{"id":420709,"date":"2026-02-11T23:00:08","date_gmt":"2026-02-11T23:00:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/420709\/"},"modified":"2026-02-11T23:00:08","modified_gmt":"2026-02-11T23:00:08","slug":"flashes-of-anger-but-paul-dacre-keeps-his-head-before-court-cut-off-paul-dacre","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/420709\/","title":{"rendered":"Flashes of anger but Paul Dacre keeps his head before court cut-off | Paul Dacre"},"content":{"rendered":"

Paul Dacre was \u201cno shrinking violet\u201d in the 27 years he edited the Daily Mail<\/a>, he said in his witness statement to the high court in London this week. He had \u201ccaptained a tough ship\u201d in order to safeguard \u201cthe \u2018patina\u2019 and prestige that differentiated the Daily Mail from other titles, both the popular ones and the so-called quality newspapers\u201d.<\/p>\n

Others have described the editor\u2019s tenure, and the impact it had on the UK, differently. Widely regarded as \u201cthe most powerful print journalist in Britain\u201d (Politico<\/a>) until he stood down<\/a> in 2021, to his critics Dacre was \u201cthe man who hated liberal Britain\u201d (New Statesman<\/a>), and even the country\u2019s \u201cmost dangerous man\u201d (Observer<\/a>).<\/p>\n

This was the editor whom celebrities and politicians most feared, whose management diatribes were so notoriously foul-mouthed that they were nicknamed \u201cthe vagina monologues\u201d on account of the number of times he used the word \u201ccunt\u201d<\/a>.<\/p>\n

So who was the unassuming older gentleman who shuffled quietly to the stand in court 76 of the Royal Courts of Justice on Wednesday and was immediately asked, on the basis of his softly spoken evidence the previous day, if he could keep his voice up a bit?<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ll do my very best,\u201d responded Dacre, still barely audibly.<\/p>\n

Dacre was giving evidence for a second day in defence of the Mail\u2019s publisher, Associated Newspapers<\/a> Limited (ANL), which has been accused by a group of claimants including Prince Harry, Elton John and Elizabeth Hurley of illegal information-gathering practices including bugging, phone tapping, hacking and \u201cblagging\u201d documents. ANL denies the claims.<\/p>\n

First, however, there was an apology from David Sherborne, the lead barrister representing the claimants. Sherborne\u2019s line of questioning to Dacre on Tuesday had not pleased the judge in the case, Mr Justice Nicklin, who had said the \u201clarge bulk\u201d of the barrister\u2019s questions were irrelevant as this case was not a public inquiry into Associated Newspapers<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Highly unusually, Nicklin had declared that Sherborne would have until 3pm on Wednesday, and no longer, to cross-examine the former editor. So, Sherborne told Dacre, he would start by outlining the relevance of his questions before \u201cthe guillotine comes down later this afternoon\u201d.<\/p>\n

Sherborne may have been ordered to stay in his lane but he was barely three minutes in when Nicklin interrupted, the first of a series of increasingly exasperated interventions over the barrister\u2019s cross-examination as he tried to pin down Dacre over Daily Mail journalists\u2019 use of private investigators, which Dacre says he banned in 2007.<\/p>\n

Asked repeatedly about his recollection of a particular story, invoice or piece of correspondence, the 77-year-old, who remains editor-in-chief of ANL\u2019s parent company, DMG Media, said they would not have come across his desk, and if they had he was unlikely to recall them. \u201cI was a very busy man in those days,\u201d Dacre said. \u201cI was so busy producing a paper of 120 pages \u2026 No, didn\u2019t get down to that granular level.\u201d<\/p>\n

Repeated questions about stories published in the Mail on Sunday were met with the same response. \u201cI keep repeating this mantra, this was the Mail on Sunday. It was an autonomous newspaper.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hadn\u2019t he been the editor-in-chief of that paper, too, at the time? \u201cI don\u2019t think you appreciate [the job] of an editor-in-chief of a busy media organisation,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Though his voice remained quiet throughout, there were occasional flashes of anger, such as when he was asked about a series of articles about the Mail in 2017 in Byline Investigates (a \u201csordid paper\u201d edited by \u201cone of the most amoral people I have ever had the misfortune to come across\u201d), or about the investigative reporter Nick Davies, whose book Flat Earth News about unedifying and corrupt practices in journalism was, Dacre said witheringly, \u201ca book written to appeal to a certain section of the Guardian readership\u201d.<\/p>\n

Soon it was 3pm and while the barrister did his best to continue, the judge was having none of it. \u201cYou have trespassed now into an area that is irrelevant, so I\u2019m not going to let you pursue that any further,\u201d he told Sherborne.<\/p>\n

The guillotine had indeed fallen and, for now at least, the former king of Fleet Street appeared to have escaped the block with his head intact.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Paul Dacre was \u201cno shrinking violet\u201d in the 27 years he edited the Daily Mail, he said in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":420710,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-420709","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-united-kingdom","8":"tag-gb","9":"tag-great-britain","10":"tag-greatbritain","11":"tag-news","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom","14":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/420709","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=420709"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/420709\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/420710"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=420709"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=420709"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=420709"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}