Beaverbrook: press crusader

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THE declining Express newspaper has another owner. Richard Desmond will try, like the past few proprietors, to take the paper back to its glory days.

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Despite his best efforts, though, he will not be able to make the Crusader's flag fly as lustily as when Lord Beaverbrook owned it.

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Lord Beaverbrook, born William Maxwell Aitken, was a king among newspaper barons.

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��Press Association

Lord Beaverbrook

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He moved to Britain and the followed year became the Conservative MP for Ashton-under-Lyne. In the House of Commons, Aitken became private secretary to the Colonial Secretary, Andrew Bonar Law.

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In 1918, David Lloyd George ennobled Aitken as Lord Beaverbrook and appointed him as Minister of Information in his war-time coalition government.

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Beaverbrook, meanwhile, had acquired a controlling interest in the Daily Express, and then, taking a lead from the Daily Mail's Alfred Harmsworth, turned it into the most widely read newspaper in the world.

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When Beaverbrook took direct control of the Daily Express in 1919, it sold 440,000 copies daily; by 1960, it sold 4.3 million.

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He founded the Sunday Express in 1921 and bought the Evening Standard in 1929.

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It was in the Second World War that he became the most powerful� - in Winston Churchill's cabinet as Minister for Aircraft Production (1940-41), Minister of Supply (1941-2), Minister of War Production (1942), and Lord Privy Seal (1943-45).

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Beaverbrook's great strength was his belief in the power of the press. Used properly, he said, 'it is a flaming sword which will cut through any political armour.'� (Cynics might like to contrast that statement with the 'sword of truth' speech by his embattled great nephew Jonathan Aitken in the mid-1990s).

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And, true to the heroic figure on the Express masthead, he led his paper on many crusades. Some were ill-judged, however: no sooner had he finished appeasing Hitler than he started appeasing Stalin.

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He also suppressed information and led Fleet Street into a conspiracy of silence about King Edward VIII's affair with Mrs Simpson.

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Yet for all this, the Express opposed 'privilege in any class of the community' - and as a result, it appealed equally to all ages and classes.

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In the years between the end of the war and his death in 1964, Beaverbrook found his political influence was exhausted and he grew bored.

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His successes all lay behind him. According to one biographer, he won the public's attention because 'he peddled hope - that precious commodity.'

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Conservative Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin called him 'one of the most corrupting influences in the country.' Labour PM Clement Attlee said Beaverbrook 'was the only evil man I ever met'.

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Either way, Desmond will be hard pushed to get the Express anywhere near Beaverbrook's 4.3 million.