The Daily Mail: will it get cuddlier?

“One of the last big beasts of Fleet Street” is departing, said Les Hinton in The Sunday Times. After 26 years at the helm of the Daily Mail, Paul Dacre announced last week that he will step down from his front-line role later this year to become chairman and editor-in-chief of the Mail’s parent company, DMG Media. Few editors have had as much power, or a reputation as fearsome, as Dacre. An irascible manager given to expletive-filled rants – morning news conferences during his editorship became known as the “vagina monologues” – he has ruled his paper for the past quarter-century with “passion and fearlessness”. You may object to the political positions the paper has adopted during his tenure; you may argue that it has indulged in irresponsible Brussels-bashing, belittled women or harked back to reactionary, 1950s values. But what you can’t dispute is the newspaper’s “technical brilliance”, or the fact that Dacre “kept millions of readers happy”.

Dacre has certainly run a tight ship, said Roy Greenslade in The Guardian. And some of the Mail’s campaigns, such as its fight for justice on behalf of the murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence, have been superb examples of journalism (it helps that Dacre had “at his disposal the largest journalistic staff in national newspapers and a budget that makes rival editors’ eyes water”). But none of this really compensates for all the years in which Dacre has shamelessly pandered to readers’ worst instincts, reinforcing prejudices at every turn. Dacre has been a “poisoner of the national psyche”, agreed Polly Toynbee in the same paper – the country’s “bully-in-chief”.

For many on the Left, Dacre has become “a bogeyman: a shadowy figure of malign intent who forces his audience to think like him”, said Will Gore in The Independent. That’s a mistaken, and highly patronising, view. Dacre hasn’t been imposing his attitudes on gullible readers. Rather, his great skill has been instinctively understanding their existing concerns and reflecting these back to them. Some people appear to believe that Dacre almost single-handedly took Britain out of the EU. They’re now celebrating his departure and hoping that the Brexit debate will change under his successor, Geordie Greig, the Remain-supporting editor of The Mail on Sunday, who is more aligned with the liberal Tory wing. They could be in for a disappointment. Dacre’s departure “might (but only might) make the Daily Mail a moderately cuddlier beast, but you wouldn’t bet your house on it”.