Lord Denning described it as ‘a marvellous
piece of journalism’. Former Mail employ-
ee Tim Miles, whose assessments of his old
paper are not always laudatory, justly says:
‘That was an extraordinary front page. You
would never — never — have seen that on
page one of the Guardian. Never.’
There is much more to be said about
Dacre than Addison says here. One of my
theories is that many of his impulses — sus-
picion of the Establishment, distaste for the
very rich (though he is now of their number)
and sympathy for the underdog mistreated
by the authorities (for example, Sergeant
Blackman, whose conviction for murdering
a Taleban terrorist was recently reduced to
manslaughter in the Court of Appeal after a
Mail campaign) — have their roots, at least
in part, in his youthful left-wing beliefs. This
is not an insight most of his critics on the left
would share.
Post-Brexit, they seem more obsessed
with the Mail than ever, though it is, by
my calculations, read by only 7 per cent
of the adult population. They ignore the
inexorable fall in sales of the Mail —
granted, not as precipitate as most other news-
papers’ — as a result of the internet. Circula-
tion now stands at around 1.5 million copies
a day. It’s true that Mail Online has become
the most visited newspaper website in the
world outside China, which is a phenome-
nal journalistic achievement. But it’s not, at
least so far, a commercial success. As Addi-
son notes, though he doesn’t really develop
the thought, the values of Mail Online (wor-
ship of celebrity and an infatuation with half-
naked women) are strikingly at odds with
those of the conservative Mail. Moreover, as
two thirds of its audience is outside Britain,
it is inevitably more internationally minded
than the fiercely patriotic Daily Mail.
So the future will be very different
if Mail Online continues to expand, and
the paper to decline. Not that the Ste-
phen Frys and Polly Toynbees and most
of the Mail-hating liberal left realise it. My
advice to them is to relish their hatred while
they can.
Too young to die
David Crane
Resolution: Two Brothers, a Nation
in Crisis, a World at War
by David Rutland and Emma Ellis
Head of Zeus, £30, pp. 480
In the north transept of Westminster Abbey,
there is a memorial by Joseph Nollekens
to three British captains killed at the Bat-
tle of the Saintes. It is hard to imagine that
many visitors notice it, but when the news
of the battle reached London from the West
Indies in May 1782, it inspired the same
kind of hysteria that 120 years later would
greet the relief of Mafeking. The victory
might not have been all it was cracked up to
be — Rodney had let the French fleet escape
— and yet at a time when a bitterly divided
country was embroiled in a losing struggle
for its American colonies and a mismanaged
war with France and Spain, anything which
promised that Britannia still ruled the waves
and Britons could fight and die as their fore-
fathers had done was manna from heaven.
Resolution is a double portrait of the
youngest and most glamorous of Nollek-
ens’s captains, Lord Robert Manners, and of
his elder and distinctly less resolute brother
Charles. It is not unfair to say that neither
of them alone would warrant a full biogra-
phy, and if 480 pages is pushing the boat out
even for the pair of them, David Rutland and
Emma Ellis have found a clever, and ulti-
mately poignant, way of bringing the naval
and political sides of the war with the Ameri-
can colonies into a single focus.
The Manners brothers were the grand-
sons of the 3rd Duke of Rutland and, more
importantly in the popular perception, the
sons of that great and balding British hero
and well-known pub sign, the Marquis of
Granby. For all their closeness, the two boys
would have been aware from the first of the
very different futures that awaited them;
but while the amiable and feckless Charles
seems to have collapsed under the expec-
tations and temptations — not to mention
debts — awaiting the heir to Belvoir and the
Rutland dukedom, the younger son flung
himself into his naval career with an won-
derfully dogged and impatient determina-
tion to ‘get on’.
One of the most engaging things about
Lord Robert Manners, in fact, is how very
much like every other midshipman or younglieutenant down the generations he sounds.
On the face of it, no one could have been
better placed to exploit the Georgian world
of patronage and connections, but his let-
ters home to Charles — full of frustrations
about ‘sea-time’, promotions, the uselessness
of superiors, the good fortune of his peers
or the holy grail of post rank — could have
as easily been written a century later by the
penniless Robert Falcon Scott as by an 18th-
century aristocrat with a brace of dukes for
grandfathers.
And life would not, as it turned out,
prove as smooth for him as might be expect-
ed, because for all his social advantages,
Manners was unlucky enough to be born
a Whig in one of the unhappiest and mis-
erably politicised periods in naval history.
The growing rift with the American colo-
nies had exposed bitter divisions in British
public life, and, when war broke out, the
navy split along factional lines, with officer
turned against officer in a climate of recrimi-
nation and mistrust that finally boiled over
after the indecisive Battle of Ushant in the
notorious Keppel-Palliser affair.
While Manners’s connections came
to his rescue in the end — he made post-
captain by the age of 22 — he had been
made to wait longer than any son of Gran-
by with a well-developed sense of entitle-
ment felt was proper. He had first gone to
sea on the Newfoundland station, when he
was just 14, but it would be six frustrating
and tedious years before he saw his first
action at Ushant, and another two before
he got his own ship and the chance of the
glory and prize money that were the driv-
ing force behind every ambitious officer in
the age of sail.
The young Manners did not live long‘The Death of Lord Robert Manners’ by Thomas StothardTHE BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY