Last March, three months before Britons voted to take the United Kingdom out of the European Union, then-Prime Minister David Cameron asked Daily Mail proprietor Lord Rothermere to fire the newspaper's editor, Paul Dacre. The press baron, descendant of the family which did more than any other to create the British tabloid press, refused, and did not even tell Dacre of the request until after the result of the referendum. The incident, reported by the BBC, has not been denied by any of the parties involved.

It was a grubby event on the road to Brexit. Unlike many of their kind, the owners of the Mail do seem to have stuck to the line that they may own, but Dacre may edit. Rothermere is in favor of remaining in the EU; the Daily Mail was and is the most devoted Brexiteer in the land. And, without peer, still the most powerful organ of the press: the "newspaper that rules Britain."

Dacre, now 68 and apparently still a tireless workaholic, is the last of that line of Fleet Street editors who have the confidence and talent to address the country like a revivalist pastor does his flock — with heat, passion and a supreme sense of being right.