Mail Men: The Unauthorised Story of the Daily Mail review

Mail Men

Author: Adrian Addison

ISBN-13: 978-1782399704

Publisher: Atlantic Books

Guideline Price: £20

The man who brought death to Birmingham or the man who brought peace to Belfast? Martin McGuinness was a complicated character and, on his death last month, most newspapers reported both sides of his life and attempted to navigate his transition from one to the other.

For the Daily Mail, however, he was a mass murderer beyond redemption who turned to peace only because he knew he had lost the war. His passing was marked with a pair of bomb-devastation pictures on the front page and a leader declaring that the world was a cleaner, sweeter place without him.

The Daily Mail in the UK, that is. For readers in Ireland, McGuinness's death left a gap that would be difficult to fill; the fury of his victims had turned to forgiveness. This was a man deemed worthy of a black-bordered front-page portrait, three news spreads and a 12-page pull-out supplement.

Newspapers sensibly adjust coverage to match the different markets of different editions, but few have the Mail's ability to look in two directions at the same time – while denouncing the "breathtaking hypocrisy" of anyone else who ever changes a view on anything.

It is this supreme confidence, some would say arrogance, that makes the Mail, recently named Britain's newspaper of the year, a unique force; a newspaper that still abides by its founder's assertion more than a century ago that "the British people relish a good hero – and a good hate".

In his book Mail Men, freelance journalist Adrian Addison has set out to look at the personalities behind the phenomenon and, as might be imagined, there are striking similarities between them. Our Citizen Kane preconceptions of the archetypal press magnate (proprietor or editor) are confirmed: only workaholic tyrants with a full lexicon of expletives need apply.

In the early pages we meet Dublin-born Alfred Harmsworth, who started the Evening News and the Mail (and also at one point owned the Times and the Daily Mirror), and his brother Harold. Alfred was nicknamed Sunny and cared about journalism; Harold was nicknamed Bunny and cared about money. Alfred became Lord Northcliffe, after whom the old Mail offices off Fleet Street and new offices in Kensington are named; Harold became Lord Rothermere, and it is his descendants who inherited the papers and still own the Mail titles today.

Press barons

There are plenty of biographies of press barons and not a lot new to see here, beyond a reminder that Northcliffe pretty well invented popular journalism – right down to the word “tabloid”, even though his papers were broadsheets – and was willing to invest in it, constantly battling with his brother’s desire to cut costs.

The shame of the fake Zinoviev letter that torpedoed Labour's chances in the 1924 general election and of the second Lord Rothermere's fascination with fascism are dutifully recorded. More interesting are examples of stories and headlines that would not look out of place in the Mail today: blaming a mother's "criminal neglect" for the near-starvation of a little girl in a Kitchener concentration camp during the Boer War, declaring Asquith "a national danger" in 1916.

But what Addison's readers really want to know about is the modern Mail, the inside story on the tensions in an office with a fire escape known as the "crying steps" because so many journalists go there to recover from their latest bawling-out.

We meet the bouncy but bullying David English, whose Daily Sketch took over everything but the Mail's name when the papers merged at the beginning of the 1970s, and whose 20-year partnership with proprietor Vere Harmsworth (the third Lord Rothermere) created the template that is still followed today. It was English who pushed the paper's appeal to women and established columnists such as Lynda Lee-Potter, Nigel Dempster and Ian Wooldridge. It was English who engineered fast-track citizenship for the South African athlete Zola Budd so that she could run (disastrously) for Great Britain in the Los Angeles Olympics.

And it was English who decreed that the Mail should rescue 150 abandoned babies at the end of the Vietnam War, although it couldn't find enough and ended up bringing a load of teenagers out. The mission was much derided, but the Mail was still proud of what it had done. Three decades later, English's successor, Paul Dacre, was to urge David Cameron to show compassion and allow 3,000 orphans in the Calais Jungle into Britain. This time the paper was less enthusiastic when the first arrivals weren't quite as young as it had hoped.

A little less than half of the book is devoted to the Dacre regime that has prevailed for the past quarter-century, with its atmosphere of fear – he will apparently send two reporters on the same assignment and expect them to fight it out for a place in the paper – and its particular brand of “target” journalism.

Extraordinarily misogynist

For a paper aimed at women, it is extraordinarily misogynist, to the extent of running a piece by a leading lawyer headlined “Divorce: why we women are to blame”, in which the author states: “In most cases it is women and women alone who are responsible for the dissatisfaction in so many relationships.”

Then there are the knife jobs on female celebrities. One former staffer told Addison: "It'd be the Daily Mail hatchet job. A writer would go to the toilet and come back and there'd be a cutting about Patsy Kensit or somebody and you just knew what they wanted, this slight pulling apart of someone's life."

This might surprise few observers of the paper, but how many knew that ordinary people would have to undergo a mini-makeover – make-up, hair, wrap dress and kitten heels – to make sure they looked like “people like us” before their story could appear in print?

It’s snippets like this, rather than the rather predictable rough and tumble in what one insider describes as a “hideous and joyless place to work”, that make this book so readable.

For, apart from countless examples of the C-word rants that came to be known as the Vagina Monologues, Dacre remains an enigmatic figure. Some say he is good at heart and will give people time off to deal with family problems, but anecdotes to match are absent. The only direct quotes from the emperor editor come from an old episode of Desert Island Discs and a rare interview with the Observer. By all accounts, he is shy and socially insecure, a man who "never wears out his shoe leather" because he is chauffeured from his multimillion-pound home to his carpeted office and home again 14 hours later, so that his feet never touch gravel.

There is no evidence of great writing talent, and Addison’s interviewees can offer no journalistic explanation for Dacre’s rise to the top. Maybe not, but his pencil-stabbing mark is on every page of the paper, in every headline, and the end result is without doubt the most polished product to come out of what used to be called Fleet Street.

With his London mews home, country house and Scottish shooting estate, not to mention the punishing working hours that bring a salary and perks in excess of £2 million (€2.3 million) a year, Dacre’s life seems totally divorced from those of his readers. How he can be so sure that he knows what they feel and think remains a mystery.

But he is. And he does.

Liz Gerard was named Media, Technology and Digital Commentator of the Year at the Editorial Intelligence Comment Awards for her media blog, SubScribe