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Paul Dacre was “no shrinking violet” in the 27 years he edited the Daily Mail, he said in his witness statement to the high court in London this week. He had “captained a tough ship” in order to safeguard “the ‘patina’ and prestige that differentiated the Daily Mail from other titles, both the popular ones and the so-called quality newspapers”.
Others have described the editor’s tenure, and the impact it had on the UK, differently. Widely regarded as “the most powerful print journalist in Britain” (Politico) until he stood down in 2021, to his critics Dacre was “the man who hated liberal Britain” (New Statesman), and even the country’s “most dangerous man” (Observer).
This was the editor whom celebrities and politicians most feared, whose management diatribes were so notoriously foul-mouthed that they were nicknamed “the vagina monologues” on account of the number of times he used the word “cunt”.
So who was the unassuming older gentleman who shuffled quietly to the stand in court 76 of the Royal Courts of Justice on Wednesday and was immediately asked, on the basis of his softly spoken evidence the previous day, if he could keep his voice up a bit?
“I’ll do my very best,” responded Dacre, still barely audibly.
Dacre was giving evidence for a second day in defence of the Mail’s publisher, Associated Newspapers Limited (ANL), which has been accused by a group of claimants including Prince Harry, Elton John and Elizabeth Hurley of illegal information-gathering practices including bugging, phone tapping, hacking and “blagging” documents. ANL denies the claims.
First, however, there was an apology from David Sherborne, the lead barrister representing the claimants. Sherborne’s line of questioning to Dacre on Tuesday had not pleased the judge in the case, Mr Justice Nicklin, who had said the “large bulk” of the barrister’s questions were irrelevant as this case was not a public inquiry into Associated Newspapers.
Highly unusually, Nicklin had declared that Sherborne would have until 3pm on Wednesday, and no longer, to cross-examine the former editor. So, Sherborne told Dacre, he would start by outlining the relevance of his questions before “the guillotine comes down later this afternoon”.
Sherborne may have been ordered to stay in his lane but he was barely three minutes in when Nicklin interrupted, the first of a series of increasingly exasperated interventions over the barrister’s cross-examination as he tried to pin down Dacre over Daily Mail journalists’ use of private investigators, which Dacre says he banned in 2007.
Asked repeatedly about his recollection of a particular story, invoice or piece of correspondence, the 77-year-old, who remains editor-in-chief of ANL’s parent company, DMG Media, said they would not have come across his desk, and if they had he was unlikely to recall them. “I was a very busy man in those days,” Dacre said. “I was so busy producing a paper of 120 pages … No, didn’t get down to that granular level.”
Repeated questions about stories published in the Mail on Sunday met with the same response. “I keep repeating this mantra, this was the Mail on Sunday. It was an autonomous newspaper.”
Hadn’t he been the editor-in-chief of that paper, too, at the time? “I don’t think you appreciate [the job] of an editor-in-chief of a busy media organisation,” he said.
Though his voice remained quiet throughout, there were occasional flashes of anger, such as when he was asked about a series of articles about the Mail in 2017 in Byline Investigates (a “sordid paper” edited by “one of the most amoral people I have ever had the misfortune to come across”), or about the investigative reporter Nick Davies, whose book Flat Earth News about unedifying and corrupt practices in journalism was, Dacre said witheringly, “a book written to appeal to a certain section of the Guardian readership”.
Soon it was 3pm and while the barrister did his best to continue, the judge was having none of it. “You have trespassed now into an area that is irrelevant, so I’m not going to let you pursue that any further,” he told Sherborne.
The guillotine had indeed fallen and, for now at least, the former king of Fleet Street appeared to have escaped the block with his head intact.
