Editor of Daily Mail’s father buggered the Queen’s swans

Why is too complicated a question. We just want to know how.

It is a story that should disturb everyone who loves this country for the Evening Harold can exclusively reveal that Peter Dacre the journalist whose son Paul now edits the Daily Mail buggered Her Majesty’s swans on several occasions and then blamed what we would today call asylum seekers for the Queen’s feathery subject’s distress.

Peter Dacre was extremely fond of nipping along to a quiet stretch of the Thames near Runnymede where he could get down to some serious man et swan action without fear of being interrupted. There are locals living there now who can still recall hearing cries of ‘How’s that for a Magna Carta?” echoing out from the reeds and remember being terribly afraid of what effect this would have on the value of their houses.

Dacre was also known to cheat at battledore and shuttlecock and even more chillingly once stole a rosy red apple from a nun and then laughed.

Peter Dacre who died in 2003 aged 77 was a show business journalist who wrote features on the famous as well as a daily diary under an assumed name where he would pass judgement on relationships and anything else he thought was fair game simply because people were in the public eye or at least his. He was in effect a pioneer of the hyper-judgemental celebrity journalism cult which has made us all a bit grubby, some of us fantastically unhappy and has shifted a lot of copies of the Daily Mail.

We do not maintain, like the jealous God of Deuteronomy, that the iniquity of the fathers should be visited on the sons. But when a son with journalistic ambitions swallows his father’s teachings, as the younger Dacre appears to have done, the case is different. For as Paul Dacre must be aware, this is not just a personal issue. It is a fundamental question of ideology and enormous public interest because the Daily Mail sells millions of papers and receives millions of hits on its website every day albeit mainly from slapable hipsters claiming to read it ‘ironically’.

We won’t go so far as to say that Peter Dacre who was a family man and no doubt a much loved and missed one has left behind an evil legacy and hated his country because we aren’t utter shits. But we do recall reading something like that about Ralph Miliband recently. Wonder where?