The Daily Mail has 4.5 million readers. One editor says, “The paper’s defining ideology is that Britain has gone to the dogs.” Illustration by Harry Campbell

On Thursday, January 19th, the front page of the Daily Mail carried a story about Sir Fred Goodwin, the former chief executive of the Royal Bank of Scotland. During Goodwin’s tenure, from 2000 to 2008, R.B.S. quadrupled its assets, became the fifth-largest bank in the world, and then failed spectacularly, at a cost to British taxpayers of seventy billion dollars. The Mail illustrated the piece with a large photograph of Goodwin. He was dressed in hunting gear, with a shotgun hanging over the crook of his left elbow. “Reviled: Sir Fred Goodwin,” the caption read. Any further doubt about the Mail’s stance was relieved by the headline: “STRIP FRED ‘THE SHRED’ OF TAINTED KNIGHTHOOD DEMAND MPS.” The exclusive story, the latest in a series of unflattering pieces about Goodwin, revealed that Prime Minister David Cameron was “sympathetic” to the idea that the honor should be revoked. Two weeks later, Goodwin became the only Knight Bachelor in memory to lose his commission without having been censured by a professional body or convicted of a criminal offense. “Fred Goodwin joined the ranks of Robert Mugabe and Nicolae Ceausescu last night when his knighthood was removed by order of the Queen,” the Mail announced.

The Mail is the most powerful newspaper in Great Britain. A middle-market tabloid, with a daily readership of four and a half million, it reaches four times as many people as the Guardian, while being taken more seriously than the one paper that outsells it, the Sun. In January, its Web arm, Mail Online, surpassed that of the New York Times as the most visited newspaper site in the world, drawing fifty-two million unique visitors a month. The Mail’s closest analogue in the American media is perhaps Fox News. In Britain, unlike in the United States, television tends to be a dignified affair, while print is berserk and shouty. The Mail is like Fox in the sense that it speaks to, and for, the married, car-driving, homeowning, conservative-voting suburbanite, but it is unlike Fox in that it is not slavishly approving of any political party. One editor told me, “The paper’s defining ideology is that Britain has gone to the dogs.” Nor is the Mail easy to resist. Last year, its lawyers shut down a proxy site that allowed liberals to browse Mail Online without bumping up its traffic.

The Mail presents itself as the defender of traditional British values, the voice of an overlooked majority whose opinions inconvenience the agendas of metropolitan élites. To its detractors, it is the Hate Mail, goading the worst curtain-twitching instincts of an island nation, or the Daily Fail, fuelling paranoia about everything from immigration to skin conditions. (“WITHIN A DAY OF HIS ECZEMA BEING INFECTED, MARC WAS DEAD,” a recent headline warned.) A Briton’s view of the Mail is a totemic indicator of his sociopolitical orientation, the dinner-party signal for where he stands on a host of other matters. In 2010, a bearded, guitar-strumming band called Dan & Dan had a YouTube hit with “The Daily Mail Song,” which, so far, has been viewed more than 1.3 million times. “Bring back capital punishment for pedophiles / Photo feature on schoolgirl skirt styles / Binge Britain! Single Mums! / Pensioners! Hoodie Scum!” Dan sings. “It’s absolutely true because I read it in the Daily Mail.” The Mail is less a parody of itself than a parody of the parody, its rectitudinousness cancelling out others’ ridicule to render a middlebrow juggernaut that can slay knights and sway Prime Ministers.

In 2000, Tony Blair wrote a memo to his advisers (it later leaked) in which he pinpointed some “touchstone issues” that he wanted to address immediately. They were: the family (“we need two or three eye-catching initiatives that are entirely conventional in terms of their attitude”); asylum (“where we are perceived as soft”); crime; defense; and the case of Tony Martin, a fruit farmer from the Norfolk village of Emneth Hungate, who had been sentenced to life in prison after killing a burglar on his property. Blair feared, he wrote, that he was perceived as being out of touch with “gut British instincts.” That morning, the Mail had run an editorial lambasting him as “the worst offender in the new politics of intolerance,” in which a citizen who expressed unfashionable views was branded as a “xenophobic little Englander.” The paper had enumerated five areas of concern. As it happened, they mirrored almost precisely the quintet, including the fruit farmer, that Blair had suddenly become so eager to deal with.

Fred Goodwin, a married father of two, was an especially tasty mark for the Mail. He had demonstrated personal frailty as well as professional incompetence, by conducting an affair with a colleague as R.B.S. collapsed. In the Mail’s cosmology, men are giants or pygmies, strong or weak. (Women are assessed by other metrics.) Such is the Mail’s censoriousness that British Esquire recently deemed it the nation’s “purse-lipped mother-in-law.” After the affair, Goodwin obtained from the High Court a gag order that forbade the British media from reporting it. This rankled the Mail, which flouted the injunction without technically violating the law. If its competitors lob spitballs at their bugbears, the Mail strafes them with righteousness.

The Mail’s editor, Paul Dacre, considers it a compliment when critics accuse the paper of moralizing. “The family is the greatest institution on God’s green earth,” he told me recently, sitting on a dotted-swiss sofa in his London office, which is swagged in the camels and burgundys, the brasses and woods, that one would expect of a man who, as a student at the University of Leeds, chanted “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh” but now says, “For the life of me, I’m not quite sure why.” According to one editor, Dacre is enamored with New Zealand: “He thinks it’s like Britain from the nineteen-fifties.” This retrograde mind-set has recently been notable in the Mail’s insistence that marriage should be solely between a woman and a man.

The paper, which runs to about a hundred pages a day, is not all gloom. It has an equable rhythm. The serious stuff is supplemented by a beguiling lineup of novelty stories (the girl who eats nothing but chicken nuggets), animal stories (the surfing hippopotamus), personal essays (“I married a skinflint!”), barely disguised press releases (cranberry-cheese-flavored crisps on sale at Tesco), recipes, gossip, crosswords, obituaries, amusing pictures, and heartwarming fluff. The Mail is the place to go if you want to see a house that looks like Hitler, or a tabby with its head encased in a slice of bread. These are, as the former Daily Express editor Arthur Christiansen, one of Dacre’s heroes, once wrote, the “human twiddly bits that make for conversations in the pubs.”

The Mail has an oral quality, prompting the exclamations of wonder or disgust that attend what the media critic Roy Greenslade has called “Hey, Doris!” stories. Its quirks include a love of aviation, and the annoying habit of inserting real-estate prices into stories that have nothing to do with them, such as the death in a ski-resort accident of a boy whose parents “live in a £1 million house.” Its columnists range from sensible to unhinged. (One, Liz Jones, recently wrote about stealing her husband’s sperm in an attempt to have a child without his permission, earning her the nickname Jizz Loans.) Some of the paper’s greatest interest arises when Doris hollers back. Harry Simpson, of Northwich, Cheshire, wrote recently: