Rothermere's right-wing propaganda had badly hit the paper's sales. But he still held considerable sway over the paper's board of directors, which he had appointed, including editorial director Harry Guy "Bart" Bartholomew - the man credited with creating the modern tabloid Mirror - and Rothermere's nephew Cecil King, who was to run the paper in its glory years of the 1950s and 1960s.The change of ownership did not at first change the paper's pro-fascist editorial stance. Rothermere had inherited both papers from his older brother Lord Northcliffe, but had slowly sold off shares in the Mirror, enabling him to invest in the more profitable Mail. Surprisingly, perhaps, when the Mirror piece was published, he no longer owned the paper.
No surprise then, so the conversational gambit goes, that the Mail is still beating up on asylum seekers today. What is less well known is that the Mail's former stablemate the Daily Mirror was just as pro-fascist. On Monday, 22 January, 1934 the Mirror ran the headline "Give the Blackshirts a helping hand". It is one of the choicest pieces of journalistic dinner party general knowledge that the filthy right-wing Daily Mail was officially a fascist newspaper in the 1930s. The paper was burned on the streets after running the headline "Hurrah for the Blackshirts" and backing Oswald Mosley's plan to make himself Britain's equivalent of Adolf Hitler. His reasoning? Morton's allegations were so outlandish that they could not possibly be true.v.graff independent.co.uk.
The author of Diana: Her True Story originally took his version of events to Sir David English, the great Daily Mail editor. English passed up the opportunity to grab for himself the biggest royal scoop for generations, which eventually went to The Sunday Times. I'll bet you weren't talking about Fawcett in the pub 10 days ago.Is Smith telling the truth? Even at The Mail on Sunday they do not know for sure - how could they? But recent developments have shifted executives at the paper farther and farther toward Smith's versions of events. They believe that the reactions of senior people at Clarence House indicate doubts there about the Prince's denials. Why, they ask, the initial panic when The Mail on Sunday put the story to the Prince's people? Why did Michael Peat feel the need to check out the nature of Charles's sexuality with Mark Bolland?We will never know. But Clarence House's initial defence was blown out of the water a decade ago by Andrew Morton.