Paul Dacre

Paul Michael Dacre (; born 14 November 1948) is an English journalist and the former long-serving editor of the British right-wing tabloid the ''Daily Mail''. He is also editor-in-chief of DMG Media, which publishes the ''Daily Mail'', ''The Mail on Sunday'', the free daily tabloid ''Metro'', the Mailonline website, and other titles."Paul Dacre appointed Editor-in-Chief"
, Daily Mail and General Trust, 16 July 1998. Retrieved 5 December 2012.

On 1 October 2018, Dacre became chairman and editor-in-chief of Associated Newspapers, and stood down as editor of the ''Daily Mail'' in the following month. He briefly left Associated Newspapers in November 2021, but rejoined just three weeks later following his withdrawal from the race to become Ofcom chairman.

Early life

Dacre was born and grew up in the north London suburb of Arnos Grove in Enfield. His father, Peter, was a journalist on the ''Sunday Express'' whose work included show business features. Joan (née Hill), his mother, was a teacher; the couple had five sons, of whom Paul was the eldest. One of his brothers, Nigel, was editor of ITV's news programmes from 1995 to 2002.

Dacre was educated at University College School, an independent school in Hampstead, on a state scholarship, where he was head of house. In his school holidays, he worked as a messenger at the ''Sunday Express'', and during his pre-university gap year as a trainee in the ''Daily Express''. From 1967 he read English at the University of Leeds, while Jack Straw was President of the Students' Union.

While at university, he became involved with the '' Union News'' newspaper (the ''Leeds Student'' from 1970), rising to the position of editor. At this time he identified with the liberal end of the political spectrum on issues including gay rights and drug use, and wrote editorials in support of a student sit-in at Leeds organised by Straw. He introduced a pin-up feature in the newspaper called "Leeds Lovelies". He told the '' British Journalism Review'' in 2002: "If you don't have a left-wing period when you go to university, you should be shot" and said of his early experience of editing in November 2008 that it taught him "dull ontentdoesn't sell newspapers. Boring doesn't pay the mortgage", but also that "sensation sells papers".

On his graduation in 1971, Dacre joined the ''Daily Express'' in Manchester for a six-month trial; after this he was given a full-time job on the ''Express''. Concerning his career choice, Dacre commented in the ''BJR'' interview that he did not have "any desire to do anything other than journalism".

Early career

At the ''Express'', Dacre was based in Belfast for a few years before sent to the office in London. He was sent to Washington D.C., in 1976 to cover that year's American presidential election, remaining there until 1979, when he moved to New York as a correspondent. It was at this time that his politics shifted to the right:

After his years at the ''Express'' bureau, Dacre was head-hunted by David English, appointed as head of the ''Mail''s New York bureau in 1979 and brought back to London in 1980. A profile in ''The Independent'' in 1992 recounted his behaviour in this period: "It was terrifying stuff. He would rampage through the newsroom with his arms flailing like a windmill, scratching himself manically as he fired himself up." Subsequently, he became assistant editor (news and features), assistant editor (features) in 1987, executive editor the following year and associate editor in 1989.Griffiths ''Fleet Street: Five Hundred Years of the Press'', p. 379. In this period, according to former colleague Sue Douglas, Dacre was a "good David English disciple".Addison ''Mail Men'', p. 246 Adrian Addison found opinions differed as to whether Dacre was an English protégé when he was conducting research for ''Mail Men''.

During Dacre's brief period as editor of the ''Evening Standard'' from March 1991 to July the following year, circulation of the newspaper rose by 16%.

Editor of the ''Daily Mail''

Appointment

Dacre succeeded (the by then) Sir David English as editor of the ''Daily Mail'' in July 1992. Dacre had turned down an offer from Rupert Murdoch to edit ''The Times'' believing that Murdoch "would not accept my desire to edit with freedom". It was his approach to the job of editor, "hard-working, disciplined, confrontational" according to Roy Greenslade, which had led Murdoch to attempt to hire him. For the ''Mail'', Dacre was considered important enough to necessitate sidelining someone thought unsackable; English became editor-in-chief and Chairman of Associated Newspapers, then the parent company.

Dacre was known in the summer of 1992 to be against Britain's membership of the Exchange Rate Mechanism (this was shortly before Black Wednesday in September when Britain was forced out of the ERM) and the Maastricht Treaty. Several leaders in his last weeks at the ''Standard'' asserted that "Maastricht is dead" (on 10 June); "Unrealities in the EEC" (sic, 29 June); and an appeal to prime minister John Major, 'Come on, John, gizzaballot" (30 June). In contrast, English was a Europhile and allowed more international content in the paper. Dacre apparently ceased publishing a page on World News and an American diary as soon as possible after he took over.Addison ''Mail Men'', p.9

After English died in March 1998, Dacre himself became the Mail Group's editor-in-chief the following July, in addition to remaining as editor of the ''Daily Mail''.

Stephen Lawrence case

Dacre's most prominent newspaper campaign was in 1997, against the suspects who were acquitted of the murder in 1993 of the black teenager Stephen Lawrence. It "turned out to be one of the very rare instances in which the editor showed fellow-feeling", wrote Andrew O'Hagan. According to Nick Davies in ''Flat Earth News'' (2008), the paper originally intended an attack on the groups arguing for an inquiry into the Lawrence murder, but the paper's reporter Hal Austin, on interviewing Neville and Doreen Lawrence, realised that some years earlier, Neville had worked at Dacre's home in Islington as a plasterer, and the news desk instructed Austin to "Do something sympathetic" about the case. Dacre eventually used the headline "MURDERERS" accusing the suspects of the crime on 14 February 1997. He repeated this headline in 2006.

On the final day of the inquest held at the coroner's court, Dacre and other Mail executives had lunch with Sir Paul Condon, then Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, "who very eloquently told me they were as guilty as sin". Four of the five suspects had never provided any alibi for their whereabouts on the night of Stephen Lawrence's murder and they invoked the privilege against self incrimination to avoid giving evidence and exposing themselves to cross examination. The police believed that the alibi of the fifth suspect was unconvincing. The newspaper on 14 February 1997, under its headline asserted: "The ''Mail'' accuses these men of killing. If we are wrong, let them sue us". No claim was issued and the newspaper received significant acclaim and opprobrium as a result. Two of the men featured on the ''Mails "MURDERERS" front page were convicted of Stephen Lawrence's murder in January 2012.

Jonathan Freedland of ''The Guardian'' wrote of the development: "He made an unlikely anti-racist campaigner, but there were few voices more critical in the demand for justice for Stephen Lawrence than Paul Dacre and the ''Daily Mail''." However, Brian Cathcart wrote in November 2017 that the paper's "principal claims" about its involvement in the case "are at best exaggerated and at worst unsupported by evidence."

On other occasions, the ''Mail'' under Dacre has been criticised for an alleged racist attitude towards the stories it chooses to cover. Nick Davies recounts an anecdote from a former senior news reporter who, en route to a murder scene of a woman and her two children 300 miles away, was told to return because the victims were black.Davies p. 371 Davies comments: "Perhaps I have been unlucky, but I have never come across a reporter from the ''Daily Mail'' who did not have some similar story, of black people being excluded from the paper because of their colour."

New Labour years

Dacre is "highly influential politically", in the opinion of the journalist Simon Heffer. For a while, the ''Daily Mail'' under Dacre briefly entertained positive views of New Labour until the Formula 1 tobacco advertising controversy and clashes with the government's Director of Communications Alastair Campbell cooled the relationship owing to the practice of spin doctoring. By 2001, according to the former ''Mail'' journalist (later the political editor) James Chapman, relations between Dacre and Tony Blair had completely broken down.

Dacre stated at a meeting of the Select Committee on Public Administration in 2004:

Dacre later wrote in 2013: "for years, while most of Fleet Street were in thrall to it, the ''Mail'' was the only paper to stand up to the malign propaganda machine of Tony Blair and his appalling henchman, Campbell".

As recounted by the academic and journalist John Lloyd in 2004, Campbell's assistant in Labour's first term, Tim Allan, believed "the government pentyears trying to be chummy with the ''Daily Mail''... Blair sees himself as the great persuader, able to convince anyone. But they didn't want to like him. The government raised far too much time trying to turn the ''Mail'' around".

The newspaper also turned against Cherie Blair, the former Prime Minister's wife, when the Blairs' lawyers prevented the publication of a former nanny's memoirs; official regulations prevent press revelations regarding the children of public figures. The ''Daily Mail'' and ''Mail on Sunday'' also came into direct conflict with No. 10 in 2002 for their pursuit of Cherie Blair's connection to the conman Peter Foster, although Dacre denied any "agenda apart from good journalism". Tony Blair targeted the ''Mail'' titles directly, denouncing "parts of the media that will take what there is that is true and then turn it round into something that is a total distortion of the real truth".

According to Michael White, Dacre made contact with Gordon Brown around 2000 as the ''Mail'' editor's attitude towards Blair became more negative. In 2002, while Brown was Chancellor of the Exchequer, Dacre commented about his high admiration for him: "I feel he is one of the very few politicians of this administration who's touched by the mantle of greatness". Brown returned the favour at an event at the Savoy Hotel which celebrated the tenth anniversary of Dacre's editorship of the ''Mail'' in 2003. In a video presentation, Brown said that Dacre "has devised, developed and delivered one of the great newspaper success stories of any generation" and was "someone of great journalistic skill, an editor of great distinction and someone of very great personal warmth". Journalist Polly Toynbee referred to this relationship as an "incomprehensible and grovelling friendship" on the part of Brown with "Labour's worst enemy". In explanation, Peter Wilby thought both men were "puritans at heart". Campbell, however, has written that Brown in conversation always "adamantly denied" being a "personal friend" of Dacre.

Although he is a Eurosceptic, Dacre backed Kenneth Clarke, an advocate of the European Union, to be leader of the Conservative Party on two occasions. In what Anthony Barnett has described as "a gem of far-sightedness", a ''Mail'' editorial on the Conservative leadership candidates in 2005 got round this contradiction by arguing the campaign for Britain to switch to the Euro as its currency "has for the foreseeable future, been overtaken by events". While David Cameron was considered "attractive", although "insubstantial", and "too obsessed with aping Mr Blair", Clarke was "uniquely qualified to start a long overdue demolition job on" Labour's "shameful war record" in Iraq, Blair having "led Britain into an illegal war on the coat-tails of the Americans". It added "no one has dared accuse" Clarke "of not being a patriot".

After the change of Labour prime minister in 2007, Brown commissioned an independent inquiry chaired by Dacre on the release of government information, which reported in late January 2009. It recommended the halving of the thirty-year rule in the remaining areas where it still applied. Dacre wrote: "the existing rule seemed to condone unnecessary secrecy rather than protecting necessary confidentiality. This perception of secrecy was breeding public cynicism".

Dacre said during a talk given to students in January 2007, that the Conservative Party could not be guaranteed the ''Mail's'' support at the 2010 general election, and he also queried whether the party was still conservative.

The editor and his newspaper

According to Cristina Odone, writing for ''The Observer'', Dacre has a reputation towards underlings of "verbal abuse" and "a drill sergeant's delight in public humiliation". Nick Davies, in his book ''Flat Earth News'', writes that Dacre's staff call his morning editorial meetings the "Vagina Monologues" because of his habit of calling everybody a "cunt". In his ''Desert Island Discs'' appearance in 2004, host Sue Lawley quizzed him on his methods, to which Dacre responded: "Shouting creates energy, energy creates great headlines." Conrad Black, a convicted fraudster and ex-proprietor of the Telegraph papers, considers him "a saturnine and capricious manipulator". Peter Wilby, in a January 2014 profile for the ''New Statesman'', quoted an anonymous source, who said of Dacre: "He's no longer the expletive volcano he once was; his barbs these days tend to concern the brainpower of his target and their supposed laziness."

According to John Lloyd writing in April 2012, Dacre's newspaper "is a daily and brilliantly disciplined savaging of government follies, progressive fads and flouters of the time-honoured verities of British and family life". Dacre, he commented in 2007, is the only "British newspaper editor who stamps himself on his newspaper every morning" reflecting "his unique blend of libertarian-authoritarian Conservatism". According to Roy Greenslade in ''The Guardian'': "The ''Mail'' is a rare national newspaper in that it is the embodiment of the values and views of its editor rather than its proprietor. It is very much Paul Dacre's paper. This is to the credit of" Jonathan Harmsworth, 4th Viscount Rothermere "in the sense that he allows the editor to hold sway".

Some years later, at the Leveson Inquiry in February 2012, Dacre rejected the idea that he imposes his will on the paper. He commented that some issues contain opinions which "make my hair go white" and asserted that some journalists "would resign if I told them what to write". Peter Preston noted: "He can hire leading voices from the ''Guardian'' or the ''Observer'' and let them say exactly what they'd have said in their old homes." The astrologer Jonathan Cainer was first taken on for a ''Mail'' horoscope column in December 1992. Given to an unconventional dress code Dacre found objectionable, his contract had a clause insisting he wore a suit. Cainer, who spent the bulk of his career at the ''Mail'' although he "never once agreed with an editorial they have published", was the highest paid journalist of his era.

Dacre told Lauren Collins for a 2012 article about the ''Mail'' in ''The New Yorker'': "The family is the greatest institution on God's green earth." The typical locale of his readers, he told Collins, is the area of North London in which Dacre himself was raised, Arnos Grove: "Its inhabitants were frugal, reticent, utterly self-reliant, and immensely aspirational. They were also suspicious of progressive values, vulgarity of any kind, self-indulgence, pretentiousness, and people who know best".

These pretensions have sometimes received dismissive responses. Owen Jones in ''The Establishment'' (2014) wrote that Dacre "is the epitome of the privileged and powerful journalist who has convinced himself that he's the voice of the little man, the ordinary Brit". Stephen Fry in August 2013 said Dacre "decries indecency on one page and pushes his male readers" into looking at "a semi-nude actress on another. His cancer scare, miracle cure stories are sickeningly anti-science and the only good thing to be said about his ''Mail'' is that no one decent or educated believes in it".

Dacre defended himself against his critics in October 2013 decrying the existence of "an unpleasant intellectual snobbery about the ''Mail'' in leftish circles, for whom the word 'suburban' is an obscenity. They simply cannot comprehend how a paper that opposes the mindset they hold dear can be so successful and so loved by its millions of readers. Well, I'm proud that the ''Mail'' stands up for those readers".

Eight former national newspaper editors in 2003 considered "the secret of its success", according to Brian MacArthur in ''The Times'', as being "Dacre's utter, old-fashioned professionalism". A MORI poll in 2005 asked 30 editors from the national and regional press and from the broadcasting industry for the name of the editor they most admired. Dacre won the poll. For Kelvin MacKenzie, the former editor of '' The Sun'' writing in 2005, he is "comfortably Britain's finest editor" who arrives at work "determined to crush the life out of his rivals".

Critics of Dacre, such as Brian Cathcart, have spoken of his "outstanding gifts as an editor". Peter Wilby considers the ''Mail'' "a technically brilliant paper".

Editorial issues

Allegations of prejudicial coverage

Andrew O'Hagan wrote in the ''London Review of Books'' in 2017 that Dacre's "worst effect" on the ''Mail'' "has been to let it seem mired in the things it hates, as if society's worst excesses were mostly an outgrowth of its own paranoid imagination". In his view, under its editor the paper is a "bubbling quagmire of prejudice posing as news, of opinion dressed as fact, and contempt posing as contempt for that portion of the world's population that doesn't live in Cheam". Polly Toynbee in 2004 commented "Read him out the first clause of the press code - the one that tells newspapers not to 'publish inaccurate, misleading or distorted material', and he replies with a straight face that the Mail obeys it".

Writing in ''The Independent'' in 2002, Simon O'Hagan stated: "As far as Dacre is concerned, women have no right to go out and earn money of their own, let alone rise to positions of power, when they also have a family". Journalist Rachel Johnson, writing in ''The Spectator'' in 2001, noted that photographs taken of women for the features pages of the ''Mail'' must comply with the 'Dacre Rules' which she considered a "patriarchal, sexist, trivialising treatment of women". Johnson quoted a female ''Mail'' photographer she had met while writing an article for the newspaper: "No jeans. No black lothes No trousers. Paul Dacre only wants women to appear wearing dresses. If skirts, only to the knee". In 2007, Toynbee claimed the paper shares the opinions of Iran's President Ahmadinejad when it responded to his country's release of the hostage Faye Turney in April 2007. After attempting to buy her story, according to the Ministry of Defence, "with a very substantial sum", and Turney going elsewhere, the paper denounced her as an "unfit mother". "If you dare to take on the ''Mail'' you are a marked man (or woman)", wrote Roy Greenslade in 2013. "When the ''Mail'' has a target in its sights, the victims suffer", wrote Brian MacArthur in ''The Times'' over a decade earlier.

In 2005, the then Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, long in conflict with the London ''Evening Standard'', then wholly owned by the same media group as the ''Mail'', branded the Mail titles as "the most reprehensibly edited" publications in the world with the ''Mail'' chosen as having most "disgraceful record". The ''Mail's'' treatment of asylum seekers and members of other vulnerable groups is a particular source of grievance for many critics, not only Livingstone. "Maybe we anti-racists have been naive to think that he Stephen Lawrence campaignwas anything more than an aberration," suggests Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, adding: "wouldn't it be better if this extraordinary editor decided to use his influence to create just a little more understanding of why refugees leave their countries, and what most of them bring to our nation?"

Expenditure, revenue and circulation

Dacre has pursued a strategy of appointing star columnists established at other newspapers at significantly raised salaries, including in 2006, Peter Oborne (for £200,000 per annum) and Tom Utley (for £120,000). Richard Littlejohn was then on £700,000 a year. Contractual problems have sometimes broken into the open. Astrologer Jonathan Cainer, before his 2000–4 sojourn when he worked for other titles, was offered £1 million to stay with the ''Mail'' because he was thought vital to sustaining the paper's circulation over the ''Daily Express''. This dispute led to a court case against Cainer which the ''Mail'' lost. Another legal entanglement came in 2005 with ''The Sun'' when the terms of Littlejohn's contract came into conflict with his obligations to his former newspaper. Dacre's appearance in the High Court was only averted by a few days. Like other titles, reductions in the editorial budget because of the decline in advertising revenue have resulted in staff redundancies.

From the business point of view, Dacre's time as editor has been highly successful: "no editor can point to rises in sales that come anywhere near Dacre's in the irst10 years that he has been in the job", wrote Simon O'Hagan in 2002. In his first decade as editor of the ''Mail'', circulation rose by 805,000 in a declining market for tabloid newspapers, although the rise in circulation was helped by the closure of the ''Today'' newspaper. Circulation peaked in 2003 with daily sales of 2.5 million copies, but by 2018 was down to 1.4 million. However, the Mail Group's website Mailonline has overtaken ''The New York Times'' as the English-language title with the largest reach. Although the website reprints content from the newspaper, as well as generating its own material, responsibility for it is delegated to Martin Clarke as Dacre does not use a computer. Dacre received a bonus of £263,388 (as revealed in the 2016 DGMT annual report) for his involvement in the company's consumer digital media.

On 24 May 2016, Lord Rothermere issued a company profit's warning to the city and the share price fell by almost 10%.

Public appearances

A shy man who is uneasy in company, according to former employee Helen Lewis, Dacre has a reputation for avoiding publicity and seldom gives interviews. He has a low opinion of "celebrity editors" such as the (then) editor of the ''Daily Mirror'', Piers Morgan. Responding to comments on his more limited public visibility to a parliamentary select committee in 2004, he spoke of his peers who "think they are public figures and the more they become speaking heads on TV chat shows the more their newspapers decline and they do not last very long in their jobs".

The Cudlipp Lecture was delivered by Dacre at the London College of Communication on 22 January 2007.Paul Dacr
"The BBC's cultural Marxism will trigger an American-style backlash"
as reproduced on 'Comment is Free', ''The Guardian'', 24 February 2007. Retrieved 25 May 2007. For him, Britain is dominated by a "subsidariat", those newspapers whose "journalism and values—invariably liberal, metropolitan and politically correct, and I include the pinkish ''Times'' here—don't connect with sufficient readers to be commercially viable" and make a profit. Dacre also attacked the BBC
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