I have recently got around to reading Simon Winder’s The Man Who Saved Britain, an amusing and credible attempt to put Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels into their post-War cultural, social and historical context. Winder’s account plants Bond squarely amid the seemingly familiar setting of British post-War decline, but with a historian’s eye for the continuities and breaks from one era to the next. Funny, insightful, and worth a read, the book slips in a casual account of a certain post-War mindset which comes closer than anything I have ever read to solving the eternal mystery of why on earth people read the Daily Mail.

Like many people, I am baffled by the world as seen through its pages. I am offended by its bigotry, its contempt for good journalism, its ignorance, but I am more inclined simply to scratch my head in amazement at a world I simply don’t recognise. And yet, and yet…the paper still commands a readership several times that of its middle-market imitator the Daily Express, albeit down nearly two percent over the past year, and its influence on British culture and politics remains extraordinarily strong.

Danuta Reah’s The Language of Newspapers reminds us how newspapers - all newspapers - construct their readership by implication and the creation of sets of shared assumptions, in the same way that automobiles and toothpaste are designed, branded and marketed by use of subtle emotional cues, so that we know that that brandis for people like us.We know who the Mail reader is, or at least we think we do. The paper appeals to aspirational, Pooterish, indignant, “common sense” types. But its credo, and its implied readership, is riddled with contradictions. Vitriolic hatred sits alongside the most mawkish sentimentality; “down to earth” “common sense” alongside the most airy-fairy, new age, live-to 150 nonsense; deference and aspiration mixes with furious defiance of alleged “élites”. Who are these people, and how did the Mail hit such a rich seam? Over to Winder (who is in his mid-40s, like me):

My early memories are filled with the stifling nostalgia for the Second World War that filled my parents’ newspapers. I was brought up in a Conservative household by parents who were in no sense violently ideological and who were more than willing to be critical of ‘their’ government. My mother’s views at that time, the late sixties and early seventies, were reflected by papers such as the Daily and Sunday Express and were suffused with an overwhelming sense that ‘things were going wrong’. I have often thought about those strange papers which really fed quite remorselessly on a sense of bitterness and anger over a poorly defined ‘they’ who had let everyone down. ’They’ could be the Soviets, of course, but also oily Europeans, vulgar Americans, vicious Africans…shirkers and cheats of all kinds - in fact virtually everybody.

This is a vast, clear strand in British life that goes oddly unnoticed. In the years I lived in the US I never once encountered anything approaching this strange tic, and it does not seem a serious force in countries such as Italy or Germany. Le Pen, of course, taps into something related in France and for similar reasons - and I bet there’s lots of it in Russia, which now shares much of Britain’s old psychosis.The 1950s saw this tendency in British life really find its feet. A whole category of people became decisively embittered.

They hated the Socialist government of 1945, hated the loss of India, hated the feeling that Britain was no longer Great and were worked up about the USA, about which many had, to say the least, complicated feelings. This bitterness has been a huge theme in British life ever since…These people clung to Churchill, who should have retired in 1945, they adored the royal family, they emigrated in substantial numbers, and they hated every twist and turn of the permissive society as it unfolded in the fifties and sixties. They were not fools in any sense but they were doomed by political, military and economic events to experience the next decades as a roller coaster in a condemned fairground they had not even asked to visit.

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