‘I must have been off that day’: Paul Dacre is The Man Who Wasn’t There

Cat-like and hiding his claws, the former Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre slunk low in the witness box as he whispered his evidence in the long-running case of Prince Harry vs the publishers of his very own newspaper group.

In the bland, strip-lit courtroom, the editor-in-chief of DMG Media was a far cry from his own mythology. In legend, he has long been a frightening, Nosferatu-type figure, stalking around his Kensington lair and striking fear into the hearts of those who work for him. Today, he sat shadowed but shrunken, black-clad and a frail 77, his hoarse voice barely audible as he said, simply and repeatedly, “I don’t know”, and, “I can’t remember”, and, “I may have been off that day”.

Dacre is Macavity the Mystery Cat, the Hidden Paw – and in the box he duly defied the law, or at least bamboozled it. Incongruously, for the man who must have presided over more rigorous inquiries and more blockbuster investigations than any other outlet in Fleet Street over the past 30 years, when being questioned himself, he suddenly had nothing to say.

Worse: he claimed not even to understand the lingo. On the basic journalistic practice of a “door-knock”, Dacre shrugged and said smoothly, hoarsely, that he “does not know what that is”. On the spurious practice of “blagging” – which makes up a bulk of the accusations as to how, exactly, his journalists got hold of private information on celebrities including Hugh Grant, Jemima Khan and Sadie Frost… well, Dacre “couldn’t define it”. Until... he could. And he already had – at the Leveson Inquiry in 2011.

Dacre/Macavity “categorically” denied claims that his journalists paid police officers bribes, he denied all knowledge of where a story in the Daily Mail about Prince Harry taking a specific flight to Johannesburg with his ex-girlfriend, Chelsy Davy, in 2007, had come from – or that it may have involved a private investigator.

When the court was shown an email exchange between the Mail’s royal correspondent and a private investigator – along the lines of: “Can we plant someone next to them on the plane?”, which might only have been less shocking if it had carried a “LOL” at the end – Dacre, who hadn’t been party to the emails, said he didn’t know how the reporter got hold of any flight information. But he did say that "airlines were very relaxed" about giving out such details in his day. On being told that – perhaps, maybe? – the way the seat numbers were obtained was “unlawful”, Dacre returned to smooth form with: “I don’t know about that.”

Did Dacre, who famously used to brag he “smelled danger”, smell any danger with the sources who gave up such sensational stories and double-page spreads to his newspapers? Any of them? How about, for example, apparent payments for accessing people’s criminal records? We don’t know, you see. Paul Dacre “can’t remember”. He doesn’t bother himself with such “granular details”.

He reminded us, multiple times, that he’s far too busy and important; that he had risen “so high in the ranks” at the Mail over the years, working 15-hour days, that he couldn’t possibly have been expected to keep an eye on trivial matters such as who told whom to do what.

He made sure that we all heard – though we had to press our ears to the speaker to hear it – that he trusted his managing editors and his journalists, for all were of “impressive” calibre and training. That he – and he said it imperiously – had personally shut down any use of private investigators by way of a ban in the early 2000s. That the Mail on Sunday “wasn’t his paper”, that both papers are run “entirely autonomously”. It all felt like the court equivalent of a Dick Van Dyke skit, holding both hands up to a local bobby, declaring that it “wasn’t me, Guv!”, punctuated repeatedly by the – boom! – punctilious and precise – boom! – Dickensian roll call of barrister David Sherborne’s nod-of-his-hat address: “Mister Dacre...” Never has politeness sounded more like an insult.

Only Mr Justice Nicklin will know whether The Man Who Wasn’t There has dodged a bullet, in the end. He certainly dodged taking personal responsibility for any payments. For every piece of evidence that turned up and was presented to the court – each handwritten, scrawled receipt made out to “a source” or “the intelligence service” or a “detective agency”, each invoice marked with numbers like K2751 and L159, stamped and recorded and signed off by his own company, Associated Newspapers – was vigorously, vehemently, personally shrugged off.

Dacre/Macavity “had no recollection of it”. He simply “didn’t see it”. In one case, he “read it late at night”; in another, he skimmed it and realised it related to the Mail on Sunday – then dismissed it immediately as “not for him” (because the two papers are separate and anonymous, do you see? Didn’t he tell you?!). The exchange was like watching a ping-pong match in slow motion.

The coiffed barrister tried, repeatedly, to get him to reveal whether he’d told the truth – both now and at the Leveson Inquiry – but Macavity repeatedly slipped out of sight. Still, despite those pesky “granular details” that Dacre/Macavity detests so much, it will all come down to this: how each story came to light. Whose privacy was interrupted (at best) or stolen (at worst) to get to it. And who “smelled danger” – or should have.

Throughout the day-long, testy gladiatorial battle between gruffness and smoothness, one image remains: Dacre leaving the box in his dark overcoat, with a sharp and stealthy swoosh of his tail. And ay, there’s the wonder of the thing, you see! You may meet him in a by-street, you may see him in the square – but Macavity’s not there!