Paper tiger
STEPHEN BATES devours a lively, well-researched biography of a controversial and influential news tycoon
Any British newspaper you pick up today – local or national, tabloid or broadsheet – has been influenced by a man who died 100 years ago. Alfred Harmsworth, Lord Northcliffe, founded the Daily Mirror and his greatest creation, the Daily Mail. He later owned The Times, The Observer and the Evening News as well – 40 per cent of the newspaper market, at a time when papers were the only sources of news.
Northcliffe has been written about often, but Andrew Roberts’ latest biography is surely definitive. With access to the Harmsworth family’s papers, he has produced a detailed and convincing portrait of the great man who signed memos to staff as “the Chief”. If Roberts’ tone occasionally veers towards the hagiographic – he writes regularly for Conservative outlets including the Daily Mail – it does not blind him to his subject’s faults.
Harmsworth stamped his personality and style on his papers, particularly the Mail. He demanded shorter stories and livelier writing, more vivid pages and a wider range of coverage. His editors were ordered to “touch life at as many points as possible”. What sold, he told them, were “health things, sex things and money things”, appealing to women as well as men. Human interest and readability were priorities all papers came to adopt.
Within five years of its launch in 1896, the Mail claimed the biggest circulation in the world. Eight years earlier, Harmsworth had been an impecunious freelance selling stories for a guinea a go. Now he was a millionaire. By the time he was 40, he had a peerage.
Northcliffe didn’t mind who he offended. “The Daily Mail is the best-hated paper in the world,” he told one of his journalists. “On the day it ceases to be, I’ll change my staff.” His papers played a major part in the deposition of the ineffectual Liberal prime minister Herbert Asquith in 1916. He fell out with that leader’s successor, David Lloyd George, and made even Winston Churchill tread warily.
Early Mail campaigns covered pasteurised milk, bread, telephones in police stations – even a new men’s hat. During the First World War, its revelations about the shortage of shells for British guns on the western front – a result of the government’s complacent procurement practices – caused a crisis. The Chief was, though, also prone to hypocrisy, anti-Semitism, xenophobia, imperialism, bullying, conspiratorialism and an ostentatious populism. Some of these were merely prejudices of their time; others, some may feel, still resonate in his old paper today.
The Mail was then, as it often is today, widely sneered at – it was “written by office boys for office boys”, said Lord Salisbury. Northcliffe didn’t mind that, either, so long as they bought it. What enabled him to transform newspapers was the expansion of literacy following the 1870 Education Act, along with his willingness to invest in the latest print and telecommunications technology. He paid his journalists well, and expected them to dress respectably, to get the news first, and always to get the most interesting angle. The Mail still prioritises these things.
The book’s major revelation is the cause of Northcliffe’s death at the age of 57, gibbering and waving a revolver at his staff. Some have suggested syphilis as the cause, but his doctors at the time diagnosed an even more frightening condition: septic endocarditis – blood poisoning, causing delirium, fever and death. He was given a funeral in Westminster Abbey and, as the Manchester Guardian observed in its obituary: “There has been nothing in journalism to compare with him.”
Early Daily Mail campaigns covered pasteurised milk, bread, telephones in police stations – even a new men’s hat