some women about to be photographed as “case studies” for the Daily Mail have been known to encounter a certain uneasiness about a lady being seen in trousers.

On occasion the dress code for such photoshoots has stipulated “no denim, no trainers, no sportswear.”

And yet it would be churlish – and sneering – to suggest that the Mail is either wholly ridiculous or totally malign.

Under Dacre’s stewardship, it has fought and won some important battles.

Dacre mentioned some of these in his letter to staff announcing he was stepping down: the campaigns to prevent the pollution caused by plastic, to stop vulnerable hacker Gary McKinnon being extradited to the US and to free Shaker Aamer from Guantanamo Bay.

It is perhaps also worth noting that it was Tony Blair’s former spin doctor Alastair Campbell who branded the Daily Mail “a national poison” and who on Thursday called the newspaper and its editor a “malign force on our culture and politics, the worst of British values posing as the best”.

It might even be possible to agree with Campbell and yet recognise that criticism from a man who once wielded such power, and whose own contribution to British - and Iraqi - life may not always have been positive, could be read as something of a professional compliment.

And then, of course, there is Stephen Lawrence.

On February 14 1997, at a time when it seemed that no-one would ever be brought to justice for the murder of the black teenager, the Daily Mail put the photos of five suspects on its front page, with the words: “MURDERERS: The Mail accuses these men of killing. If we are wrong, let them sue us.”

Almost ever since, there has been debate about the precise impact of that front page and the numerous follow-up stories.

Dacre himself has never expressed any doubt.

In January 2012 when Gary Dobson and David Norris were finally convicted for taking part in the racist murder, Dacre, a man who tends to shun publicity for himself however much he likes to expose others, took the unusual step of releasing an online video statement in which he said:

“I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that if it hadn't been for the Mail's headline in 1997 … and our years of campaigning, none of this would have happened. Britain's police might not have undergone the huge internal reform that was so necessary.

“Race relations might not have taken the significant step forward that they have. And an 18 year‐old A‐level student who dreamed of being an architect would have been denied justice.”

Others, however, are sceptical about whether Dacre and the Mail can claim quite so much glory.

Journalism professor Brian Cathcart, the co-founder of press reform group Hacked Off, has, for example, queried how much credit the Mail can claim for the setting up of the Macpherson inquiry that eventually accused the Metropolitan Police of “institutional racism”.

He has claimed, on the website of the Open Democracy campaign group: “The Mail never once called for a public inquiry. Even when the Lawrence family demanded one, the Mail conspicuously did not give its support.

“Once it became clear, in the early summer of 1997, that there would be an inquiry, the Mail publicly opposed the kind of inquiry – into police failures – that Doreen Lawrence was arguing for.

“In short, the paper has been claiming credit for the establishment of an inquiry which the record shows it didn’t seek and which took a form it actually opposed.”

Then there is the matter of how the Mail came to champion the cause of the Lawrences in the first place.

Stephen’s father Neville has spoken of how he complained directly to Paul Dacre about some of the newspaper’s earliest coverage of the case, and while doing so told the editor that he was the plasterer who had done some work on his house.

“Neville,” Dacre is said to have replied, “I didn’t know it was you.”

Thereafter the Mail became a wholehearted supporter of the campaign to bring Stephen’s killers to justice.

There have, though, long been mutterings about how Dacre and the Mail have might have exploited this support.

Many have wondered whether it has become a shield, used to deflect all mention of the mere possibility that the Daily Mail might sometimes stray close to racism, in its treatment of immigrants and others: we can’t be racist, look what we did on Stephen Lawrence.

Such criticisms may be valid, but they don’t change something else: for Paul Dacre to have published that front page in February 1997 was an act of no little journalistic courage.

The degree of risk was shown by the fact the CPS had already taken the view that there was insufficient evidence to prosecute the five men, a decision seemingly vindicated by the failure of the Lawrence’s own private prosecution. And UK libel law requires a newspaper to be able to prove any claim they make against somebody.

If the Lawrence suspects had dared to find a lawyer willing to represent them on a pro bono or no-win, no-fee basis – perhaps to “get at” a newspaper that was already unpopular in some circles - Dacre and the Mail could have found themselves facing a very tricky court case.

And while the Mail may not have campaigned for a public inquiry of the Macpherson kind, its front page almost certainly sent an important signal to a New Labour government that was forever worrying about what the Mail might think.

As Prof Catchcart has acknowledged, Jack Straw, the home secretary at the time, wrote in his autobiography that the attitude of the Mail helped give him the “political space” he need to call the inquiry.

Dacre, then, seems to have taken a risk that had far-reaching, although possibly exaggerated consequences – and it is not certain that any other editor of his generation would have had the guts to do it.

Maybe – just maybe – this is what the right-wing political blogger Guido Fawkes was thinking about on Thursday when he reacted to the standing down announcement by tweeting: “Genuinely fear that without Dacre acting as sentinel Britain will be imperilled on so many fronts.”

Although, of course, Dacre will not be gone. He will simply be “moving upstairs” to become chairman and editor-in-chief of Associated Newspapers.

And even if he does vanish from the British media scene, it’s pretty certain his influence will not.

The naming of Geordie Greig, currently at the helm of the Mail on Sunday, as Dacre's successor at the Daily Mail does suggest something like the beginning of a countertrend.  As the likes of Private Eye never tire of pointing out, Greig is as committed to Remain as Dacre is to Brexit, meaning the two newspaper 'stablemates' regularly contradict each other.

The potential expiring shelf life of Paul Dacre’s brand of Daily Mail is also suggested by the mockery of a younger generation, many of whose members wear the anti-Mail T-shirts and lap up the mockey on the TV comedy shows, and who in turn get called millennial “snowflakes” by the newspaper.

But in senior positions all over what used to be called Fleet Street, there are newspaper executives who have spent formative parts of their careers working in close proximity to Paul Dacre.

To work in national newspapers for any length of time, is to get the uneasy sense that there are quite a few people desperate to be “the next Paul Dacre” – the micro-Dacres, if you will.

They may lack his talent – or, if you prefer “evil genius”.

Some may not even have met the man, although they almost certainly want to. Dacre is once said to have asked a job candidate whether they were serious about the position or just attending the interview to meet him, so keen are some journalists to get a close sight of him – or to be him.

So right now, in influential positions in influential newsrooms, there are ambitious executives who seek to emulate the circulation-boosting, if allegedly occasionally brutal methods of Paul Dacre.

The man himself may be taking a step closer to retirement, but his legacy will live on.