The left-liberal press are celebrating the announcement that Remain supporter Geordie Greig will take over the Daily Mail later this year, badly undermining one of Britain’s main bulwarks against the Soros-funded campaign to undo Brexit.
A bullish Independent described outgoing editor Paul Dacre, who has headed Britain’s second most popular right-leaning newspaper for more than a quarter of a century, as having “cemented his position as a titan of Fleet Street through his ferocious and often controversial conservatism”.
The ex-newspaper quotes a Conservative source concerned that “Dacre’s Mail [was] the standard bearer for Brexit and what it stands for,” and that it “would be silly to deny that Brexit isn’t potentially losing one of its greatest champions” — hot on the heels of the acquisition of the Daily Express, Brexit’s other major champion, by the left-wing Trinity Mirror group.
Greig, a figure at home with the establishment described as “Britain’s best-connected man” during his tenure as editor of the high society Tatler magazine, currently leads the Daily Mail‘s sister outlet, the Mail on Sunday.
Greig’s MoS has adopted a markedly different editorial stance on Brexit than its weekday counterpart, having come out for a Remain vote during the EU referendum and derided Brexit campaigners as “So eager … for a divorce that they are prepared to sacrifice a large chunk of our income, and trade down on living conditions, in order to walk out into a rose-tinted future of ‘freedom’.”
The Guardian, house newspaper of the elite left in the United Kingdom, is hopeful that the timing of Greig’s takeover in November 2018 will afford him “an opportunity to give the honest verdict that we are damaging both our prosperity and our power” as the Brexit negotiations come to a close.
The equally europhile New Statesman, too, describes “excitement among Remainers” at the prospect of a move away from “Dacre’s aggressive stance”, if not outright betrayal of the paper’s Brexit-supporting readership.
Coming so soon after the aforementioned takeover of the Express group of newspapers — Northern and Shell — by the left-wing Trinity Mirror group, Dacre’s replacement by an Old Etonian europhile could leave Brexit supporters with few friends in the mainstream media landscape 12 months from now.
The neutering of the maverick Express, which had gone further than any other major newspaper in campaigning against the European Union and backing Nigel Farage’s UK Independence Party against Britain’s establishment political parties, could give the left such a stranglehold on the British press that the takeover is being investigated by both Ofcom and the Competition and Markets Authority.
In addition to the nationally-circulated Daily Mirror, the Trinity Mirror group controls more than 200 regional newspapers, which are often more influential than national titles due to their tendency to attract general readers, rather than those who already have strong political views.