Front-page of today's Mail. Nick Clegg is in a traitorous plot with foreigners. Unlike some people. Seriously, if the Lib Dems were offering a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty (not even saying whether people should vote yay or nay) I would really consider voting for them, just to see the front-pages of the Thatcherite newspapers on May 7th and the headline 'IT WAS THE SUN WOT LOST IT!'
Moreover, although it always like to wrap itself up in the Union Jack, I always think the Mail is skating on the proverbial thin ice when it goes on about World War Two (it is for it) and Nazis (it is against them). After all, its owner at the time Lord Rothermere can hardly be said to have covered himself in glory:
On 10 July 1933, Rothermere wrote an editorial titled ‘Youth Triumphant' in support of Adolf Hitler, this was subsequently used as propaganda by the Nazis. In early 1934, Rothermere and the Mail were editorially sympathetic to Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists.Rothermere wrote an article entitled ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts’, in January 1934, praising Mosley for his ‘sound, commonsense, Conservative doctrine’....
Rothermere was a friend and supporter of both Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler, which influenced the Mail's political stance towards them up to 1939. Rothermere visited and corresponded with Hitler. On 1 October 1938, Rothermere sent Hitler a telegram in support of Germany's invasion of the Sudetenland, and expressing the hope that 'Adolf the Great' would become a popular figure in Britain....
In 1937, the Mail's chief war correspondent, George Ward Price, to whom Mussolini once wrote in support of him and the newspaper, published a book, I Know These Dictators, in defence of Hitler and Mussolini....
In 1938, as persecution of the Jews in Europe escalated, the Mail objected to their seeking asylum in Britain. ‘The way stateless Jews from Germany are pouring in from every port of this country is becoming an outrage. The number of aliens entering the country through the back door is a problem to which the Daily Mail has repeatedly pointed.’
Rothermere and the Mail supported Neville Chamberlain's policy of appeasement, particularly during the events leading up to the Munich Agreement. In 2005, the British Foreign Office disclosed previously secret letters from Rothermere addressed to Hitler from the summer of 1939, in which he congratulated the German leader on his annexation of Czechoslovakia, urged him to invade Romania, and called Hitler's work ‘great and superhuman’.
Lord R and Adolf The Great: 'Herr Hitler, before we move onto meatier questions- Marmite, Love It Or Hate It?'
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