It is rare for the Daily Mail to put an editorial on its front page, but such is the level of paranoia in the Northcliffe House bunker right now that , Daily Mail Comment, the authentic voice of the Vagina Monologue, has been promoted to major headline status as the legendarily foul mouthed Paul Dacre nominates Himself Personally Now to hold back what he believes to be the creeping advance of Euro-Federalism.
As with the pre-emptive hatchet job on the Leveson Inquiry’s report, where the Mail went after Inquiry assessor David Bell, the whole range of invective has been thrown in. But the title, “WHO WILL SPEAK FOR ENGLAND?” misses the inconvenient fact that the UK has other component countries. Not until paragraph 17 does the rant concede this, and say that they mean the UK, even though they didn’t say so earlier.
Then a thought enters: what is the Daily Mail doing talking about “speaking for England” when 100% of the voting shares in its parent company, the Daily Mail and General Trust, are owned by “non-dom” Lord Rothermere, controlled by his company in Bermuda, that company then being controlled via a trust in Jersey? And what is the Mail doing digging up the ghost of Nazi Germany, given its own questionable past?
The then Lord Rothermere was happy to be photographed with Adolf Hitler. He personally contributed an article headlined “Hurrah for the Blackshirts” to the Daily Mail. When Hitler moved to annex the Sudatenland in 1938, he sent the Führer his congratulations. After the Nazis had completed their invasion of Czechoslovakia the following year, he congratulated Hitler once again, and encouraged him to invade Romania.
Overcoming the Third Reich cost Britain dear. The Daily Mail didn’t do much “speaking for England” back then, did it? Being owned via offshore companies and tax haven trusts isn’t doing much “speaking for England” either. Nor, come to think of it, is the conduct of the family of its editor-in-chief. While Paul Dacre ordered his minions to trash the reputation of Ralph Miliband, he was standing in an awfully draughty glasshouse.
Miliband, with his father, had walked all the way from Brussels to Ostend to get on one of the last boats to leave before the Nazis arrived. As a refugee, he had no obligation to do military service, but volunteered anyway. For this, Dacre smeared him as “The Man Who Hated Britain”. In the meantime, Dacre’s father Peter, when he turned 18 in 1943, avoided being called up for military service by using the cover of a “reserved occupation”.
Journalism was such an occupation, but Peter Dacre was coming it just a bit: he was a showbiz reporter and gossip correspondent. Other journalists volunteered and served with distinction: the young Alan Whicker was one such. Let us put this directly: Peter Dacre was a coward. His yellow streak merely adds to the stinking hypocrisy of his son pompously calling for someone to “speak for England”.
We should take no lectures on “speaking for England” from an offshore-controlled paper with a Nazi-supporting and viciously anti-Semitic past, and whose editor is a bullying hypocrite whose father displayed cowardice in Britain’s hour of need.
The Daily Mail’s editor is speaking not for England, or Britain, but only for Himself.
