Is the real reason Paul Dacre missed out on the Ofcom job?

When Paul Dacre’s application to chair media regulator was rejected in 2021, he was quick to cry political bias.

The former Daily Mail editor had been supported by Boris Johnson for the role but his initial application was rejected and Dacre pulled out of the contest.

He described his experience of applying for the role at the time as an “infelicitous dalliance” with “the Blob” and claimed that it was his “strong convictions” which had led to him being judged “unappointable”.

Writing in a letter in the Times, he said: “To anyone from the private sector, who, God forbid, has convictions, and is thinking of applying for a public appointment, I say the following: the civil service will control (and leak) everything; the process could take a year in which your life will be put on hold; and if you are possessed of an independent mind and are unassociated with the liberal/left, you will have more chance of winning the lottery than getting the job.”

He said he was instead taking up “an exciting new job” in the private sector that “struggles to create the wealth to pay for all those senior civil servants working from home so they can spend more time exercising on their Peloton bikes and polishing their political correctness”. This “exciting new job” turned out to be returning to the Mail in a nebulous executive role, well away from the newsroom.

Suggested Reading

The lies of the Boris Johnson revisionists

Rats in a Sack

But why might Dacre really have been rejected? Rather than just being about newspapers – the only medium in which the now 77-year-old has ever worked – Ofcom has a wide and complicated role in regulating the increasingly digital world.

It has wide-ranging powers over television, radio, telecoms and postal services, dealing with licensing, complaints and much else besides, and at the time Dacre was eyeing its chairmanship was being handed new powers to regulate social media companies as part of the then government’s online safety legislation, since passed.

And what did Dacre have to say about such matters as he appeared at the High Court yesterday in the case brought against Associated Newspapers by a number of celebrities, including Prince Harry and Baroness Lawrence, who have accused the Mail of unlawful information gathering over an 18-year period?

“I had a somewhat antediluvian appreciation and understanding of matters digital,” he sniffed. “This is not something I am proud of, but I didn’t ever use a personal computer and barely knew how to log on.”

Hmmm. Might this be why he was considered unsuitable to oversee the new world of media, rather than, as he wrote in the Spectator in 2021, the “toxic hatred of Brexit that is so palpable among the people who really run this country”?