[16] At this time he identified with the liberal end of the political spectrum on issues including gay rights and drug use,[17] and wrote editorials in support of a student sit-in at Leeds organised by Straw.
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".
[32] Jonathan Freedland of The Guardian wrote of the development: "He made an unlikely anti-racist campaigner, but there were few voices more critical in the demand for justice for Stephen Lawrence than Paul Dacre and the Daily Mail.
Nick Davies recounts an anecdote from a former senior news reporter who, en route to a murder scene of a woman and her two children 300 miles away, was told to return because the victims were black.
[36] For a while, the Daily Mail under Dacre briefly entertained positive views of New Labour until the Formula 1 tobacco advertising controversy and clashes with the government's Director of Communications Alastair Campbell cooled the relationship owing to the practice of spin doctoring.
[40] As recounted by the academic and journalist John Lloyd in 2004, Campbell's assistant in Labour's first term, Tim Allan, believed "the government [spent] years trying to be chummy with the Daily Mail... Blair sees himself as the great persuader, able to convince anyone.
[50][51] In what Anthony Barnett has described as "a gem of far-sightedness", a Mail editorial on the Conservative leadership candidates in 2005 got round this contradiction by arguing the campaign for Britain to switch to the Euro as its currency "has for the foreseeable future, been overtaken by events".
[57] Peter Wilby, in a January 2014 profile for the New Statesman, quoted an anonymous source, who said of Dacre: "He's no longer the expletive volcano he once was; his barbs these days tend to concern the brainpower of his target and their supposed laziness.
"[50] According to John Lloyd writing in April 2012, Dacre's newspaper "is a daily and brilliantly disciplined savaging of government follies, progressive fads and flouters of the time-honoured verities of British and family life".
The typical locale of his readers, he told Collins, is the area of North London in which Dacre himself was raised, Arnos Grove: "Its inhabitants were frugal, reticent, utterly self-reliant, and immensely aspirational.
[28] Polly Toynbee in 2004 commented "Read him out the first clause of the press code - the one that tells newspapers not to 'publish inaccurate, misleading or distorted material', and he replies with a straight face that the Mail obeys it".
"Maybe we anti-racists have been naive to think that [the Stephen Lawrence campaign] was anything more than an aberration," suggests Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, adding: "wouldn't it be better if this extraordinary editor decided to use his influence to create just a little more understanding of why refugees leave their countries, and what most of them bring to our nation?
[87][88] For him, Britain is dominated by a "subsidariat", those newspapers whose "journalism and values—invariably liberal, metropolitan and politically correct, and I include the pinkish Times here—don't connect with sufficient readers to be commercially viable" and make a profit.
[90] According to Dacre: The right to disagree was axiomatic to classical liberalism, but the BBC's political correctness is, in fact, an ideology of rigid self-righteousness in which those who do not conform are ignored, silenced, or vilified as sexist, racist, fascist or judgmental.
Thus, with this assault on reason, are whole areas of legitimate debate—in education, health, race relations and law and order—shut down, and the corporation, which glories in being open-minded, has become a closed-thought system operating a kind of Orwellian Newspeak.
[95] On 9 November 2008, Dacre gave a speech to the Society of Editors Conference in Bristol in which he was critical of the emerging pressures for privacy laws following the conclusion of the Max Mosley libel case against the News of the World and Mr Justice Eady's closing remarks.
According to Dacre, Eady had "effectively ruled that it was perfectly acceptable for" Mosley "to pay five women £2,500 to take part in acts of unimaginable sexual depravity with him" which is "the very abrogation of civilised behaviour of which the law is supposed to be the safeguard".
[2][18][96][97] Referring to a case in 2006 where Eady had blocked the publication of a married man's account of his wife's seduction by a prominent figure involved in sport, Dacre said "the judge - in an unashamed reversal of centuries of moral and social thinking - placed the rights of the adulterer above society's age-old belief that adultery should be condemned".
[96][97] If newspapers, which "devote considerable space" to "public affairs, don't have the freedom to write about scandal, I doubt whether they will retain their mass circulations with the obvious worrying implications for the democratic process".
[102] He was critical of Cameron ("too close to News International") who "in a pretty cynical act of political expediency has prejudiced the outcome of this inquiry by declaring that the" Press Complaints Commission, "an institution he'd been committed to only a few weeks previously, was a 'failed' body".
"[102] His advocacy of newspaper owners being legally unable to reject any regulatory body was viewed as a reference to Richard Desmond, whose Northern & Shell company owns the Daily Express, and had withdrawn from the PCC.
The original article, entitled "The Man Who Hated Britain",[122] alleged that Ralph Miliband detested the country he and his father had fled to from Nazi-occupied Europe on the basis of a diary note written when he was sixteen and because of his left-wing views.
[130] Paul Dacre was given a right of reply by The Guardian a fortnight later: "As the week progressed and the hysteria increased, it became clear that this was no longer a story about an article on Mr Miliband's Marxist father but a full-scale war by the BBC and the left against the paper that is their most vocal critic".
[40][131] In early 2016, it has been reported on the BBC's Newsnight programme, prime minister David Cameron was worried the Eurosceptic stance of newspapers such as the Daily Mail in the run-up to the 2016 European Union membership referendum might affect the vote.
The Daily Mail, in 2015, serialised Call Me Dave, the unauthorised and unflattering biography of Cameron written by Michael Ashcroft and Isabel Oakeshott which contained the unverified "Piggate" claims.
[140][144] A call in early August 2016 by Patience Wheatcroft, a former Daily Mail journalist, for a second referendum intended to reject the Brexit vote "led to her being monstered as a 'cheerleader for the moneyed Metropolitan elite'" by the newspaper, Alastair Campbell wrote.
[147] More than a year before May became prime minister, Gaby Hinsliff wrote in a February 2015 Guardian article that "one reason she gets on so well with Daily Mail editor-in-chief Paul Dacre is that both prefer talking business to pleasure".
[148] Following May's announcement, the next day's front page of the Mail insisted "It must be Theresa" accompanied by an editorial "which bear's Dacre's hallmarks" (according to Anthony Barnett) commenting "what the country which was needs most is a solid and steady hand on the tiller".
[10] "With the referendum now behind us, they can have their cake and eat it", wrote Alastair Campbell in a February 2017 article about Dacre, by "taking the mickey out of a woman who raised the famous 'bent banana' issue on Question Time as the reason for her LEAVE vote, the same reporter having been one of the journalists responsible for spreading the lie in the first place".
[175] According to the DMGT annual report for 2017, Dacre's total income from the group amounted to £2.37 million, including a salary of £1.45m and an additional £856,000 as part of the company's Long-Term Investment Plan (LTIP).