BOOKS & ARTS
An eye for sensationalism
Stephen Glover
Mail Men: The Unauthorized Story of
the Daily Mail — The Paper That
Divided and Conquered Britain
by Adrian Addison
Atlantic Books, £20, pp. 407
According to Private Eye, executives at the
Daily Mail were alarmed by the impending
publication of Adrian Addison’s new history
of the paper. They expected an onslaught. So
their hearts must have sunk when they saw
the cover of Mail Men. Stephen Fry, who may
hate the Mail more than anyone alive, pro-
nounces it ‘a damned good read’; and Polly
Toynbee, whose loathing is scarcely less vehe-
ment, praises it as a ‘well-informed, diamond-
shaped analysis’ of the paper that ‘dominates
England’s political culture’.
Possibly neither of these sages has read
the book in its entirety. It isn’t the hatchet job
that Mail executives feared and its enemies
wanted. Admittedly, as a columnist on the
paper for many years I may be an imperfect
judge. On the other hand, if the book were
gratuitously insulting or unfair I might have
cottoned on. For the most part it isn’t, though
whether it is as acute as it is generally even-
handed is less certain.
The first part efficiently retells a famil-
iar story. In 1896 Alfred Harmsworth founds
the paper, which Lord Salisbury thought was
‘run by office boys for office boys’. He dies
rich and half-bonkers as Lord Northcliffe,
and the Mail passes into the journalistical-
ly far less gifted hands of his bean-counter
brother, Harold, ennobled as Lord Rother-
mere. He was the ass who intermittently
flirted with Hitler before the war. Addison
suggests that, from Northcliffe’s death in 1922
until the paper’s relaunch as a tabloid in 1971,
the Mail was in slow decline as it was over-
taken by Beaverbrook’s Daily Express, which
by the 1950s was selling more than twice as
many copies.
David English, editor from 1971 to 1992,
made the Mail much livelier than it had
been, and set out to attract women readers.
He emerges through the reminiscences and
anecdotes of contemporaries as a mischie-
vous, mercurial and inspiring man, not invari-
ably wedded to the truth. Many years after
the event, he claimed to have been almost
at Kennedy’s side when the president was
assassinated in Dallas, though in fact he had
been 1,600 miles away. Still, Addison (who
has worked for the Sun and the News of the
World, as well as the BBC) seems mostly to
admire him. He also provides a sympathet-
ic portrait of Vere Rothermere, grandson
of Harold, who formed a productive andaffectionate partnership with English. Vere
stroked his friend’s hand in 1998 as he lay
dying in St Thomas’s Hospital, where he was
himself to breathe his last 12 weeks later.
And so we enter the age of Paul Dacre,
already a successful editor of the Mail for six
years when English and Vere Rothermere
died. Addison recognises Dacre’s journal-
istic achievements. In his 18 months as edi-
tor of the Evening Standard before following
English at the Mail, circulation rose by 26
per cent. Daily sales also increased steadily
at his new paper — from 1.7 million in 1992
to over 2.5 million in 2003. The Mail has been
newspaper of the year countless times. Addi-
son attributes Dacre’s success to a Stakhano-
vite work regime, manic energy and an eye
for sensationalism. Innumerable unidentified
former employees are wheeled on to testify
to his temper and swearing, characteristics
to which he has himself publicly owned up.
Many also praise him.
Addison rightly implies that Dacre’s infu-
riation with the world drives his journalism.
It was anger over the authorities’ failure to
arrest and charge the killers of the black teen-
ager Stephen Lawrence that led to the Mail’s
famous front page branding them as ‘murder-
ers’. The Daily Telegraph virtually called for
Dacre to be jailed, and the former Master of
the Rolls, Lord Donaldson, accused him of
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