For those us who dabble in journalism, it is a constant effort to make our prose as engaging, punchy, and robust as our limited vocabularies can manage. It is thus utterly refreshing and deeply imposing to be reminded of how best to do it by a master of their craft. Exhibit A: Paul Dacre’s statement following Prince Harry’s loss in court yesterday. Read it and grin.
Dacre and his publications stood for people like us: ordinary suburban Brits
‘There isn’t a laundry in the cosmos big enough to wash all the dirty linen he has aired about his own family’. ‘I feel sorry for the way a confused and angry young man has been drawn into this case’. This ‘trumped-up action’ raises ‘profoundly disturbing questions about the conduct of elements of the legal profession’. ‘This was a conspiracy…to destroy a paper’ financed ‘by the orgy-loving racist Max Mosley’, a ‘sinister bid to resuscitate Levenson Two and impose statutory regulation on the press’. No, Mr Dacre – tell us how you really feel.
Almost four years ago, when the Duke of Sussex, Lady Lawrence, Sir Elton John, Liz Hurley and Sadie Frost took the Daily Mail to court over alleged phone hacking, I wrote for my previous employer how unfortunate it was that this legal action seemed to have kiboshed Dacre’s chances of receiving a peerage in Boris Johnson’s resignation honours. Now that it is over, the Prince humiliated and Dacre vindicated, his elevation to the peerage should be swift.
