If Dean Baquet were suddenly shoved out as editor of The New York Times, or Jeff Zucker were ousted from his perch at CNN, it would be a 7.0-magnitude earthquake on the Richter scale of American media. That’s the kind of shockwave rippling through Great Britain right now with the news that Geordie Greig will “step down” as editor of the Daily Mail, arguably the most powerful job in U.K. media. Except in Greig’s case it’s more like a 9.0-magnitude earthquake, considering how much influence the Mail wields in British politics. In the words of one U.K. media figure I spoke with, “Everybody’s very surprised. No one saw it coming.” That apparently includes Greig himself. Sources said he didn’t know he was being shown the door until “very recently”—I’m told he was made aware of the shake-up just over 24 hours before a press release was distributed early Wednesday evening (London time) by the P.R. power firm Teneo, which represents the Mail’s parent company, Daily Mail and General Trust. (A spokesperson for the Daily Mail declined to comment beyond its official announcement.)
Greig, who is to be replaced by Mail on Sunday editor Ted Verity, had only been at the helm since 2018, when he succeeded Paul Dacre in the role. (Just a few weeks ago, Dacre himself exited his role as chairman and editor in chief of the DMGT subsidiary Associated Newspapers.) Greig’s tenure got off to a rocky start, with some comments he made in a 2019 Financial Times interview leading to a very public row with Dacre. The following month there were reports of tensions with executives at MailOnline, the massively successful digital operation in the U.K., U.S., and Australia. In a 2020 profile in the British edition of GQ, Greig, an Eton- and Oxford-educated Fleet Street veteran with literary sensibilities, said, “My aim is to make the Mail a force for good.” That same year the Mail overtook Rupert Murdoch’s Sun as Britain’s best-selling newspaper.
Alas, it seems that wasn’t enough for DMGT’s chairman, Lord Rothermere, to keep Greig in the job. “I am grateful to Lord Rothermere for 10 extraordinary years as editor of his newspapers,” Greig said in a parting statement. “I wish my successor, Ted Verity, good luck, and also continued good fortune to the Mail. I look forward to new opportunities ahead and will bring the best of what I learnt from my years at the Mail, on which I first joined in 1983 as its most junior reporter on the graveyard shift.”
What’s behind the change? Sources agreed that it looks like Rothermere, DMGT’s largest shareholder and a member of the family that has lorded over the Mail for more than a hundred years, is cleaning up shop before taking the company private. There were some other executive changes announced a day earlier on the business side, although not quite as seismic. A source familiar with the inner workings of DMGT said Rothermere had installed the people who he believes will “position the company for the greatest success. Ted Verity is the person Lord Rothermere wants overseeing the newspapers going forward.” (The Guardian, meanwhile, questioned if Greig’s ouster “could change the recently hostile relationship between the right-wing newspaper and Downing Street,” citing critical coverage of conservative prime minister Boris Johnson.)
Verity, who now consolidates editorship of both The Mail on Sunday and the Mail’s weekday paper, is a longtime company man who previously had stints as royal correspondent, editor of the Mail’s Irish edition, and deputy editor of the flagship. “Ted Verity is very well respected,” someone at a competing news organization told me. One of my sources put it like this: “He’s known for producing a paper that Britons want to wake up and buy on a Sunday morning. If you’re having coffee in Middle England on a Sunday morning, you are reading The Mail on Sunday.”
— In Major Shift, NIH Admits Funding Risky Virus Research in Wuhan
— Matt Gaetz Reportedly Screwed Six Ways From Sunday
— Joe Biden Reaffirms Trump’s Has-Been Status Over Jan. 6 Documents
— The Metaverse Is About to Change Everything
— The Weirdness of Wayne LaPierre, the NRA’s Reluctant Leader
— The Jan. 6 Committee Is Finally Getting Trump Allies to Spill
— Jeffrey Epstein’s Billionaire Friend Leon Black Is Under Investigation
— Facebook’s Reckoning With Reality—And the Metaverse-Size Problems to Come
— From the Archive: Robert Durst, the Fugitive Heir
— Not a subscriber? Join Vanity Fair to receive full access to VF.com and the complete online archive now.