Baz Bamigboye was the last of the big Daily Mail stars – up there with the late Nigel Dempster, Lynda Lee-Potter and Jack Tinker – but his farewell party held in the atrium of the paper’s headquarters in Kensington last week was a less than starry occasion.
Neither Paul Dacre nor Lord Rothermere attended – a great public relations opportunity squandered to celebrate the trail-blazing appointment of a black journalist to such a high-profile role 40 years ago – and the speech was left to executive Leaf Kalfayan, who drily noted that Bamigboye didn’t share his newspaper’s enthusiasm for Brexit. Bamigboye was left to pose for pictures beside the columnist Andrew Pierce.
“The thing about Baz is that he was, in common with all the paper’s biggest stars, appointed not by Dacre, but Sir David English, the creator of the modern Daily Mail,” one hireling of the paper explains.
A current preoccupation of Rothermere I understand is Mail Plus, its news briefings service complete with live video bulletins. This was supposed to enhance its digital offering, but the uptake hasn’t lived up to expectations.
