Whisper it, but is Geordie Greig about to change the tone of Brexit Britain?

Pleasing a pro-Brexit readership and an anti-Brexit proprietor is a tricky tightrope to walk

Westminster watchers awoke yesterday morning wondering whether Brexit secretary David Davis would quit the cabinet. If they were looking for the employment news that had the greatest potential to impact on our departure from the EU, they were looking in the wrong direction.

Yesterday evening, three miles to the west of parliament in nearby Kensington, an announcement came from the Daily Mail: Geordie Greig will be the new editor. Just under 24 hours earlier we had learnt that Paul Dacre would be stepping down in November, after 26 years at the helm. Greig has long been in the conversation about likely replacements, but don’t mistake this for a “business as usual” transfer of power.

Dacre famously cemented his position as a titan of Fleet Street through his ferocious and often controversial conservatism, wielding power over prime ministers and MPs alike – as David Cameron discovered to his cost. But as his time as editor of the Mail on Sunday shows, Greig represents an altogether more interesting prospect for both Theresa May and, most starkly, Brexit.

As one Conservative told The Independent: “Dacre’s Mail is the standard bearer for Brexit and what it stands for. So it would be silly to deny that Brexit isn’t potentially losing one of its greatest champions.” November will be a critical moment in the Brexit tale – when the whole deal and Ms May’s government could stand or fall.

If the paralysed government of Brexit Britain is, at least to his critics, Paul Dacre’s political legacy, his successor might just take a different course.

Among those long-mooted names for the top spot were Tony Gallagher, editor of The Sun and former Mail deputy editor, MailOnline publisher Martin Clarke, and two other acolytes who have joined the Dacre team over the years, deputy editors Ted Verity and Gerard Greaves. But Geordie Greig is different. He is no Dacre ally. Something of a nemesis to the outgoing editor, Greig was the only one of the frontrunners to have been an outspoken voice on the other side of the Brexit debate. During the referendum he directed the Mail on Sunday to campaign strongly for a Remain vote, a decision said to have gone down like a cup of imported Turkish chardonnay in the office next door.

It is little wonder that Dacre, a man who slavishly wooed the villages and county towns of middle England, often clashed with the editor of his paper’s sister publication, the Mail on Sunday. Greig was once dubbed “Britain’s best-connected man” when he was editor of the high society magazine Tatler. And when the Mail on Sunday came out in favour of Remain, it attacked those who had most fervently pushed for Brexit as having peddled a “dangerous illusion”.

“So eager are they for a divorce that they are prepared to sacrifice a large chunk of our income, and trade down on living conditions, in order to walk out into a rose-tinted future of ‘freedom’,” said the Sunday paper’s editorial.

In his resignation statement on Wednesday, Paul Dacre thanked Lord Rothermere for giving him the freedom to edit without interference, but now that he is moving upstairs – to become “chairman and editor-in-chief of Associated Newspapers” – insiders suggest that the Mail’s owner is seizing the opportunity to smooth the paper’s harsher edges. Geordie Greig is the man for that job. With falling newspaper sales and a tighter advertising environment, the prospect of rationalising operations by shifting to a seven-day operation under one editor might also be an attractive prospect to Lord Rothermere’s accountants. But all of this gives Greig a tricky tightrope to walk from November – pleasing a pro-Brexit readership and an anti-Brexit proprietor, showing consistency of his own stance and respect for his constituency’s opinions. Could the Mail really soften on Brexit? Ask the question a different way: can Greig really leap from one side of this fight to the other?

Jacob Rees-Mogg MP told The Independent: “Paul Dacre has the remarkable ability of keeping his finger on the pulse of public opinion, and shows this in his support for Brexit.”

Another Tory put it to The Independent in blunter terms: “The Mail is Brexit’s attack dog. For some of its opponents it has been the agent of death. Look what happened to David Cameron.”

This hallmark of the outgoing editor has made him one of the most powerful and controversial in Fleet Street history, not to mention one of the most inescapable and feared forces in British politics. Many credit him with holding back the British left, fomenting fear of immigration and railroading Brexit through the UK political landscape.

It was the Daily Mail of Paul Dacre and its emphasis on anti-immigration stories in the run up to the referendum that helped that issue supersede the economy as the major theme, at a pivotal moment in the campaign.

In 2015 and early 2016 then-prime minister David Cameron had tried to renegotiate the UK’s relationship with the EU, and came back with an agreement allowing the UK to withhold benefits from European migrants – a deal the Mail derided as “The Great Delusion”. Getting personal, its editorial said Mr Cameron’s “capacity for self-delusion is breathtaking”.

The then-prime minister had “promised nothing less than a fundamental renegotiation of Britain’s relationship with Europe. How woefully that contrasts with the footling, pedantic and almost certainly ineffective reforms he now trumpets.”

One disputed story that emerged a year ago suggested that as that particular editorial was going to press Mr Cameron met the Mail’s owner, Lord Rothermere, and asked him to sack Dacre.

Rothermere, a resident of France and himself said to have been pro-EU, was a personal friend of Mr Cameron, but the appeal had no effect.

In the end, Dacre’s coverage helped nail the lid on the coffin of David Cameron’s deal, which became so toxic it was subsequently ignored by Remainers in the ensuing referendum campaign – even those in Downing Street promptly forgot it existed.

Since the referendum, the Mail has demanded Theresa May “Crush the Saboteurs” of Brexit and declared that judges who upheld a decision preventing her from unilaterally triggering Article 50 were “Enemies of The People”.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then Dacre would have taken heart at the Daily Telegraph’s decision to brand MPs who rebelled in one vote against the government as the “Brexit Mutineers”.

But now he will be handing the reigns to Greig at a crucial time in the Brexit saga he has so formidably shaped. While the final EU exit deal was meant to be agreed in October, that now looks increasingly unlikely, given that the UK’s cabinet is unable to agree what kind of future relations to have with Europe, and that all the options being discussed have already been rejected by Brussels anyway.

Talk is now of the negotiations extending into December and the new year, despite the Article 50 period, after which British membership ends, running out in March.

Sensing the shifting sands, a key ally of Angela Merkel and president of Germany’s Bundestag, Dr Wolfgang Schäuble, has said in the last 24 hours that the UK would likely be granted an extension of Article 50 if it asked for one.

The prime minister is already probably looking back wistfully on the Mail’s front pages, depicting her as an insurmountable political force. Today, even before Dacre is out of the door, the paper’s editorial said her administration looked “rudderless”.

As the new editor arrives, the Brexit thumbscrews will be tightening, the divisions in the Conservatives widening and political criticism reaching fever-pitch – pressure on Ms May inside her party and in the press is only likely to grow.

Her faithful spokeswoman said at this morning’s briefing: “The PM congratulates Paul Dacre on a long and distinguished career, in which he was a passionate defender of press freedom, held the feet of six different prime ministers to the fire and fought many great campaigns.”

Not to mention a longstanding backer of the prime minister. Like so many of the Brexiteers, Theresa May might miss Dacre when he’s gone.