An eye for sensationalism

According to Private Eye, executives at the Daily Mail were alarmed by the impending publication of Adrian Addison’s new history of the paper. They expected an onslaught. So their hearts must have sunk when they saw the cover of Mail Men. Stephen Fry, who may hate the Mail more than anyone alive, pronounces it ‘a damned good read’; and Polly Toynbee, whose loathing is scarcely less vehement, praises it as a ‘well-informed, diamond-shaped analysis’ of the paper that ‘dominates England’s political culture’.

Possibly neither of these sages has read the book in its entirety. It isn’t the hatchet job that Mail executives feared and its enemies wanted. Admittedly, as a columnist on the paper for many years I may be an imperfect judge. On the other hand, if the book were gratuitously insulting or unfair I might have cottoned on. For the most part it isn’t, though whether it is as acute as it is generally even-handed is less certain.

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James Tidmarsh

The end of the pick ’n’ mix passport

The first part efficiently retells a familiar story. In 1896 Alfred Harmsworth founds the paper, which Lord Salisbury thought was ‘run by office boys for office boys’. He dies rich and half-bonkers as Lord Northcliffe, and the Mail passes into the journalistically far less gifted hands of his bean-counter
brother, Harold, ennobled as Lord Rothermere. He was the ass who intermittently flirted with Hitler before the war. Addison suggests that, from Northcliffe’s death in 1922 until the paper’s relaunch as a tabloid in 1971, the Mail was in slow decline as it was overtaken by Beaverbrook’s Daily Express, which by the 1950s was selling more than twice as many copies.

David English, editor from 1971 to 1992, made the Mail much livelier than it had been, and set out to attract women readers.