Paul Dacre
Paul Michael Dacre is an English journalist and the former long-serving editor of the British 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.
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, 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, 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 doesn'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 being 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 Mails 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, assistant editor in 1987, executive editor the following year and associate editor in 1989. In this period, according to former colleague Sue Douglas, Dacre was a "good David English disciple". 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 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 and the Maastricht Treaty. Several leaders in his last weeks at the Standard asserted that "Maastricht is dead" ; "Unrealities in the EEC" ; and an appeal to prime minister John Major, "Come on, John, gizzaballot". 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.
After English died in March 1998, Dacre himself was appointed by the 3rd Viscount Rothermere as 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, 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 Mail's "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 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 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 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".
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". According to BBC News's political editor Nick Robinson, Dacre "was a guest at many of the most intimate family occasions Gordon Brown had". 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".
Following 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.