Paul Dacre

Paul Michael Dacre (/ˈdeɪkər/; born 14 November 1948)^[1] is an English journalist and editor of the British newspaper 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, and other titles.^[3] He is a director of the Daily Mail and General Trust plc (Associated Newspapers' holding group) and was a member of the Press Complaints Commission (PCC) from 1999^[4] to 2008. He left the PCC in order to become chairman of the PCC's Editors' Code of Practice Committee from April 2008.^[5]

In the British Press Awards, Dacre's Daily Mail has won the "Newspaper of the Year" category on six occasions, twice as often as any other title.^[6]

Early life

Dacre was born and grew up in the London suburb of Arnos Grove in Enfield.^[7] His father, Peter, was a journalist on the Sunday Express whose work included show business features.^[8][9][10] His brother, Nigel, was editor of ITV's news programmes from 1995 to 2002.^[11]

He was educated at University College School, an independent school in Hampstead, on a state scholarship,^[12] where he was head of house.^[13] 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.^[10] From 1967 he read English at the University of Leeds,^[14] where Jack Straw was President of the Student's Union,^[13] and during this period met his future wife, Kathleen,^[2][12] now a professor of drama studies.^[6] One of their two sons,^[2] James, is a theatre director.^[15][16]

While at university, he became involved with the Leeds Student newspaper, 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,^[17] and wrote editorials in support of a student sit-in at Leeds organised by Straw.^[18] "'If you don’t have a left-wing period when you go to university, you should be shot'", he has said.^[10] On graduation in 1971, he joined the Daily Express in Manchester for a six-month trial;^[12] after this he was given a full-time job on the Express. Concerning his career choice, Dacre commented in an interview for the British Journalism Review in 2002 that he "never any desire to do anything other than journalism".^[10]

Early career

At the Express, Dacre worked as correspondent in a variety of locations before being sent to Washington, D.C., in 1976 to cover that year's American presidential election,^[10] remaining there until 1979, when he moved to New York as a correspondent.^[19] 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 to be Bureau chief for the Mail in 1980,^[19] but was brought back to the UK in 1983 to be news editor.^[19] 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."^[13] Subsequently, he became assistant editor (news and features), assistant editor (features) in 1987, executive editor the following year and associate editor in 1989.^[20]

He was appointed editor of the Evening Standard in March 1991 and replaced Sir David English the following year as editor of the Daily Mail,^[21] after turning down an offer from Rupert Murdoch to edit The Times.^[10][21] Dacre believed that Murdoch "would not accept my desire to edit with freedom".^[22] It was his approach to the job of editor—"hard-working, disciplined, confrontational"^[12]—which had led Murdoch to attempt to hire him. For the Mail, Dacre was considered important enough for English to become editor-in-chief, considered a means of sidelining someone considered unsackable.^[12] After English's death in March 1998, Dacre himself became the Mail Group's editor-in-chief the following July,^[20] in addition to remaining as editor of the Daily Mail.^[3]

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. According to Nick Davies in Flat Earth News 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,^[22] and the news desk instructed Austin to "Do something sympathetic" about the case.^[23] Dacre eventually used the headline "MURDERERS" accusing the suspects of the crime on 14 February 1997.^[24] 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".^[10] 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".^[25] No claim was issued and the newspaper received significant acclaim and opprobrium as a result.^[10] Two of the men featured on the Mail front page^[24] were convicted of Stephen Lawrence's murder in January 2012.^[26]

On other occasions, the Mail under Dacre has been criticised for its 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.^[27] 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."^[27]

The New Labour years

Seen as "highly influential politically"^[28] by the conservative journalist Simon Heffer, Dacre said, in a talk given to students in January 2007, that the Conservative Party cannot be guaranteed the Mail's support at the 2010 general election, and he also queried whether the party was still conservative.^[28]

Indeed, the Mail under Dacre briefly had positive views of New Labour until the Ecclestone scandal and clashes with the government's Director of Communications Alastair Campbell cooled the relationship thanks to the practice of spin doctoring. Dacre said in 2004:

As recounted by John Lloyd in 2004 though, Tim Allan, Campbell's assistant in Labour's first term, "'the government [spent] years 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'"^[30]

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;^[31] 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".^[32] 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".^[32] Dacre was reportedly horrified when he saw Cherie Blair breastfeeding in public.^[1]

Reportedly though, Dacre saw the former Prime Minister Gordon Brown as a "kindred spirit".^[33] An "incomprehensible and grovelling friendship" on the part of Brown according to journalist Polly Toynbee with "Labour's worst enemy".^[34] In 2002, when Brown was Chancellor of the Exchequer, Dacre commented: "I have an awful lot of admiration for Gordon Brown. I feel he is one of the very few politicians of this administration who's touched by the mantle of greatness".^[10] Brown returned the favour to Dacre at an event at the Savoy Hotel which celebrated the tenth anniversary of his editorship of the Mail in 2003. In a video presentation, the then Chancellor of the Exchequer 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".^[35][36] The Home Secretary David Blunkett was present at the event in person and also praised Dacre.^[36] Although he has Eurosceptic inclinations, Dacre backed Kenneth Clarke, an enthusiast for the European Union, to be leader of the Conservative Party on two occasions.^[6]

Dacre chaired an independent inquiry, commissioned by Gordon Brown, on the release of government information, which reported at the end of 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".^[37] In addition, the report called for ("as a matter of urgency") a review of the government's methods of preserving information held digitally for their long-term survival. It also called for an independent review of the "Radcliffe" rules, which apply to the information released in the memoirs of former ministers, in the light of the changes it recommended.^[38]

Editorial strategy

According to the academic and journalist John Lloyd, responding in 2007, Dacre is currently the only "British newspaper editor who stamps himself on his newspaper every morning" reflecting "his unique blend of libertarian-authoritarian Conservatism".^[39] 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”.^[40] 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."^[41]

For his admirers, Dacre has maintained his newspaper's defence of family values and the "small-c" conservative interests of the suburban middle-classes in the south of England. The editor himself has said: "The family is the greatest institution on God’s green earth."^[42] Dacre once suggested to a new employee, sports' columnist Des Kelly, that he should "Make them laugh, make them cry, or make them angry".^[43] 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 [first] 10 years that he has been in the job".^[7]

Dacre's stated objective is:

He has pursued a strategy of appointing star columnists established at other newspapers at significantly raised salaries.^[45] This practice led to a legal entanglement with The Sun when the terms of Richard Littlejohn's contract came into conflict with his obligations to his former newspaper in 2005. Dacre's appearance in the High Court was only averted by a few days.^[46] Even critics, such as Peter Wilby,^[47] consider the Mail "a technically brilliant paper".^[48]

At the end of 2007, there was speculation in the press over Paul Dacre's future at the Daily Mail. Dacre is known to have a heart condition. He was off work for three months in mid-2007,^[49] and for three weeks that autumn with what was described as "gastric flu". Stephen Glover, a Mail columnist, wrote urging the parent company DMGT to make a statement ending the uncertainty;^[50] four days later the company reaffirmed Dacre's position.^[51]

For many years, Dacre has been the highest-paid newspaper editor in Britain. In 2008, Dacre received £1.62 million in salary and cash payments, an increase from the £1.49 million of the previous year.^[52] In 2015, according to DMGT's annual report, Dacre's income fell by nearly 40% to £1.4 after adopting the companies incentive plan, having risen by almost 25% to £2.4 million in total in 2014 over the amount he was paid in 2013.^[53][54]

Responses

According to Cristina Odone in The Observer, Dacre has a reputation towards underlings of "verbal abuse [and] a drill sergeant's delight in public humiliation"^[55] which also includes verbal abuse.^[17] According to Nick Davies in his book Flat Earth News^[56] his 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."^[42] Conrad Black, a convicted fraudster and ex-proprietor of the Telegraph papers, considers him "a saturnine and capricious manipulator".^[57] Peter Wilby, in a December 2013 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."^[6]

Polly Toynbee in 2004 called the newspaper a "daily blast of fear and loathing" and Dacre himself is "the most arrogant bully of us all".^[58] Dacre reportedly has difficulties relating to women,^[1][6] and for Toynbee the Mail's attitude under his editorship reflects this. 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.^[59] 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".^[34] Simon O'Hagan, writing in The Independent, 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".^[7] Rachel Johnson, writing in The Independent in 2001, noted that photographs taken of women for the features pages of the Mail must comply with the 'Dacre Rules'. She quotes a Mail photographer: "No jeans. No black [clothes]. No trousers. Paul Dacre only wants women to appear wearing dresses. If skirts, only to the knee."^[60]

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 "the most reprehensibly edited" publications in the world.^[61] 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 [the Stephen Lawrence campaign] was 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?"^[62] Stephen Fry has called Dacre a hypocrite who "sends his son to Eton" but mocked Fry "for being posh." Fry added: "He bullies, swears and shrieks, but presents his paper as having the values and standards of a misty Midsomer Britain. Dacre is, all those who have had the misfortune to work for him assure me, just about as loathsome, self-regarding, morally putrid, vengeful and disgusting a man as it possible to be."^[63]

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.^[64] 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".^[65] Publicist Max Clifford has commented that "Paul Dacre is virtually a law [un]to himself" in not being influenced by the Daily Mail's publisher.^[66] Speaking about the Mail and its readers in 2003, Peter Oborne said that its: "detachment from metropolitan opinion is the Daily Mail's overwhelming strength."^[36]

Public appearances

Dacre has a reputation for avoiding publicity and rarely giving interviews. He is acknowledged to be a shy man who feels uncomfortable in the limelight and would prefer to "potter in his garden" than maintain a high profile in London's media circles,^[1] and he takes a dim view of "celebrity editors" such as the former editor of the Daily Mirror, Piers Morgan.^[67] Responding to comments on his more limited public visibility, he claims:

Dacre gave the Cudlipp Lecture^[69] at the London College of Communication on 22 January 2007.^[70] 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.^[71] Dacre also attacked the BBC as a "monolith" pursuing "Cultural Marxism" which has a singular world view and is contemptuous of "ordinary people".^[72] According to Dacre:

In The Guardian Peter Wilby claimed that Dacre's speech made "many listeners feel they were stuck in the back of a taxi with a particularly boring and opinionated driver".^[47] Martin Kettle,^[73] a columnist in The Guardian, questioned whether Dacre's assertion that the Mail represents Conservative voters can be sustained.^[74] Kettle points out that in the 2005 general election 22% of Mail readers voted Labour, 14% for the Liberal Democrats and 7% for other non-Conservative candidates. "In this respect, therefore, the editor who claims to have a hotline to the national mood turns out to have something of a crossed line instead", Kettle wrote.^[73]

On 9 November 2008, Dacre gave a speech to the Society of Editors in which he was critical of the emerging pressures for privacy laws following the conclusion of the Max Mosley libel case against the News of the World and Mr Justice Eady's closing remarks.^[18][75] Dacre and the PCC were criticised directly by Mosley in March 2009 at a meeting of the culture, media and sport committee at the House of Commons.^[76] but Dacre defended the newspaper industry's current system of self-regulation under the Press Complaints Commission (PCC) in his statement accompanying the annual report published in 2010.^[77] In April 2009 Dacre made a further appearance in front of the House of Commons CMSSC, where he criticised current libel laws and the fees charged by law firms.^[78] Justice Eady later referred indirectly to Dacre's submission: "this ad hominem approach does absolutely nothing to further the debate".^[79]

The Leveson Inquiry

Dacre himself appeared on three occasions at the Leveson Inquiry, which had been set up by the Conservative Prime Minister, David Cameron. He gave a speech at a Leveson seminar concerning press standards on 12 October 2011.^[80] He re-asserted his opinion that self-regulation "in a considerably beefed up form" remained "the only viable way of policing a genuinely free press".^[80] Dacre claimed legislation passed in the last 20 years already helped stop necessary journalistic enquiry, and meant that the press was "already on the very cusp of being over regulated". After returning to his negative opinion of liberals, who "by and large hate all the popular press", he claimed "that Britain's commercially viable free press – because it is in hock to nobody – is the only really free media in this country."^[80] His advocacy of newspaper owners being legally unable to reject any regulatory body was viewed as a reference to Richard Desmond, whose Northern & Shell company owns the Daily Express, and had withdrawn from the PCC.^[81]

On 6 February Dacre, in his first cross-examination, admitted that the Mail had used the private detective Steve Whittamore, who was jailed in 2005 for illegally accessing information, but claimed that the rest of the British press had done so too.^[82] Peter Wright, now a former editor of the Mail on Sunday, had said in his session that the Sunday continued using Whittamore for 18 months after his conviction, which Dacre effectively confirmed.^[83] A suggestion from Dacre for a new "press card", to be supervised by a new body,^[40][84] received support from The Independent^[85] but was rejected by commentators and other interested parties.^[86]

The actor Hugh Grant had accused the Mail of using phone hacking to report on his private life,^[87] although Dacre himself had made "extensive enquiries" to establish his newspapers had not used phone hacking.^[88] Dacre had accused Grant of indulging in a "mendacious smear" in a November 2011 statement.^[82][89] He refused to retract his response to Hugh Grant at both appearances at the hearings, unless Grant withdrew his statement. He was quickly recalled on this specific issue,^[90] and again on 9 February 2012, he rejected calls that he should retract his allegation that actor Hugh Grant lied.^[91] DMGT had paid damages to Grant for a false February 2007 story in the Mail on Sunday, but he accused Grant of being "obsessed with trying to drag the Daily Mail into another newspaper's scandal".^[92] Grant stood by his accusation in an interview on the Today radio programme on 11 February.^[88][93] Described as "unflinching, bordering on truculent" at his Leveson inquiry appearances in a New Yorker profile of the Mail,^[42] Dacre was criticised in the final report for his paper's coverage of several stories, including the reports about Grant.^[94][95]

Ralph Miliband affair

In late September and October 2013, Dacre became the subject of criticism across the UK media and political spectrum after the Daily Mail published a piece on 28 September maligning Ralph Miliband, a deceased Marxist academic and father of Ed Miliband, the leader of the Labour opposition at the time. The original article, entitled "The Man Who Hated Britain",^[96] alleged that Ralph Miliband detested the country he and his father had fled to from Nazi-occupied Europe on the basis of a diary note written when he was sixteen and because of his left-wing views. Ed Miliband requested a right-of-reply piece to be published, which was granted but placed alongside a reprinting of the original article and an editorial criticising him for responding, while insisting that Ralph Miliband did hate Britain and that his son’s ambition was to inflict his father’s Marxism upon the country.^[97]

The criticism of Ralph Miliband, and his son's response, came in the run-up to a possible agreement between the media and parliament over the findings of the Leveson inquiry, a point which was made in the Mail's editorial on the subject.^[98] The articles published by the Mail were criticised by publications including The Spectator^[99] and The Times,^[100] as well as by major figures in the Conservative Party. Both Prime Minister David Cameron and Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg empathised with Ed Miliband’s response.^[101][102] Former Conservative Deputy Prime Minister Michael Heseltine condemned the Mail for demeaning the level of political debate, as did former Conservative cabinet minister John Moore, who had been taught by Ralph Miliband at LSE.^[103]

The article also brought Dacre’s position as editor-in-chief of Associated Newspapers under scrutiny, with Roy Greenslade accusing him of making poor decision making.^[104] Paul Dacre was given a right of reply by The Guardian a fortnight later: "As the week progressed and the hysteria increased, it became clear that this was no longer a story about an article on Mr Miliband's Marxist father but a full-scale war by the BBC and the left against the paper that is their most vocal critic."^[105]

References