A generation of Daily Express editors were wasting their time thanks to Rothermere’s vision

ROTHERMERE: Pulled the rug on Express by turning the Mail tabloid

They must have wondered, all those failed Daily Express editors, as they pushed their golden wheelbarrows out of 120, Fleet Street, where it all went wrong.

Well, who better to tell them than the man who plotted the downfall of the World’s Greatest Newspaper, Vere Harmsworth, third Viscount Rothermere?

He gave the most fascinating and revealing interview of all those conducted by former Mirror features editor Tony Gray for his book Fleet Street Remembered.

Rothermere sat down with Gray in December, 1988, in the old dining room of Associated Newspapers on the fifth floor of New Carmelite House looking out across the Thames.

He told Gray that he regarded himself as a newspaper proprietor, rather than a publisher or journalist. “Being a newspaper proprietor is a state,” he explained. “Either you own a newspaper or you don’t. Becoming a publisher is a craft, which you can learn, or fail to learn.”

Rothermere, who died In 1998, aged 73, personally took the decision to turn the Daily Mail into a tabloid. The size, he thought, was so much more convenient in a car, or on a commuter train.

He also believed the fold in a broadsheet newspaper had too much importance, a lot of it negative.

“The material above the fold in a broadsheet is always far better read than the material below the fold, and that goes for advertising as well.

“It’s the top half of a broadsheet above the fold which is the dramatic area, whereas with the bottom half there’s always a problem to make it look attractive.

“With a tabloid on the other hand, the whole page can be given a tremendous impact, and you get twice the number of pages for the same total of newsprint.”

So much for tactics, but what about strategy? Rothermere goes on: “If we could successfully produce and sell the idea of a middle-market, tabloid-sized paper, then we could leapfrog the Express so that they wouldn’t be able to compete with us directly.

“We would be standing at an angle to them and they wouldn’t be able to get at us. And we would be exploiting a different market, a young people’s market particularly, because young people like that size of newspaper, and they were not addicted to the broadsheet which retained the image of the sort of paper that Dad had always liked.

“Dads were by habit addicted to the broadsheet and habit is a hard thing to break, whereas young people like new things and women, particularly, found the tabloid far more convenient.”

Reading the interview is like listening to Napoleon briefing his generals before the Battle of Austerlitz.

What strikes you most is the clarity of thought; the singleness of purpose; the understanding of the skills that would be needed to achieve the goal; and above all, the priceless ability to read his enemy’s mind and leave him wrong-footed and floundering.

Rothermere tells Gray: “The Daily Mirror’s success was built on the realisation that the working classes had suddenly emerged as a readership group with political and spending power.

“We realised when we were re-launching the Daily Mail that women were the last emergent group with spending power and the ability to influence spending.”

Rothermere then turns to how he pulled the rug from beneath the Daily Express. He wanted the Mail to look like a miniature broadsheet rather than a true tabloid because “our readership was middle class and the paper had to have the style of a middle class paper, which up until then had always been a broadsheet”.

This meant the layout needed to look serious and he praises David English for “brilliantly” accomplishing that trick, which was all part of convincing Mail readers that, though tabloid in shape, they were not going down-market.

“The Express, on the other hand, assumed that because we had gone tabloid in size, we would go tabloid in nature. They therefore plunged down-market to pursue us and left us with a free field.”

Rothermere’s identification of women as a valuable new market was a stroke of genius. But the notion of it as a women’s paper was achieved largely by sleight of hand. It paid lip service to women’s interests but never really became a paper for women.

They had fine women columnists such as Lynda Lee-Potter and Janet Street-Porter and they covered the fashion catwalks but the impression that it was a women’s paper came largely from marketing. The Mail convinced us all that, if The Times was the paper read by those who governed Britain, then the Mail was the paper their wives read.

The Mail owes its pre-eminence in the middle market to Rothermere but he had one great advantage over the Express: He was the boss, nobody else. As he told Gray, “Either you own a newspaper or you don’t.” And he did.

Rothermere, last of the great Press barons, was shrewd and vastly experienced. He could back his own vision and no one would stand in his way.

Compare that to the ponderous machinations at the Daily Express, where a boardroom full of sceptics had to be convinced by a chairman who could guide but not dictate.

Many of those sceptics and their chairmen had little feeling or instinct for newspapers. They were managers, cautious not bold, suspicious not insightful.

The Mail went tabloid in 1971. Since then, its sales have declined much like other newspapers. But it remains a power and its website is getting better as it seeks to gain subscribers.

The Express, however, has frittered away its only capital, the loyalty of its readers, under the demonic possession of Reach.

And all those failed editors? They were all wasting their time.

*****

Pity Gregg Wallace. He’s the Alf Garnett for our age.

His defence to the charges that he made inappropriate sexual comments on the set of MasterChef seems to be: “I’m a geezer and these women just don’t get the bants.”

What Wallace actually said, in a post on Instagram, was that the complaints came from “a handful of middle class women of a certain age, just from Celebrity MasterChef. This isn’t right.”

Wallace, 60, is no Mohamed Al-Fayed. Like Alf Garnett, he’s a loud-mouthed dinosaur of a man. Boorish, insecure and self-absorbed. But not a monster.

We laughed at Alf, played in the sitcom of the Sixties and Seventies Till Death Us Do Part by Warren Mitchell. Not with him, at him.

And if witnesses are to be believed, Wallace would invite onlookers on the set to laugh at his crass displays of misogyny.

But times have changed. It’s not funny now, if it ever was.

Wallace, a former greengrocer, has stepped back from the BBC show while production company Banijay UK investigates. My guess is we won’t see him return to TV when the probe is complete.

Most of us could have told him: “Never mess with middle class women of a certain age.”

*****

If you don’t count Liz Truss (and who does?) Keir Starmer is the worst politician to hold the office of Prime Minister since Gordon Brown.

He’s so bad he hasn’t yet realised that he actually is the PM. Remember when he first took over and twice at least referred to the defeated Rishi Sunak as “Prime Minister”?

Well, he has got over that but still seems to think he is in Opposition.

Faced with the worst immigration figures in history, he chose to tear into the Tories. The figures should shock us all, he said. “Failure on this scale isn’t just bad luck… this happened by design, not accident.”

He accused the Conservatives of conducting “an open borders experiment”.

Not a word about how he plans to fix the problem. Net migration hit nearly a million last year. What’s he going to do about it?

Perhaps he will tell us on Thursday when he tries to steady the ship of state. Water is already sloshing around the gunwales, so he’d better make it quick.

And he is wasting time bashing the Tories. For the moment, they are in purgatory, if not quite oblivion.

The Toolmaker’s Son must start  to take some responsibility.

*****

What are you doing Saturday night?

Woman: Committing suicide.

What about Friday night? – Woody Allen, Play It Again, Sam (1972)

RICHARD DISMORE

3 December 2024