Media Matters
Editor Paul Dacre is stepping down – to be replaced by a Remainer
The surprising retirement of the fervently pro-brexit Paul Dacre as editor of the Daily Mail, and his replacement by the avid Remainer Geordie Greig, mark an enormous sea change in British newspapers and our political life.
Much has been said and written about Dacre over recent days, some of it nonsense. As a columnist on the Mail, I know him moderately well. The key to his character and his success is that he is an outsider, and unlike most editors and leading politicians – indeed most people – harbours no requirement to be liked. He has been in nobody’s pocket, though perhaps got too close to Gordon Brown for the good of either of them.
Many have tried to buy his approval but none has succeeded. Bankers have been bashed, fat cats decried. (The idea that Dacre is an off-the-shelf Rightwinger is absurd.) Politicians of all parties have been roasted, with Tony Blair, once a would-be suitor, and Alastair Campbell becoming particular enemies after their shenanigans over the Iraq War were revealed. Dacre is a shy, fiercely independent, combative and sometimes explosive man who wants to serve his readers.
It’s been rightly said that he has an intuitive sense of these readers’ fears and preoccupations. That is why the Mail started calling for tighter immigration controls some twenty years ago when some claimed it was racist to do so.
But he hasn’t always given readers what they expect. I don’t imagine many of them were initially impressed when in 1997 the Mail exposed the alleged killers of the murdered black teenager Stephen Lawrence, provoking such Establishment outrage that a former Master of the Rolls, Lord Donaldson, accused Dacre of contempt of court. Nor do I suppose many at first applauded the Mail’s campaign for Shaker Aamer, Saudi-born though a British resident, to be released
from Guantanamo Bay. But Dacre trusted in their decency and wanted them to care. The charge of racism so wildly invoked by the Guardian’s Polly Toynbee and others is offensive when applied to a man who risked his job and reputation for a young black man.
Dacre’s good fortune was that he had a proprietor who allowed to him to do more or less what he wanted. He became the de facto proprietor of the Mail after the paper’s editor-in-chief David English and its owner Vere Rothermere died within a few months of each other in 1998. The new proprietor, Jonathan Rothermere, was only thirty, and happily deferred to an already experienced and successful editor. Dacre became dominant to an extent that had probably never been equalled by any former editor on any newspaper, and will certainly never be matched by any future one.
Rothermere wouldn’t be human if he hadn’t sometimes resented the way in which Dacre ran the paper almost as though he owned it. But profits soared as sales climbed from about 1.7 million copies a day when Dacre became editor in 1992 to more than 2.5 million in 2003. Then the effects of the internet and online newspapers began to be felt and the Mail’s circulation started to slide. Rothermere and the management increasingly threw their energies into Mailonline (a popular triumph, though not yet a commercial success) for which Dacre had little enthusiasm.
Then came Brexit. Though a Remainer, and with a wife, Claudia, who was and remains ardent in that cause, Rothermere didn’t interfere when Dacre campaigned energetically for Leave. The proprietor’s finest hour came when he ignored David Cameron’s suggestion a few months before the Referendum that he sack his editor because of his strong pro-brexit views.
But something appears to have changed over recent months. With his seventieth birthday approaching, Dacre may be relieved to hand over the reins after 26 years. Yet many were taken aback that Brexit’s chief champion in Fleet Street should be withdrawing from the field of battle when the fraught issue is still unresolved. It is no less surprising that his successor, Geordie Greig – as much an insider as Dacre is an outsider – should be an enthusiastic Remainer. While it is true Dacre will remain editor-in-chief, it seems Greig will report to Jonathan Rothermere.
Greig has much internal work to do as management seeks to slash costs, probably partly by merging the editorial operations of the Daily Mail and the Mail on Sunday, of which he has been editor. But the wider world will be more interested in the kind of paper he produces. What would be the point of choosing a paid-up Remainer if he did not change the Mail’s policy on Brexit? Indeed, Greig could in conscience hardly do anything else.
The interesting questions are the speed of the transformation, as well as its possible effects on the readership. And when the Mail deserts the Brexit cause, will the wind entirely go out of Theresa May’s already drooping sails?