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Paul Dacre returned to the editor of the Daily Mail as the editor of the newspaper’s parent company after stepping down from the race to be the next chairman of media regulator, Ofcom.
His appointment as head of DMG Media comes days after rival Geordie Greig was ousted from his post as editor of the Daily Mail and less than three weeks after Dacre split from the publishing group where he spent 42 years.
Dacre’s appointment was announced to staff in an email from Jonathan Harmsworth, fourth Viscount Rothermere, who is the chairman of the Daily Mail and General Trust. “Although he is not involved in day-to-day editing, he will play an active role in advising me and the editors,†said Rothermere.
It comes after Rothermere announced he was set to close deals that will allow him to pull parent company DMGT from the stock market and gain full private control over The Daily Mail and its sister titles.
Dacre’s return to his former employer, where he will also have an influence on Metro and i titles, comes after a brief complicity with the public sector in the form of a possible transfer to Ofcom. He withdrew from that race last week – describing the civil service hiring process as an “unfortunate banter with the blob” in a letter to The Times – after concerns were raised about the transparency of the hiring process. recruitment.
After failing on his first attempt when an interview jury decided he did not meet the required criteria, ministers cleared the way for him to be given another chance.
But after the Guardian revealed that a lobbyist from a company with close ties to the Conservative Party had been chosen to help select candidates for approval, Dacre announced that he would no longer act on a request despite the exhortations from “many senior members of the government”. â€. He said he was accepting “an exciting new job” in the private sector.
His return to the Mail is in fact an extension. Although he resigned as editor of the Daily Mail in 2018, he remained on the payroll after receiving the largely honorary positions of chairman and editor of parent company Associated Newspapers.
On Monday, the news of his return was greeted with surprise by staff in the face of the company’s titles. One read was that Greig’s tenure – a former Tatler editor and friend of David Cameron – was an experiment to detoxify Mail’s image, which the company had now decided to ditch.
Dacre, a leading Brexit campaigner, had rarely been seen in the Daily Mail newsroom after moving upstairs to an office on the executive floor of the company’s head office at Northcliffe House after the Greig’s appointment in June 2018, but had used his position to criticize his successor.
In an intervention, Dacre wrote a letter to the Financial Times accusing Greig of being “economical with the news” when it came to suggesting that advertisers thought the newspaper had become too toxic. He also accused Greig of not having sufficiently respected his journalistic accomplishments.
In contrast, Dacre has had a close working relationship with Mail on Sunday editor-in-chief Ted Verity, who will take charge of a new seven-day operation that will cover Grieg’s role at the Daily Mail.
He has also worked well with Martin Clarke, editor of DMG Media and the executive who oversees online operations. He said in a statement released by the company Monday: “No one has done more to make Mail headlines what they are today than Paul Dacre and I am honored to work with him.”
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