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THE REAL-LIFE SIR RICHARD CARLISLE: LORDS BEAVERBROOK AND NORTHCLIFFE

Sir Richard Carlisle is loosely based on the newspaper magnates who made their fortunes out of the First World War. The Canadian tycoon Max Aitken, later Lord Beaverbrook, was a prominent figure largely because of his political friends as well as his rousing leaders in the Daily Express. But it was Lord Northcliffe who led the way in tabloid journalism with the establishment of the Daily Mirror and the Daily Mail – his descendant, Lord Rothermere, is still the majority shareholder of his newspaper group.

Aitken is compelling for his political bombast. A protégé of the Conservative party leader, Bonar Law (who formed the wartime coalition government with Lloyd George), and a friend of Winston Churchill, his personal alliances guided his newspaper editorials, which were hugely influential in directing politics after the war. But it was the brash effrontery of Lord Northcliffe, born Alfred Harmsworth in Dublin to ‘a tough mother and a feckless hard-drinking father’ in 1865, that could be said to be responsible for influencing some of the major decisions of the war cabinet, including – with Beaverbrook’s Express – the destruction of the Liberal government.

When the Daily Mail was first printed in 1896, the immediate effect was electrifying. Gone were the word-for-word dull reports of political speeches; in were first-person accounts of events. Easy on the eye with lots of white space on the page and an early use of big pictures, one could say that the founding principles still operate on the paper today. ‘The three things which are always news are health things, sex things and money things,’ Northcliffe told a reporter. Cheap to buy and titillating to read, the paper made him a millionaire. Northcliffe died in 1922 quite mad, probably due to a blood infection, and a newspaper man to the end; he telephoned his night editor and told him: ‘They say that I am mad: send your best man to cover the story.’