For those us who dabble in journalism, it is a constant effort to make our prose as engaging, punchy, and robust as our limited vocabularies can manage. It is thus utterly refreshing and deeply imposing to be reminded of how best to do it by a master of their craft. Exhibit A: Paul Dacre’s statement following Prince Harry’s loss in court yesterday. Read it and grin.
Dacre and his publications stood for people like us: ordinary suburban Brits
‘There isn’t a laundry in the cosmos big enough to wash all the dirty linen he has aired about his own family’. ‘I feel sorry for the way a confused and angry young man has been drawn into this case’. This ‘trumped-up action’ raises ‘profoundly disturbing questions about the conduct of elements of the legal profession’. ‘This was a conspiracy…to destroy a paper’ financed ‘by the orgy-loving racist Max Mosley’, a ‘sinister bid to resuscitate Levenson Two and impose statutory regulation on the press’. No, Mr Dacre – tell us how you really feel.
Almost four years ago, when the Duke of Sussex, Lady Lawrence, Sir Elton John, Liz Hurley and Sadie Frost took the Daily Mail to court over alleged phone hacking, I wrote for my previous employer how unfortunate it was that this legal action seemed to have kiboshed Dacre’s chances of receiving a peerage in Boris Johnson’s resignation honours. Now that it is over, the Prince humiliated and Dacre vindicated, his elevation to the peerage should be swift.
My grandparents were both Daily Mail readers; I had the Dacre style ingrained on my consciousness from a very young age. I understood, intuitively, that Dacre and his publications stood for people like us: ordinary suburban Brits, unfashionable, conservative and often Conservative, who might be interested in celebrity and scandal, but combined that with a deep patriotism, a desire for law, order and morality, and a sense of natural justice.
In an age in which others fawned over New Labour and Alastair Campbell’s spin machine, Dacre’s Daily Mail remained stoically undeferential. It was willing to tap into strains of public opinion considered unfashionable by predictable snobs of the intelligentsia. It was no surprise that the Mail’s circulation rose by 805,000 in his first decade despite a broader falling back of the tabloids. Cream rises to the top.
For all the pearl-clutching that an ‘Enemies of the People’ or ‘Crush the Saboteurs’ may have provoked in the emotional months following the 2016 Brexit referendum, they reflected swathes of traduced and dismayed Leave voters wondering why a political class who had just received their greatest repudiation in decades were struggling to take heed of it. Dacre understood these voters far better than their nominal representatives. The Daily Mail became their voice and champion.
Dacre could do the same in the Lords. But he offers so much more. It was Dacre’s campaigning that helped achieve justice for Lady Lawrence’s son, Stephen; it is a great sadness that she has participated in this multi-year legal campaign against a publication that was such a critical voice for her son.
Writing only of Dacre’s reputation as a hard man obscures his nuances. A demanding boss and a forthright editor he may have been, but the Editor-in-Chief of DMG Media has also long put both his papers and his own earnings behind a wide range of charitable courses, from supporting the arts to purchasing laptops for children and young people struggling with online learning amid the lockdowns.
Deprived of the hereditaries, packed with cronies, distant and disdained by the public, the Lords needs a conscientious new peer able to inject a bit of reason into the fusty Upper House. Now that Prince Harry’s farcical case is complete, one hopes our latest outgoing Prime Minister’s resignation honours completes the work of his predecessor-but-two’s.
Comments