• Thursday, March 28, 2024
businessday logo

BusinessDay

Geordie Greig: ‘Provocation is a good thing’

Geordie Greig: ‘Provocation is a good thing’

There is one thing that a journalist can count on, said a character in Evelyn Waugh’s 1938 novel Scoop: “popularity”. The public always has “a smile and the best of everything for the gentlemen of the press”.

How times changed, particularly for the Daily Mail. At the turn of the century, the tabloid became the most influential newspaper in Britain, but also the most divisive — thanks to angry headlines such as “Crush the Saboteurs”, “Over 1m Illegals are in Britain” and “Is this a case of bias against men?”

Comedians mocked it, advertisers boycotted it, Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s former spin-doctor, called it the “most evil paper in the world”. “They just get on everyone’s tits, don’t they?” sighed the model Kate Moss.

Then last year, after a quarter century in charge, the Mail’s fearsome Brexiter editor Paul Dacre was shoved upstairs — replaced by Geordie Greig, a debonair Remainer famed for his literary contacts. It was as if the Brexit party had chosen Amber Rudd as leader.

So Greig and I are meeting in his favourite Notting Hill restaurant, Clarke’s, to mark his first year in charge. It’s the first media interview by a Mail editor in seven years. “It couldn’t be a more exciting time to be editing a newspaper,” he says. “Every time I take over a new job, there is a sense of trepidation and a certain concern — how are you going to make a difference?”

Read also: Banks snap up $60bn in two-week loans from New York Fed

Oh, he made a difference all right. Within weeks, Britain was no longer overrun with foreigners. When the Supreme Court ruled against Boris Johnson last week, the judges were not “Enemies of the People” but “the friend of a strong Constitution”. As for Moss, in 2018 she was “Cocaine Kate” who looked “frankly ridiculous in a playsuit”. Since Greig took over, she has been “looking gorgeous”.

For years, the Mail depicted a country going to the dogs; now Britain might actually be going to the dogs, and the Mail is seeing the bright side. “It’s a really complicated journey a lot of people are on,” says Greig.

Viscount Rothermere, the proprietor, is happy with the new tone; the paper’s previous coverage was said to embarrass him at dinner parties. The Mail’s sales — 1.16m a day — are falling more slowly than its rivals’. Perhaps optimism works.

Can a liberal editor etch his views on the bedrock of British conservatism? Could at least one corner of Britain’s public discourse be becoming nicer?

Greig and I sat next to each other at lunch a decade ago at Wimbledon. I recall he spent the meal speaking to someone more important; I rather admired the polite ruthlessness. “How good to see you again,” he says warmly as we shake hands.

Clarke’s, an elegant English restaurant, used to have no menu. That suited Greig fine. “The only thing I hate is rice pudding,” the 58-year-old smiles, boyishly. There is now a menu, filled with delightful ingredients, all of which the Daily Mail has probably linked to cancer.

Greig chooses a ricotta and fig starter, followed by grey mullet. I go for the vegan options — described as a salad and “a lovely selection of vegetables” — plus a glass of Pinot Grigio. We are nestled against a wall at the back of the restaurant, and at first Greig speaks so softly that I can barely hear him.

His grandfather was a courtier and medic, who played doubles with the Duke of York at Wimbledon. Greig is the first tabloid editor to have gone to Eton; indeed, it’s the only four-letter word he utters all meal.

“I loved Eton . . . It set me up doing so much of what I’m still doing.” It was there that he first wrote to stars — David Hockney, Samuel Beckett, Joanna Lumley — for interviews. He managed to keep in touch, starting one of Britain’s best address books. What’s his secret?

“It’s sort of slightly the EM Forster thing — only connect!” Even with the royals? “If you’re comfortable in your own skin, you just be yourself.”

Greig was urged by his father, a courtier and shipping executive, to be a banker. But he instead joined an unglamorous local paper in Deptford, south London. He worked his way up to the Mail, The Sunday Times, then edited the society magazine Tatler, the Evening Standard and The Mail on Sunday.

“I was never entirely sure if he was my New York correspondent or my social secretary,” his Sunday Times editor Andrew Neil said. Greig’s career trajectory has been that of a hot-air balloon; his contacts the propane, his confidence the spark.

He seems proudest of his memoir of Lucian Freud, whom he met regularly in Clarke’s. Breakfast with Lucian is a hair-raising book that depicts Freud as selfish, secretive and sexually sadistic. One reviewer did question if the elderly artist knew what he was getting into.

Greig concedes his methods were unorthodox. “I sort of stalked him . . . I twisted my way into getting access to him through a bit of deception, charm and kidnapping.” It’s a brazen admission. Then again, what does the Daily Mail editor have to fear?

What’s it like being editor, I ask. “People always think, oh my God, it must be conflict with 10 Downing Street.” It’s actually often the small diary stories that “cause difficulties later”. Indeed, I think, remembering how the Mail’s diary used to tease him as a “Tintin lookalike”.