The Daily Mail’s expletive-prone editor-in-chief Paul Dacre may be about to be elevated to the House of Lords in the resignation honours list, but some of his journalistic peers are not happy.
Tina Brown – the legendary Tatler, New Yorker and Vanity Fair editor – tells me her late husband Sir Harry Evans was not impressed after meeting Dacre. She reckoned they just didn’t share the same instincts about what journalism should be about.
Evans fearlessly took on governments and big business as editor of the Sunday Times and exposed the Thalidomide scandal in the late 1970s. Dacre, by contrast, attempted to prop up Boris Johnson’s government in its dying days, was Johnson’s unsuccessful candidate to take over the broadcasting watchdog Ofcom, and has lately made little secret of the fact he is desperate for a peerage (the House of Lords Appointments Commission does not share his enthusiasm, but let’s see).
Tina’s insightful new book about the royals, The Palace Papers, references Dacre’s campaign against Meghan Markle. She describes him variously as “the saturnine editorial minotaur with a matchless flair for defenestrating whichever public figures cross his Middle England moralistic code” and “the surly baron of Middle England”.
I ask Tina if “editorial minotaurs” now represent the future for journalism and she says she’s doing what she can to repel them. With Durham University – which her late husband attended – and the news agency Reuters, she has set up the Sir Harry Evans Global Fellowship in Investigative Journalism to give young journalists the opportunity to perfect their investigative skills.
Meanwhile, over the weekend, Dacre’s Mail on Sunday was still unable to let Johnson go, mindlessly saying “the outgoing PM has done so much to cheer us all up and make Britain feel good about itself…”
