Richard Cockett
Press Gang
Mail Men: The Unauthorized Story of the Daily Mail
By Adrian Addison
Atlantic Books 407pp £20 order from our bookshop
Prime ministers come and go, but the editor of the Daily Mail is forever – and woe betide anyone who forgets it. David Cameron did, and now has time to repent at leisure. Appalled, or more likely intimidated, by the Daily Mail’s vituperative assault on the EU during last year’s referendum, Cameron foolishly asked the Daily Mail’s pro-European proprietor, Lord Rothermere, to sack Paul Dacre, the paper’s editor. Hearing of this, Dacre is said to have become ‘incandescent’ with rage, resolving to be even more brutal towards the EU and Tory Remainers than previously.
Every day Dacre filled the paper with pages of demonic, hateful tosh denouncing all the awful immigrants taking advantage of Europe’s lax border controls, spiced with highly personal, vengeful attacks on the likes of Sir John Major. In the end the Daily Mail might well have swung the referendum result
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