All hail to the Mail

Alfred Harmsworth, Lord Northcliffe, created the Daily Mail in 1896, and with that, the popular newspaper. Instantly scorned as the filler for the idle hours of clerks and secretaries, it was the daily newspaper for those repelled by the stuffiness of much of the existing press, but who wished to understand and follow the news of the nation and the world. “The board schools,” he told a friend, as he was preparing for his dive into the publishing pond, “are turning out hundreds of thousands of boys and girls who are anxious to read…they will read anything that is simple and sufficiently interesting.” The Mail was, like its founder, fickle in its praise and denunciations: but, like him, entirely sure of its judgments, often expressed in the paper version of a bellow – even where the judgment directly contradicted a position of passionate intensity taken a little time before. He was large, and contained multitudes, in life and work (not that there was much of a division).

Harmsworth was born to a middle-class Protestant family in Dublin in 1865. His father, Alfred Senior, was a teacher in Dublin turned barrister in London, “unambitious, hopeless, but outgoing and popular”, making too little for a comfortable life for his family in both these professions, in large part because of his alcoholism, and the more, since his wife Geraldine gave birth to 11 children – eight of whom survived after infancy. Alfred, the firstborn, loved his “hopeless” father, but was devoted for life to a mother who held the family together through periods of near-hunger, and which he never forgot. All others of every rank in society could be insulted, ignored, snubbed and forgotten: only his mother, whose word was law, could command his presence at any time. Harmsworth and his wife, Mary Elizabeth Milner, lived largely separate lives for much of their marriage, and both took lovers: one of his children was born to a 16-year-old maidservant (he was 17), and Harmsworth paid for his upbringing and education. He later had three other children with a long-time mistress.

Andrew Roberts endorses his book’s title: this was the greatest press lord of the times, and perhaps any time. Apart from The Mail, he owned The Evening News, Daily Mirror (aimed at a female audience, but at first a flop) and the Weekly Dispatch. He acquired The Observer in 1905 and The Times and The Sunday Times in 1908, all making large losses, in spite of – in the case of The Times – large fame as a paper of accurate record. By the outbreak of war in 1914, he had 41 per cent of morning and 45 per cent of evening circulation. He attracted criticism, even hatred, from much of the political and senior administrative classes, who looked down on one from a penniless background who had no formal education after 15, and who entered the industry by producing a magazine named Comic Cuts, modelled on the already popular Tit-Bits. He also, with the large power he wielded, attracted much toadying, and some real respect – as from Winston Churchill and David Lloyd George, two men who endured more volleys of slings and arrows than he.

When in his pomp, he met a young Australian journalist, Keith Murdoch. Murdoch revered the older man, Northcliffe took to the Australian, as one with something of the same ambition, and invested in his expansion of a growing press network. Murdoch’s son, Rupert, has a claim to the “greatest” title: his papers – The Sun, The Times and The Sunday Times in the UK, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post in the US, and more than 140 newspapers in Australia, including the only national newspaper, The Australian – have clout and can make profits if they can make a successful transition from paper to digit. They can also make large losses, as both the leading tabloids, The Sun and the New York Post, do – The Sun sporadically, the New York Post chronically – except, briefly, in the past year.

Murdoch has the merit of having kept good papers going through thin times; he has the very large charge against him of providing a platform for conspiracy peddlers such as Tucker Carlson, who, in a three-part series last year, suggested that the attack on the US Capitol in January 2021 was mounted by leftists, supported by the FBI. Others have endorsed the QAnon organisation’s fantasies, that Donald Trump, when president, waged war against a group of progressive, Satan-worshipping paedophiles. These appear to have real-life consequences: NBC News has reported that QAnon followers have been “implicated in armed standoffs, attempted kidnappings, harassment and at least one killing”. It’s difficult to confer the accolade of “the greatest” on one who broadcasts such stuff under the guise of a serious news channel.

Was Northcliffe, with all the power he had, as guilty? He certainly fiercely opposed political figures and policies with which he disagreed. Roberts shows how he hastened the departure of Liberal leader Herbert Asquith from the premiership during the First World War, in 1916 (to the fury of his wife, who, a few years later, asked Northcliffe to give space to a friendly interview on the subject of her book).

He promoted then attacked Lloyd George, Asquith’s successor as prime minister and, most consequentially, he kept unremitting and eventually successful pressure on the government for the lack of shells produced and shipped to the army in France, resulting in attacks by British troops being even more bloody and futile than they would have been with adequate artillery cover. These were real-world arguments and campaigns: he exaggerated the part his newspapers played in securing the changes he sought – but the influence, as contemporary politicians attested, was significant.

He modernised, and perhaps saved, The Times – promising editors editorial freedom, which he repeatedly flouted. To the end of his life – he died, at the age of 57, of a disease contracted during a world cruise designed to restore him to health, one which had the side-effect of inducing paranoia and explosions of anger – he closely read his newspapers and poured out blame and praise, suggestions and demands to his editors: many foolish, which the stronger among his senior staff ignored, as many to the point. He itched, though he denied it, to play a direct part in government – and partially succeeded in being appointed, by Lloyd George, to direct the UK’s propaganda mission in the US, and later in the UK.

Roberts, whose lucid style lets the narrative flow smoothly, is kinder to him than previous biographers: by making clear that his late outbursts were a consequence of sickness, not of his nature, he rescues him from much criticism. But he’s not a hagiographer. When he strikes a balance, he makes clear what weight he’s giving to each pan on the scales. The world he describes, in which newspapers proliferated and were the feedstock of every debate, conversation and scandal of consequence, is as nostalgic for newspaper people as the soft light of gas lamps (the few remaining in London are now under a sentence of death). The media world is much more diverse, much harsher, now.