The Daily Mail – which means its editor, Paul Dacre – does not do subtlety. Its leading article on Wednesday was a full-frontal assault on politicians, on anyone, hopeful of upending the EU referendum vote for Brexit.

It carried a front-page blurb for its editorial saying: “Damn the unpatriotic Bremoaners and their plot to subvert the will of the British people.”

And it reinforced that message with three adjectives in the headline over its full page article: “Whingeing. Contemptuous. Unpatriotic. Damn the Bremoaners and their plot to subvert the will of the British people”.

The savage tone of the 1,400-word leader suggests a nervousness about the possibility that MPs might reverse or, at the least, mitigate, the referendum result.



Some of Dacre’s bêtes noires from across the political spectrum were treated with particular contempt, including the former chancellor George Osborne, former Labour leader Ed Miliband and the former deputy prime minister and Lib Dem leader, Nick Clegg.

Other MPs who campaigned for Remain got it in the neck as did the Treasury, the CBI and, somewhat more predictably, the BBC. Dacre prefers to use a blunderbuss rather than a rifle when going on the attack.



His outrage appears to have been stimulated by the “hysterical and entirely bogus” claim by the Treasury that Britain will be up to £66bn a year poorer if the country “fully breaks free of the shackles imposed by Brussels.”

That study, said the Mail, was commissioned by Osborne, who is described as “the architect of the utterly discredited Project Fear and a man whose bitterness at being removed from office is one of the more unedifying spectacles in politics.”

Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre: blasting his political opponents. Photograph: Ben Cawthra/Rex/Shutterstock

As for “trades union puppet” Miliband and Clegg, they are “the most egregious Remainers of all” for “demanding that parliament must have the final vote on the terms of the UK’s departure from the EU.”

According to the editorial, the BBC’s great sin is to have “given copious airtime” to politicians making “unsubstantiated claims of impending doom for the UK outside of the single market.”

These include “the embittered pro-EU ramblings of the wet-behind-the-ears ex-Tory ministers Nicky Morgan and Anna Soubry.”

Evidently “the BBC is now bitterly regretting its admirable impartiality during the referendum and has returned to type” by “leading the Remain charge.”

The “Bremoaners” are also said to include “the pro-Brussels CBI business group” because of its claim that “big employers will not possibly be able to cope without unskilled mass immigration from the EU”.

This, said the Mail, represents “an unpatriotic, defeatist position which will enrage people in communities whose schools, health services and housing cannot cope with the existing number of migrants.”

In a key passage, the leading article stated:

“To all these embittered Remainers, the Mail has a simple message: You lost. Stop the anti-democratic games and respect the emphatic verdict of the British people. From the moment the referendum result became clear, Remain have been sore losers: incredulous that the British people could be so disrespectful as to reject their wisdom, and increasingly furious that the economy far from collapsing, as predicted by Mr Osborne, is flourishing. So it was that they resorted to desperate subterfuge.”

This “subterfuge” involves the “petulant and unacceptable” Remain side inventing a term, “hard Brexit”, in order to demand a “soft Brexit” to keep the UK within the single market.

By contrast, there was praise for Dacre’s new-found political heroine, Theresa May, for having crushed the Remainers’ “lingering hopes that Brexit was a bad dream that might never happen.”

There were tributes to her “devastating  and entirely accurate critique of a metropolitan elite that sneers at the public’s concerns about mass immigration” and her dismissal of the views of “a well-heeled group of London ‘intellectuals’”.

This was a leading article reflecting Dacre’s personal opinions. If it was not written by him, then it was certainly done at his dictation.

That said, it is highly likely that the leader also reflects the views of the majority of the Mail’s readership. Of the almost 2,000 comments below the online version of the editorial, the overwhelming majority were in favour.

Many of them picked up on the arguments in the editorial’s final paragraphs about the Remain side “being sore losers” and being “deeply unpatriotic.”

In conclusion, the Mail/Dacre said: “Is it really too much to hope that the penny might now finally drop with the metropolitan elite, who for decades have ignored the wishes of their fellow countrymen?

“It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that their contempt for democracy and the public is more to do with their own political ambitions than with concern for the future of Britain.”