Oh, the Daily Mail. Which I’ve referred to in the past as the Daily Fail, the Scaly Mail, and more recently, the Daily Heil, after I learned of the manner in which a past owner had a hard-on for Hitler and fascism.
The owner in question was one Harold Sidney Harmsworth, 1st Viscount Rothermere. This individual had a particularly colourful history, which included:
[1] Open support for Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists in the 1930s (he even penned an article for the Daily Mail bearing the headline “Hurrah for the Blackshirts”);
[2] Writing fan letters to Adolf Hitler, including one urging him to invade Romania;
[3] Spreading anti-Semitic propaganda in his newspapers (one notorious article in the Daily Mail bore the headline “German Jews Pouring into Britain”);
[4] Hiring one Princess Stephanie von Hohenlohe, a known Nazi spy, and paying her a retainer of £5,000 per year (back in the 1930s, this was equivalent to £200,000 per year today), as well as taking her on as a mistress (she also had contacts with Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler himself, and the wives of key Tory politicians);
Oh, and it was later revealed, in the case of Stephanie von Hohenlohe, that she was awarded the Golden Party Badge by the Nazi Party for her services to the Nazi espionage effort in the 1930s (Rothermere was engaging in some serious wick dipping into her around this time). In addition, the French Secret Service found documents in her Paris flat, revealing that she was to try and persuade Rothermere to campaign in the Daily Mail, for the return to Germany of territory ceded to Poland after the end of World War I. Her reward for this, if she succeeded, was to be around £200,000 (in 1938 money - equivalent to a whopping £13 million today).
In short, Rothermere was a fascist traitor, one who was for a time literally in bed with a notorious Nazi spy and honeypot temptress, who wrote numerous fan letters directly to Hitler, and who, once World War II started, left the UK in disgrace. Though of course, as is typical here, instead of being tried and shot for treachery as would have happened to one of the plebs, he was, as a member of the aristotwat Establishment, allowed to pack his bags for a comfortable exile, ending his days in a posh Bermuda holiday home in 1940 after unsuccessful attempts to try and erase his pro-Nazi past from the history books.
However, the Daily Mail didn’t end its ties with far Right politics, merely hid them for the duration of WWII, after which, it didn’t take long for the next generation of Rothermeres to return to business as usual, though on a less egregious scale until recently., whereupon we saw the hiring of that vicious racist specimen, Katie Hopkins, most famous for her remarks about taking a machine gun to “migrants” in the English Channel, and who can best be described as Juilus Streicher with XX chromosomes.
Anyone who wishes to, can explore various Internet sources and discover all manner of creepy facts about the Daily Mail, such as the manner in which it was taken to task for using student A-level results as an excuse to post photos of teenage girls (all white ones of course), in a manner reminiscent of a cattle market.
Though one area in which it’s departed from the flag-shagging tropes that are popular with the reich wing Gammons here, is the area of sycophancy toward the Royal Family. When Prince Harry married Meghan Markle, this was a bit much for the racists on the staff, and they launched a not-so-muted whispering campaign aimed at trashing her public popularity here. By contrast, the competition, principally the Daily Express, sailed a wider course around those rocks, preferring instead to concentrate upon grovelling worship of the whiter than white Princess Catherine. Which led to a spoof article about the staffers at that newspaper having orgasms over her giving birth to a baby boy on St George’s day. But I digress.
The short version of the above, is that you can trust the Daily Mail even less than you would trust a £13 (or $13, according to your local currency) banknote. Look hard enough online, and you’ll find a range of amusing Daily Mail spoofs in various states of activity, that will provide you with some indication of the taste this publication leaves in the mouth. It’s basically the reich wing version of the Soviet era Pravda.