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  Nevertheless, despite their differences, Marlowe, English and Dacre were all fairly typical middle-class boys of their era done good. And the key factor that defines whether one was middle class or not in the second half of the twentieth century, perhaps more than any other, was the house one grew up in.

  PART IV

  KING OF MIDDLE ENGLAND

  11

  Daily Mail Country

  Middle England has a brown door.

  It’s a nice enough varnished wooden door to a nice enough red-brick house with mock Tudor beams and a short driveway leading to a small garage. It has a nice front garden with an untamed hedge that screens it from a pleasantly wide street called Brookdale. Brookdale, in Arnos Grove, north London, is firmly in Daily Mail country, suburbia. The street could be the setting of any number of classic British sitcoms set among the British middle classes: from Terry and June and George and Mildred to One Foot in the Grave. Paul Michael Dacre, editor-in-chief at Associated Newspapers, was born in London on 14 November 1948 and grew up on Brookdale,1 the eldest of five boys. He has often stated how crucial Arnos Grove was to his rise from the suburbs to take the crown of King of Middle England.

  ‘Its inhabitants were frugal, reticent, utterly self-reliant, and immensely aspirational,’ Dacre once said. ‘They were also suspicious of progressive values, vulgarity of any kind, self-indulgence, pretentiousness, and people who know best.’2

  Before the 1930s, Arnos Grove was in London’s hinterland until the brick and concrete of the ever-expanding city spilled north along the banks of the Underground. Indeed, the Tube line is only a tennis ball’s throw from the back garden where the Dacre boys could hear trains squealing to a halt coming into the station at the top of their road. Arnos Grove is near the northern tip of the Piccadilly Line that slashes London from Heathrow airport to Cockfosters, passing through Holborn on the way; which was handy for Dacre senior, as Holborn is just a short walk to Fleet Street, where he worked.

  Peter Dacre had started out in Yorkshire,3 the son of a joiner who survived the trenches of the First World War only to be killed in a building site accident when his son was just six years old. Dacre senior left Batley Grammar School at sixteen for the Doncaster Gazette and landed a few years later in London, where he worked briefly as a personal assistant to Lord Beaverbrook himself and also joined the Press Lord’s Sunday Express. He’d stay on the paper for almost forty years.

  Dacre senior was the paper’s US correspondent just as rock ’n’ roll erupted. He was even the first British journalist to interview a young singer with snake hips by the name of Elvis Presley. Upon his return to London, show business and feature writing became his newspaper passion,4 which was fortuitous, as it was possibly the best time there has ever been to be a showbiz writer – the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and a multitude of lesser bands were on their way and there were only two channels on the television, which each commanded truly vast audiences. The Sunday Express was huge then too, selling around 5 million copies every Sunday on the back of a very simple formula: its staff always kept the reader in mind – in every single sentence, on every single page – just like those on Sunny Harmsworth’s Daily Mail. It was never pompous, verbose or pretentious and would always use the throwaway detail such as ‘the house with the yellow door’5 that helped paint an instant and clear picture in the reader’s mind. The paper existed to intrigue and to entertain just as much as to inform.

  Paul Dacre had his father’s newspaper gene; he would sit with his dad at the dinner table in Brookdale every Sunday and they’d dissect that week’s edition of the Sunday Express. The paper was, Paul Dacre often said later, his journalistic ‘primer’. Peter and Paul Dacre adored newspapers and journalism but the son would become a very different journalist, a very different man.

  ‘Peter was a lovely man,’ Barry Norman, also a showbiz reporter of the era, told the author. ‘Paul is a much harder, much tougher character than his dad. His father was a much gentler, much quieter man.’ 6

  Lifelong Express hack David Eliades, who knew both father and son well, agrees. ‘I liked Peter Dacre very much. He wasn’t Paul, I can tell you. He was a very different sort of man. Peter was very softly spoken, unobtrusive. The most daring thing I ever saw him do was jump on the open platform of a London bus and nearly kill himself because he didn’t get his foot on it properly and he was dragged along Fleet Street! He was a nice chap to spend time with, to have a drink with. He was a big noise on the Sunday Express. He was very talented, he even wrote lyrics for popular songs; famous singers sang them.’7

  Paul Dacre later chose one of his dad’s songs – a Bing Crosby number for which Dacre senior wrote the lyrics called ‘That’s What Life Is All About’ – as a request on Desert Island Discs, the quintessentially English BBC Radio Four programme that has, so far, been his only broadcast interview. ‘My father was a great newspaper man but he was also a frustrated newspaper man because his great love – his first love – was writing songs and lyrics to songs.’8

  Dacre junior was focused firmly upon print from the very start, as he showed as editor of his school magazine at University College School in Hampstead. One edition of Compass that Dacre devoted to the evangelical American preacher Billy Graham, who was in the UK at the time to host a handful of mass revivalist meetings that were something of a phenomenon in the mid-1960s, was to prove to be a vital lesson. ‘Doubtless influenced by the possibility that they might view my A-Level essays in a more benign light, I asked several of the most intellectually impressive masters to attend a Graham gathering and write about their impressions,’ he said in a speech in 2008.

  It was a journalistic disaster. Without exception, their words were ponderous, prolix and achingly dull. The issue went down like a sodden hot cross bun. Lesson One: Brains and education have little to do with the craft of journalism which is to ferret for information and then explain it clearly, informatively and above all, entertainingly. Journalists are born, not made, and all the media schools in the world won’t change that. Also: dull doesn’t sell newspapers. Boring doesn’t pay the mortgage. In the next issue, I discreetely secreted a couple of expletives into an article. It was child’s stuff . . . but they got me into terrible trouble with the headmaster. The magazine, needless to say, sold out but my relationship with the school was never quite the same again. Lesson Two: Sensation sells papers.9

  Dacre may have been finding his journalistic direction with Compass, but he was best remembered by some fellow pupils as a shy and gangly boy who could balance a tennis ball on the end of his foot.10 As fellow pupil Michael Sadgrove, now the Very Reverend Dean of Durham and a committed Guardian reader, told the author: ‘I remember Paul quite clearly from UCS days as we were exact contemporaries. What made him stand out was his flair for sports and games, particularly rugby – enviable in someone like me who was an abject failure in this respect. He did not strike me as particularly an academic star, nor do I recall that he excelled in music or the arts. I recall him as being on the quieter side; I would not have foreseen that he would one day be the editor of a national newspaper!’11

  ‘Paul loves to reminisce about the London of his youth,’ said one Mail insider. ‘Arnos Grove, getting on public transport, his days at University College School. These days, he’s rarely outside W8 or SW1. He can get very misty eyed about the London of the sixties and seventies.’12

  Sadgrove and many of Dacre’s contemporaries from his school went up to Oxford and Cambridge universities in the mid-1960s just as ‘Flower Power’ was about to burst into full bloom. But Paul Dacre went to Leeds, his father’s hometown.

  This was the late 1960s, an age of protests, and thousands of students would head down to London to march around the capital making their voices heard. Every student in the land, it seemed to some in Middle England, had turned into a ‘bloody Commie’ overnight; they were squandering tax payers’ money on paint for silly placards when they should have been in the library working out how to put the Great back in
to Britain. The Mail itself commented, after a violent demonstration outside the US Embassy in London in March 1968, that as ‘Students start looking on the whole police force as a Fascist organisation out for blood, the rest of the country sees the whole student body as a bunch of irresponsible hoodlums.’13 A 6ft 3-inch shaggy-haired English student called Paul Dacre was marching with the best of them, as he later told the BBC.

  Like most sensible young people of that age, I was left-wing, and of course we went to London on anti-Vietnam marches. And we all chanted – and for the life of me I’m not quite sure why – ‘ho ho Ho Chi Minh’. They were wonderfully heady, liberated days. Quite what we were protesting about I’m not too sure in retrospect.14

  It was newspapers that drove him, though, and not the left-wing politics of his fellow Leeds University students Jack Straw and Clare Short, who both went on to become prominent figures in Tony Blair’s Labour Government. Dacre edited the Union News and seems to have been one of the few students of this era who never learned how to roll a joint. He did, however, run an interview with a student who had, under the headline ‘The delights of getting stoned’. His paper was sympathetic to gays, immigrants and homeless families and even called on students to help in ‘breaking down the barriers between the coloured and white communities of this town’.15 He put pretty female students he dubbed ‘Leeds Lovelies’16 into his paper just as Rupert Murdoch was about to start his infamous page three on The Sun. Dacre’s wholesome lasses were, of course, fully clad. Jon Holmes, now a sports agent, was one of Dacre’s student reporters:

  It all seemed to me at the time a proper, grown-up journalistic experience and I thought it only right that every day should end with the consumption of vast quantities of alcohol in the ‘local’ – in our case, the union bar. It was just along the basement corridor from the newspaper office, which was filled with cigarette smoke and lavishly equipped with a couple of typewriters. Not once did Dacre join us for a pint.17

  Union News won best newspaper at the National Union of Students awards of 1969 and Dacre, aged twenty, posed for a photo in a tweedy jacket and a sweater over a check shirt, looking a bit like Shaggy off Scooby Doo.18 ‘He came in about a week later after it had been announced,’ added Holmes, on Radio Four, ‘and said: “We’ve won the award, I’m gonna cease to be editor now. I’m gonna get a degree – I’ll see ya.” That was it. I never saw him again. He never called in the office, he never said: “Brilliant! Let’s all go out for a drink or anything.” Nah. Just “That’s it. On my CV. Cheerio.”’19

  It worked. Straight after getting that degree in English, Dacre secured probably the best job any young journalist of the day could possibly have hoped for: he joined the staff of the still-massive-selling Daily Express as a graduate trainee in Manchester in 1970.

  A young photographer called Mickey Brennan remembered meeting Dacre for the first time on a story outside Manchester University shortly after Dacre became a ‘proper’ journalist for the first time, and he wasn’t impressed: ‘He was so young and eager like some big fucking Labrador puppy. I remember looking at him and saying “Oh, piss off”; he was just some bumbling twerp. And he’s possibly the clumsiest man I’ve ever come across . . . He’d just left university and he’d not done any time on the locals or anything like that, which would make it like a “grace and favour” job that he’d got on the Express . . . thanks to his father’s connections.’20

  Photographers often get the best insight into reporters on the road, crushed together as they so often are inside bars, cars and hotels – tanks even, in a war zone – and Mickey Brennan would weave in and out of Dacre’s life for the next decade or so, but Brennan never quite rated him as a hard news man.

  Dacre’s lack of experience of the hard graft of grinding out stories for a local paper was a real disadvantage when it came to earning the respect of the other newspaper hands; the journalism trade of the early 1970s was not quite so flooded with graduates as it is today. Though just a pup compared to the hoary old hacks of the day, eager Dacre took some real risks in the name of a story during the height of ‘the troubles’ in Northern Ireland. One day Dacre found himself in an IRA area of Belfast interviewing a Catholic girl who’d been shot in the kneecaps for dating a British soldier:

  I rushed off to see her and she was in a Republican stronghold area and I was jolly foolish because I knew that you had to clear these things in advance with the relevant godfathers. Anyway, I got to see her and she was a lovely girl and it was such a tragic story and it was a great, great interview. I came out of the front door of her council flat absolutely exultant and out of the shadows, out of two alleyways on either side, this whole group of men emerged and kind of pinned me against a wall with guns pressed against my ribs. And all I could think was what a fool I’d been and I kept chanting, ‘Look, feel in my right hand pocket, it’s my press card. It says I’m a journalist!’ And this went on for about 15 minutes and eventually more men came and phone calls were made and they let me go.21

  Dacre was soon called down from the provinces to continue his learning on Fleet Street itself, where he flourished on the Daily Express’s features desk inside the same black art-deco building where his father was writing stories for the Sunday paper. But it seems he didn’t quite have his dad’s gentle showbiz touch. After a story about the Scandinavian leg of a tour with Paul McCartney’s band Wings, someone – it may well have been a fan – was so incensed that they sent a solid rebuke, recalled Mickey Brennan: ‘Dacre told me many times how he received a box back at the office, a chocolate box or something with “from Linda and Paul” written on it – and he thought it was a “thank you”, you know, a gesture from McCartney and his wife. So he opened it up . . . and there was a big fucking turd inside!’22

  Paul Dacre’s bosses had a far higher opinion of his work, though, as, not so long after, he was sent to the US to cover the Jimmy Carter election of 1976. Just as it had done with David English sixteen years before, Dacre’s time in the States would go on to define him. He would stay in the country for six years, mostly working from a desk inside the Daily News building in New York City, another – this one a thirty-six-floor skyscraper – art-deco monument to the printed word in which the pirates of the British Press had moored themselves. The Daily Mail, Daily Mirror and Daily Express all rented space in the building. Fleet Street was an ocean away, and by the time the first editions came out in the late evening in the UK most expat British hacks were operating on ‘Costello’s time’, i.e. they were working out of the infamous hacks’ bar that was all the pubs of Fleet Street compressed into one long and dark cave, just a few blocks from their desks.

  Most journos from back in the day had a tale or two to tell about Costello’s Bar and Grill – it was a memorable kinda place. A shillelagh, a tough piece of wood, that Ernest Hemingway had bent around an Irishman’s head hung over the cash register and there were famous photographs of Marilyn Monroe sitting in a booth looking up at drawings New Yorker cartoonist James Thurber had made to pay off his bar tab. Thirsty journalists would step in from the light and the traffic of East 44th Street and be greeted by the bartender, Fred Percudani, a frightful chap who would yell across the packed bar at his demanding Fleet Street clientele: ‘Just wait, you Limeys, everything round here’s done by hand!’

  ‘For us Brits the Zero-Hour was around 6pm,’ wrote photographer Mickey Brennan, who washed ashore on Manhattan Island ahead of Dacre in 1973. ‘Most nights the two pay phones would ring – remember, this was long before mobiles – and a mad dash to grab them usually involved someone from the Mail, Express or the Mirror.’23

  On the public side of the bar, an expat German called Herbie waited on the Costello’s clientele with his own inimitable kind of service, complete with a German accent that sounded like it was straight out of a war movie. ‘Herbie shuffled around in a filthy suit with soup stains and dribble caked on it, serving food,’ added Brennan. ‘He would arrange a set-up – knives and forks, napkins – with the bread rolls i
n his pocket. The ladies didn’t like that. The beautiful Anthea Disney, then the Daily Mail US correspondent and bureau chief, refused to be waited on by Herbie. [I] couldn’t blame her really after she and I saw him leaving the bar one afternoon with a dead chicken hanging from his pocket.’

  ‘One day Herbie was serving a lady lunch when she complained about her lumpy mashed potato,’ recalled another expat, Ian Bradshaw. ‘Herbie, using his great paw-like hands, scooped it up off her plate and disappeared into the kitchen, only to reappear with another handful of mashed potato which he slammed down in her gravy splattering her suit. It didn’t pay to complain.’24

  Polite Paul Dacre, the tall young chap with hair long to the collar who always seemed to wear a pin stripe suit even on a hot day,25 didn’t quite fit in at Costello’s. David English’s old friend Tony Burton, by then working on the Daily News and a Costello’s regular, never warmed to the well-spoken young man from the Express. ‘I never felt comfortable with Paul Dacre,’ he told the author, ‘he was never “one of the boys”. And the funny thing was, I kept getting mixed up and calling him Peter, his dad’s name . . . apparently he didn’t like that.’26

  ‘Paul didn’t hang around in the bar so much,’ added Anthea Disney. ‘He was a dogged and ambitious young kid who was eager to please. And he would do anything – do whatever he needed to do, “scruples” was not his middle name. Paul Dacre was just interested in his career . . . and was eager to get out of just seeming to be his dad’s son.’27

  The relationship between father and son was soon in trouble itself, though; Dacre’s parents had, by now, divorced, and when Peter Dacre married his new lover in 197928 it must have come as a seismic shock to his eldest boy, who had such a profound belief in the nuclear family. ‘I think Paul was very contemptuous of his father,’ Phil Finn Jr, another New York hack, told the author. ‘I probably shouldn’t say this, but Peter was always reputed to have had affairs and what have you and didn’t treat the family well as such. Whereas Paul and [his wife] Kathy have always been totally devoted.’29