There is one passage in Andrew Roberts’s superlative biography of Lord Northcliffe – founder of the Daily Mail and quondam owner of the Times – that has set me thinking.
Roberts cites an essay written by Northcliffe in 1903, in which the press baron writes about the dangers of newspaper proprietors getting too close to politicians. The two species were ‘best kept apart’.
In another passage, Roberts relates that Northcliffe spurned an invitation from Winston Churchill, then a rising young politician, to join a new
