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  So I witnessed the whole unbelievable scenario spiralling out of control in a frenzy of hysterical violence, culminating in Lee Harvey Oswald being shot down a few feet from me in the basement of the Dallas police headquarters.25

  The blood of Kennedy’s mortally wounded murderer pumping out across the concrete towards our intrepid reporter’s nicely polished shoes was a wonderfully evocative image. Again, though, it was not true. Though English was by now, at least, actually in Dallas – he was covered in soap suds in his hotel room, very close to Dallas police HQ. ‘David did a very good job picking up the story when he landed in Dallas and everything else,’ said Eliades. ‘And then he was rung in his hotel room by the head of bureau at the time, Henry Lowrie.

  ‘“What are you doing then, David?”, Henry asked him.

  ‘“Well, I’m having a shower at the moment.”

  ‘“So, you’re not watching television?”

  ‘“We don’t have televisions in the showers here, Henry.”

  ‘“Well, I should check it if I were you because the man who shot Kennedy has been shot dead in the police station just below you . . .”’26

  Twenty-five years later, dumbfounded Express colleagues Eliades and Stafford stood around a copy of the Daily Mail trying to work out what to do and Eliades decided to write a rebuttal for the next day’s Daily Express. But the paper’s editor and head of news decided not to print it, saying, ‘We can’t use this. We’ll have blood on the streets!’27 Just like the New York Mafia ‘going to the mattresses’ in a mob movie, Mail and Express reporters would have gone to war – shooting ink at each other across every story, across every page. It could have got messy.

  Yet somebody in the Express office (not Eliades) did leak the spiked story to the satirical magazine Private Eye and, when friends asked how he was going to respond to the Private Eye accusation, says Eliades, English simply replied: ‘Well, I think I told that story so many times I was there – I actually believed it.’

  ‘Lots of people have hypothesized about why English did it,’ said Freemantle, ‘and the main theory was that he sort of elaborated his story over the years with Harmsworth and went and got himself trapped. He got himself into a situation that he just couldn’t get out of. He felt he had to write it.’28

  ‘The popular story that reached me – because I was the one that wrote the offending piece that ended up in Private Eye,’ said Eliades, ‘was that he had told the story to Rothermere so many times that when the anniversary came up he told him, “You better write that story you’ve told me so many times.” So, he had to do it. But, I have to say, I worked with English for many, many years on the Express and never knew of him consciously inventing a story. Apart from this one about the Kennedy assassination but, well, you couldn’t go much bigger than that though – could you!’29

  From his earliest days as an editor rewriting young reporter Barry Norman’s copy as features editor of the Daily Sketch, to later claiming he had tried to persuade him to stay on at the Mail, to claims to having met a long-dead New York mobster and ‘interviewing’ Betty Ford – David English certainly seems to have had somewhat of a ‘flexible’ relationship with the truth. Nobody but David English and Vere Harmsworth can know for sure what other stories were shared between them, and they’re both long dead now. But Vere had absolute and unwavering faith in – and unwavering loyalty to – his friend and editor.

  Yet Vere did have his secretive side, just like Sunny Harmsworth. And one secret he kept from his editor was a whopper: he was planning to found a brand-new newspaper . . . and David English knew nothing about it until Lady Rothermere found a phone number in her husband’s suit pocket. She thought he was having an affair and asked the Mail ’s editor to investigate, so English dialled the number – a man answered. English asked him his name, and he replied ‘Bernard Shrimsley’ – deputy editor and then editor of Rupert Murdoch’s relaunched Sun and then editor of the News of the World. English hung up; he worked out in an instant what was happening.

  Rothermere had often talked of taking the fight to the once-mighty Sunday Express, now staggering around the builders’ yard at Trafalgar House. It makes economic sense to own a morning, an evening and a Sunday newspaper, to ensure that those expensive printing presses are never idle. Rothermere had, in fact, wanted to buy the Sunday Times, which Murdoch scooped him to – largely because Vere didn’t want to be lumbered with the heavy loser The Times, which came as part of the deal.

  He decided to start his own Sunday paper instead, without David English, and he asked Shrimsley to be its launch editor. It was a disaster.

  The Mail on Sunday was a dull and grey baby when it was born in May 1982 and it didn’t look like she could survive in what was soon to be a full-colour newspaper world. Even a huge news story couldn’t blow life into the Mail ’s little sister, and you don’t get many stories bigger than a war – Britain was fighting one 8,000 miles away over a clump of barren rocks that was home to 1,800 people and 400,000 sheep; the Falklands to the British, Las Malvinas to the Argentinians.

  ‘While the launch date of the Mail on Sunday drew closer and as we were assembling a staff for the big day,’ wrote the paper’s deputy picture editor, Alun John, ‘Mrs Thatcher was assembling a task force to sail to the South Atlantic.

  ‘Just as our own D-Day day arrived, so did the British forces in the Falklands. Editor Bernard Shrimsley was pleased: “I love a war,” he said, “There’s never any argument about what to lead on.” The first paper was not a great one. It didn’t really set me alight; it didn’t set the readers alight, either.’30

  The sixty-four-page paper’s arrival was ‘the first new national Sunday paper in 21 years’ and its first front page was pure Rule Britannia: ‘Mission Accomplished’ was the headline, after the RAF bombed the airport at Port Stanley in preparation for invasion. Unlike the daily, she was an ugly-looking thing. Her masthead was shoved over to one side and there wasn’t even a picture of a stealthy-looking British Vulcan bomber, just an old agency photo of Argentina’s dim leader General Galtieri riding a donkey – into a war few of his people wanted. It was to prove an apt metaphor.

  Shrimsley, with Vere’s approval, had decided against simply turning the Mail on Sunday into a twin to the daily. Common currency in the newspaper trade of the day was that readers wanted a longer, fatter read of a weekend as they reclined in a comfy chair after a heavy Sunday lunch with their feet propped up on the dog. The Mail on Sunday’s typeface was small and tight – it looked more like a broadsheet. And pictures had to be kept to a minimum because the antique presses used to print it couldn’t cope.

  Worst of all were the paper’s sport pages. May is the best month of all in a football-mad nation. Prizes are won, trapdoors down to lesser leagues whip open and hearts are broken. Most games were played on a Saturday – making Sunday the day to savour the victory or suffer the loss in delicious detail. In 1982 Liverpool clinched the then First Division title for the thirteenth time and the England team were packing their boots for the World Cup in Spain, having failed to even qualify in 1974 and 1978. The FA Cup too still mattered and was only a couple of weekends away. Lots going on, then – it should have been a doddle.

  Yet the Mail on Sunday’s back-page splash was . . . the roller-skating world championships in the Netherlands. Maybe it was a stroke of luck that not many people actually read the thing, as Associated Newspapers had no choice but to renovate and reuse ancient presses and these 1938 dinosaurs couldn’t pump out enough papers. Its target circulation was 1.25 million but it collapsed to 700,000 after six weeks. The paper, as it stood, could not survive. So Shrimsley was sacked in under three months and a new editor ‘abseiled to the rescue’ from upstairs: David English.

  The first working day on a Sunday paper is Tuesday and, when Alun John showed up after Shrimsley’s departure, the ex-editor’s office looked ‘like a crime scene’. The staff shuffled in at the normal conference time and soon enough the door swung open and in walked Rothermere p
lus English and some of his senior hands from the Daily Mail – deputy editor Stewart Steven, showbiz chief Rod Gilchrist and a thirty-three-year-old news editor called Paul Dacre.

  ‘Most were in dark blue suits, white shirts and restrained ties. You could cut the tension with a knife,’ said John.

  Rothermere announced that Bernard had been fired. ‘He had to go. He has not given us the paper we needed.’ He told us from now on the Daily Mail would take over and David English would edit both the daily and Sunday papers. Changes would follow and we would be informed about them. ‘Let there be no mistake,’ said Rothermere, ‘The Daily Mail is now in charge.’31

  Outside the editor’s office sat young reporter Sue Douglas. ‘So the A-Team came down,’ she told the author. ‘It was Roddy Gilchrist, Paul Dacre and a few others. And I remember Roddy jumping up on to a desk in a block of six desks, and saying, “We’re taking over!” Can you imagine? I remember just thinking, “What the ffffuck?”’32

  As English’s cartoon pirates took control of the listing Mail on Sunday, David English skippered both papers, sleeping in his office on a camp bed and working from 9 a.m. to 1 a.m. – spending half of his time on the daily, half on the Sunday. He was fighting hard to save the paper but, in fact, some thought it was actually jealous English who’d kept the wind from her sails from the start, denying the Mail on Sunday access to the Daily Mail ’s talent that could save her like typewriter-wielding shipwrights. The only way Lord Rothermere could rescue the Mail on Sunday was to make the man who wanted to sink her its protector. A smart move indeed – nobody seemed to call Rothermere ‘mere Vere’ these days.

  The paper was cleaned up visually and relaunched with Daily Mail talent hived off to help the stricken sister. New sections were added, plus a magazine called ‘You’, edited by a gifted journalist called John Leese. Editing two papers was too much for one man though, so Rothermere found another editor close to home. Mailman Stewart Steven, who had quietly rejoined the paper after resigning over the British Leyland fiasco, was appointed editor of the revitalized Mail on Sunday. Steven often joked about his pair of monumental journalistic failures to his new staff.

  ‘Gradually David faded into the background,’ said Alun John.

  Stewart was an excellent editor, the best I’ve worked for. I instantly hit it off with him in two ways. First, I supplied him with an autofocus camera for his holidays, complete with an ample supply of colour film, which I would collect from his secretary on his return and make sure was promptly processed and returned. Second, he could not understand how to work the video recorder in his office and I would be summoned to set it to record his choice of programme most days. This gave me a little privileged access and we occasionally chatted about office events as I punched in the channels for the video. Stewart’s greatest gift as an editor was a supreme confidence in his own ability to become the greatest newspaper editor the world has ever seen.33

  Steven turned out to be an excellent Mail on Sunday editor but would never become editor of the Daily Mail – though many saw him as English’s obvious successor. English, who was by now editor-in-chief of Associated Newspapers (apparently after receiving an offer from Murdoch to join News International, which he declined out of hand), wasn’t going anywhere soon. As he celebrated his first decade in the Daily Mail editor’s chair in the summer of 1981, it was clear to most on Fleet Street that the Daily Mail was the mid-market master, not the decelerating Daily Express. By the end of the 1970s the Daily Mail was only 50,000 or so short of the magic 2 million circulation mark. The Daily Express was actually still slightly ahead with a circulation of a little over 2 million – a fact that failed to disguise that its sales had, effectively, halved since Beaverbrook died in 1964. The Express had followed the Mail down the tabloid track in the mid-1970s before being sold off to the property development company Trafalgar House. Bricks and mortar were their trade, not ink and paper and truculent hacks and despotic editors. Beaverbrook’s baby was on her slow slide to nowhere.

  But Lord Rothermere’s Evening News, the newspaper that had turned Sunny Harmsworth from a magazine boy into a newspaper man in 1894, was also in trouble at the time. Beaverbrook’s former company had also owned a London evening newspaper called the Evening Standard, which, after a long-drawn-out process taking several years, Vere eventually bought outright from Trafalgar House. Vere merged the two papers and the Evening News disappeared off the streets in 1980; this was no time for sentimentality – the Standard was simply the stronger paper read by middle-class Londoners beloved by the admen (the Evening News did reappear briefly in 1987 as part of a London newspaper price war).

  It was, as a consequence of the Express’s decline, easier than ever for the Mail ’s editor to make the case for his favoured journalists to defect to the Mail. But the Express was not his only target and English could charm just about anyone into working for his beloved Daily Mail from up and down Fleet Street. The writer Keith Waterhouse, for example, had spent his entire national newspaper career on the Daily Mirror, until he decided he didn’t like the paper’s disreputable new owner Robert Maxwell in 1984, and, when the rest of Fleet Street heard Waterhouse was about to leave, Sir David English – himself once a Mirror reporter – invited him out to lunch.

  ‘I knew David from the beginning of my days in Fleet Street as a man who got great fun out of journalism and made it, therefore, fun for everyone else to read,’ said Waterhouse.

  He thought that newspapers were there to be enjoyed, while at the same time informing the readers to the hilt. I once saw him, in New York, when he was editor of the Daily Mail, snatch a telephone out of a reporter’s hand and dictate his own version of a story which he did not think was being well told. David poached my column from the Daily Mirror, having heard that I was unhappy under the lash of Cap’n Bob Maxwell. Several other papers were after it but David took me to lunch at the Savoy Grill where we talked about everything but column-writing. But that morning he’d had a Daily Mail column prepared as an exact replica of my column in the Daily Mirror. Nothing was said. I was hooked, and he knew I was hooked. He was a superb newspaperman, and a superb newspaper chief.34

  Another English swoop was for Richard Addis, who had first planned to be a monk, surely the rarest of entries on any Mailman’s CV; he even spent two years after Rugby school as a novice at the Community of the Glorious Ascension in Devon, and had the habit of wearing a monk’s smock at Cambridge – until the delights of university life eventually got to him. Rothermere took a shine to Addis when he worked on the Londoner’s Diary column of the Evening Standard. Addis was soon poached by the Sunday Telegraph, where he rose to be deputy editor. One day English invited Addis to lunch at the Savoy Grill – English’s usual table, of course.

  ‘English had oodles of charm,’ Addis told the author, ‘but I was so nervous I couldn’t drink my drink because my hand was shaking so much. So I had to do this elaborate thing where, whenever he looked away, I had a quick glug – usually with two hands – and brought my head right down to the glass. His style was, basically, “What are you earning? I’ll double your salary if you come. I want to make you . . .” – and he’d create some amazing job title – “and the contract will be delivered tonight and I’ll give you two days to make up your mind.” It was a great sales technique. English basically made me an offer I couldn’t refuse – invented a job and doubled my salary – and that was my first meeting with him, it was very, very overwhelming for a young journalist.’35 Addis would go on to be the Mail ’s number three before being poached to edit the fading Daily Express in a bid by yet another set of new owners to revitalize the paper. Tina Brown, editor of Vanity Fair, then the New Yorker and founder of the Daily Beast website – and wife of former Sunday Times editor Sir Harold Evans – was wooed by English and also, briefly, joined the Mail; ‘David English gives great hire,’ she said.36

  English still had a problem in the US though, now that Winchester had failed to fit into a Mailman’s tights, and in 1979 he de
cided he needed another fresh hire to hopefully fix his American problem for good. His sights fell upon a tall, slightly awkward Daily Express reporter in New York called Paul Dacre. They met for lunch and it went well, with English telling Dacre about how the Mail was by now far superior to the lost Express and he needed a new bureau chief. A few hours later Dacre was standing at a newsstand in the foyer of the Daily News building pretending to read a magazine, its famous big old globe perched in the background. He’d just taken a call as he sat at his desk in the Express’s office four floors above, with instructions from a man (David English) to do exactly that. Dacre recalled that ‘the phone went and this man with a kind of disguised voice said, “If you go down to the foyer of the Daily News building to the magazine stall, something will happen.” I felt something being slid in my pocket, I turned around and saw David English scuttling off into the crowd. What was in my pocket was a full, typed contract with David’s own type of typing mistakes, outlining the terms of the job and the offer. I was totally impressed by this.’37

  Dacre signed up and became a Mailman; he would rise through the ranks to replace English as editor a dozen years later and has now been the editor himself for over two decades, longer than English and nearly as long as Thomas Marlowe. Just like the contrasting personalities of Sunny and Bunny Harmsworth, Dacre is a very different kind of man to David English: whereas English was exuberant and extrovert, Dacre is awkward and shy – especially in the company of women. Whereas English started his climb from a weekly newspaper as a teenager, Dacre is the son of a star writer on the Sunday Express, attended a nice school and went to university.