Media Matters

The Daily Mail editor backed the Tories but slammed Boris’s morals

Boris Johnson’s recent creation of 36 new peers, including his younger brother Jo, has rightly earned him some flak from those who don’t like to see honours bestowed on friends and favourites. But I don’t believe anyone has pointed out one startling omission.

Who was the editor who did more than any other journalist to bring about Brexit? The man who edited the Daily Mail for 26 years, during much of which time he conducted himself as though he were the paper’s proprietor? The person before whom City ‘fat cats’, slippery politicians and other ne’er-do-wells used to quail? Step forward Paul Dacre.

The Prime Minister’s list rewarded several prominent Brexiteers, including former Labour MPS Frank Field, Gisela Stuart and Kate Hoey. A peerage was found even for former Brexit Party MEP and regular on Radio 4’s The Moral Maze Claire Fox. Johnson’s failure to include Nigel Farage, who did more than any other politician to bring about Brexit, was shocking, but this is a media column and need not concern itself with such matters. Dacre, though, is our meat and drink.

Johnson doled out peerages to three media personalities who might be considered less successful in the journalistic field. Charles Moore, a former editor of the Daily Telegraph and Johnson’s erstwhile boss, as well as Margaret Thatcher’s distinguished biographer, was certainly a worthy recipient, though I doubt any more deserving than the former Mail supremo.

Veronica Wadley, also ennobled, is a protégée of Dacre’s and a former editor of the London Evening Standard. She was an arts adviser to Johnson when he was Mayor of London, but her life’s work has been that of a journalist. One of her much respected and long-serving predecessors as editor, Charles Wintour, was considered to be worth only a CBE.

The third media figure is Evgeny Lebedev, controlling shareholder of the Independent and ailing Evening Standard, in which tens of millions of his father’s money have been sunk. (Lebedev senior used to work for the KGB.) Evgeny is a society gadfly and supporter of charities, but his greatest admirer wouldn’t claim he has been a successful newspaper proprietor. He is, however, a generous host, and has on numerous occasions invited Johnson to stay in his villa in Italy.

If these three can be fitted for their ermine robes, why should it still be plain Mr Dacre? (I should mention, by the way, that I served as a foot soldier in his army, and still write a column for the Mail.) The answer is, I suggest, that Johnson doesn’t like him.

To be precise, he resents the way in which the Mail during Dacre’s editorship harried him over several extramarital flings. The paper left it to the red-top tabloids to bring these excursions to the public’s notice, but once they had done so it was not slow to tell its readers what it thought of Johnson.

The best evidence for the Prime Minister’s feelings about the former editor came in a column Dacre wrote for the Spectator last July. Having reminded readers of Johnson’s infidelities, and been rude about his latest ‘bedwarmer’, Carrie Symonds, he referred to his own ‘several emotional dalliances’ with the new Prime Minister.

In particular, he recalled ‘a lachrymose lunch (his tears not mine) with Johnson bewailing that the Mail was destroying his marriage, while confiding that, anyway, monogamy is just a bourgeois convention’.

It is surely not stretching the facts to suggest that the Prime Minister nurses a deep well of hatred against the former editor which these reminiscences will have done nothing to dispel. Just as Farage cannot be honoured for his efforts in bringing about Brexit because Johnson dislikes him, so the leading journalistic standard-bearer for the cause cannot be rewarded on account of his having given Johnson a hard time (though scarcely unjustifiably) over his private life.

Isn’t this rather petty? Johnson is a bigger man than this. There is talk of another honours list this autumn. I implore the Prime Minister to set aside personal rancour and to recognise the man whom many journalists (including even some on the Left) acknowledge as the outstanding editor of his generation. He would, as it happens, contribute more to the House of Lords than almost anyone on Johnson’s recent list. Bring on Lord Dacre!

Despite losing hundreds of millions of pounds over the years, the Guardian is sitting on a £1 billion cash pile which is the envy of other newspapers.

So eyebrows were raised last April when the paper announced it was furloughing at least 100 non-editorial staff owing to the pandemic. Couldn’t it have dug into its ample pockets and spared the hard-pressed taxpayer?

Now the Guardian has said that it will cut up to 180 jobs, including 70 in editorial, as a consequence of falling revenues. Some of its journalists are asking why the paper isn’t using its cash pile to rescue itself.

Don’t they have a point? If the Guardian were writing about another company behaving as it has done over recent months, it would chastise it for greed, ruthlessness and stupidity.

‘I implore the Prime Minister to set aside personal rancour and recognise the man’