There’s bad news in the Mail for Boris Johnson

Long regarded as a dormant volcano, the Daily Mail proprietor Lord Rothermere has erupted. Mandrake is reliably informed he has told his editors – and his editor-in-chief Paul Dacre – that he believes his national titles have “lost all touch” with what their readers are thinking about Boris Johnson.

I am told tomorrow’s Mail on Sunday will make it abundantly clear it no longer has confidence in Johnson. The language will be strong and the change of tone and direction dramatic. It will send shock waves through Downing Street and the Conservative party and make a leadership challenge this year all the more likely.

“Jonathan [Rothermere] seldom intervenes when it comes to editorial matters, but enough is enough,” one senior executive on the paper tells me. “He is understandably incandescent he was given a speech to read at the 125th anniversary party for the Daily Mail about how his paper fearlessly exposed charlatans, and then, just a matter of weeks later, he learnt his paper had turned down a story disclosing what a charlatan Johnson is – the whole Carriegate scandal – and then how MailOnline accidentally lifted it from the Times’s first edition, only to drop it again.

“Of course he’s unsettled by the extent to which his newspapers are out of sync with the way their readers are thinking about Johnson. He sees his falling print sales and hears what people are saying. He’d be less than human if he didn’t suspect the reluctance to adjust to reality had at least something to do with Dacre’s personal ambition to get a peerage out of this particular prime minister.”

Today’s Daily Mail is the first to reflect the change of direction.

It ran a highly critical front pages about the way Johnson has handled the Chris Pincher groping scandal. An editorial stated: “No 10 tried to dampen criticism by suggesting Boris Johnson was unaware of Mr Pincher’s creepy proclivities when he promoted him.

“But given that every dog in the street seems to have known – at Westminster and beyond – that claim stretched credibility to the limit. And if he didn’t know, why not?”

Glen Owen and Dan Hodges write in tomorrow’s paper, however, that Johnson did know about Pincher’s behaviour two years ago. They write: “Mail on Sunday has been told that in 2020, during a discussion about whether to appoint Mr Pincher to the post of Chief Whip, the Prime Minister told aides: ‘He’s handsy, that’s a problem. Pincher by name, pincher by nature’.”

My source adds that Rothermere has been contrasting his newspapers’ present grasp of politics and affinity with their readers with the “effortless sure-footedness” of Sir David English’s period as editor.

English – like Rothermere – was also a passionate Europhile.