Backing Britain for 125 glorious years

MICHAEL Parkinson, later the legendary chat show host, was overawed at his first sight of the Daily Express's magnificent art-deco office in the heart of London. The year was 1959 and he had just been hired as a feature writer for "the most successful, glamorous organisation in Fleet Street". No British papers dazzled more brightly than the Express.

- By Leo McKinstry Historian and Daily Express Columnist

This Thursday marks the 125th anniversary of the Daily Express's foundation, a milestone that evokes both nostalgia and pride. Fleet Street has long vanished as the home of Britain's newspaper industry, along with great titles like the Morning Post and the News Chronicle, while the press itself is under relentless pressure from other media. Yet, amid all this change, the Express remains a powerful voice in our national life, resolute in defence of our interests and eager to build a better Britain.

This is nothing new. Throughout the 125 years of its existence, the Express has always been a tireless campaigner, as shown today in how we have set the agenda on the issue of assisted dying, Give Us Our Last Rights. The Express even shaped Britain's destiny as the first paper to advocate Britain's independence from Brussels and articulate the case for Brexit freedoms.

That sense of mission also inspired Lord Beaverbrook, the maverick Canadian whose volcanic energy during half a century of ownership pushed the Express to new heights of popularity and influence.

And on November 8, 1928, Beaverbrook launched the Scottish Daily Express and wrote that he had fulfilled "a dream that I have always carried in my heart, that as my father went out from Scotland to speak to the Canadians, I might return from Canada with a word for Scotland".

Edited, printed and published on Albion Street in Glasgow for many years, it has boasted the likes of Jack Campbell, Magnus Magnusson and John Junor among its editorial staff. Today, the Scottish edition is still going strong in print and online and looking forward to its centenary in a little under three and a half years. Often capricious, sometimes tyran-

Dramatic

nical, Beaverbrook was feared by many and loathed by some