Paul Dacre

Paul Michael Dacre (born 14 November 1948) is an English journalist and the former long-serving editor of the British tabloid the Daily Mail.

He is also editor-in-chief of DMG Media, which publishes the Daily Mail, The Mail on Sunday, the free daily tabloid Metro, the MailOnline website, and other titles.

From 1967 he read English at the University of Leeds, while Jack Straw was President of the Students' Union.

While at university, he became involved with the Union News newspaper (the Leeds Student from 1970), rising to the position of editor.

At this time he identified with the liberal end of the political spectrum on issues including gay rights and drug use, and wrote editorials in support of a student sit-in at Leeds organised by Straw.

He introduced a pin-up feature in the newspaper called "Leeds Lovelies".

On his graduation in 1971, Dacre joined the Daily Express in Manchester for a six-month trial; after this he was given a full-time job on the Express.

Concerning his career choice, Dacre commented in the BJR interview that he did not have "any desire to do anything other than journalism".

At the Express, Dacre was based in Belfast for a few years before being sent to the office in London.

He was sent to Washington D.C., in 1976 to cover that year's American presidential election, remaining there until 1979, when he moved to New York as a correspondent.

It was at this time that his politics shifted to the right:I don't see how anybody can go to America, work there for six years and not be enthralled by the energy of the free market.

America taught me the power of the free market, as opposed to the State, to improve the lives of the vast majority of ordinary people.

After his years at the Express bureau, Dacre was head-hunted by David English, appointed as head of the Mail's New York bureau in 1979 and brought back to London in 1980.

Subsequently, he became assistant editor (news and features), assistant editor (features) in 1987, executive editor the following year and associate editor in 1989.

In this period, according to former colleague Sue Douglas, Dacre was a "good David English disciple".

Adrian Addison found opinions differed as to whether Dacre was an English protégé when he was conducting research for Mail Men.

During Dacre's brief period as editor of the Evening Standard from March 1991 to July the following year, circulation of the newspaper rose by 16%.

A profile in The Independent in 1992 recounted his behaviour in this period: "It was terrifying stuff. He would rampage through the newsroom with his arms flailing like a windmill, scratching himself manically as he fired himself up."

Dacre succeeded (the by then) Sir David English as editor of the Daily Mail in July 1992.

Dacre had turned down an offer from Rupert Murdoch to edit The Times believing that Murdoch "would not accept my desire to edit with freedom".

It was his approach to the job of editor, "hard-working, disciplined, confrontational" according to Roy Greenslade, which had led Murdoch to attempt to hire him.

For the Mail, Dacre was considered important enough to necessitate sidelining someone thought unsackable; English became editor-in-chief and Chairman of Associated Newspapers, then the parent company.

Dacre was known in the summer of 1992 to be against Britain's membership of the Exchange Rate Mechanism (this was shortly before Black Wednesday in September when Britain was forced out of the ERM) and the Maastricht Treaty.

Several leaders in his last weeks at the Standard asserted that "Maastricht is dead" (on 10 June); "Unrealities in the EEC" (sic, 29 June); and an appeal to prime minister John Major, 'Come on, John, gizzaballot" (30 June). In contrast, English was a Europhile and allowed more international content in the paper. Dacre apparently ceased publishing a page on World News and an American diary as soon as possible after he took over.

One of his brothers, Nigel, was editor of ITV's news programmes from 1995 to 2002.

Dacre was educated at University College School, an independent school in Hampstead, on a state scholarship, where he was head of house.

In his school holidays, he worked as a messenger at the Sunday Express, and during his pre-university gap year as a trainee in the Daily Express.

Dacre's most prominent newspaper campaign was in 1997, against the suspects who were acquitted of the murder in 1993 of the black teenager Stephen Lawrence.

It "turned out to be one of the very rare instances in which the editor showed fellow-feeling", wrote Andrew O'Hagan.

Dacre eventually used the headline "MURDERERS" accusing the suspects of the crime on 14 February 1997.

After English died in March 1998, Dacre himself became the Mail Group's editor-in-chief the following July, in addition to remaining as editor of the Daily Mail.

He told the British Journalism Review in 2002: "If you don't have a left-wing period when you go to university, you should be shot" and said of his early experience of editing in November 2008 that it taught him "dull [content] doesn't sell newspapers. Boring doesn't pay the mortgage", but also that "sensation sells papers".

He repeated this headline in 2006.

On the final day of the inquest held at the coroner's court, Dacre and other Mail executives had lunch with Sir Paul Condon, then Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, "who very eloquently told me they were as guilty as sin".

According to Nick Davies in Flat Earth News (2008), the paper originally intended an attack on the groups arguing for an inquiry into the Lawrence murder, but the paper's reporter Hal Austin, on interviewing Neville and Doreen Lawrence, realised that some years earlier, Neville had worked at Dacre's home in Islington as a plasterer, and the news desk instructed Austin to "Do something sympathetic" about the case.

On 1 October 2018, Dacre became chairman and editor-in-chief of Associated Newspapers, and stood down as editor of the Daily Mail in the following month.

He briefly left Associated Newspapers in November 2021, but rejoined just three weeks later following his withdrawal from the race to become Ofcom chairman.

Dacre was born and grew up in the north London suburb of Arnos Grove in Enfield.

His father, Peter, was a journalist on the Sunday Express whose work included show business features.

Joan (née Hill), his mother, was a teacher; the couple had five sons, of whom Paul was the eldest.