Daily Mirror

The Daily Mirror was launched in London on Monday, November 2, 1903, by Alfred Harmsworth, later Lord Northcliffe, proprietor of the Daily Mail, as a newspaper for women, edited by Mary Howarth. Northcliffe said that no newspaper "was ever started with such a boom." The paper lost heavily; Hamilton Fyfe replaced Howarth as editor and the women on its staff were dismissed, a step Northcliffe likened to "drowning kittens."¹

Under Maxwell

In July 1984 Robert Maxwell bought Mirror Group Newspapers, publisher of the Daily Mirror and other titles including the Sunday Mirror, from Reed International for about 113 million pounds.² Its foreign editor for about fifteen years under Maxwell was Nicholas Davies, who had joined the group in the 1960s.³ In 1986 Oscar Guerrero offered the Sunday Mirror the story of the Israeli nuclear technician Mordecai Vanunu while The Sunday Times was still checking it; the Sunday Mirror instead published an attack on the story, and its news editor later said the line had "cost the Sunday Mirror a world-beating exclusive." Vanunu was lured from London to Rome, abducted and tried in Israel.⁴

Seymour Hersh's The Samson Option went on sale in Britain on October 20, 1991, alleging that Maxwell and Davies had links to Israeli intelligence and that Davies had taken part in Israeli arms sales. Under parliamentary privilege, George Galloway put down a motion stating that Davies was "a longstanding and highly-paid Israeli Intelligence asset" who had betrayed Vanunu's whereabouts to Mossad, and calling on Maxwell to establish "the extent of foreign intelligence penetration of Mirror Group newspapers"; Rupert Allason put down one stating that the Daily Mirror and its proprietor "have maintained a close relationship with the Israeli Intelligence Service" and that Davies had formed Ora Limited with Ari Ben-Menashe in 1983.⁵ The paper's front page said the two members had "as much honor as a pair of jackals scavenging in a rubbish heap."⁶ The Mirror dismissed Davies on October 28, 1991, for denying that he had been at the Ohio home of an arms dealer in 1985 after a rival paper printed a photograph of him there.³ Maxwell was found dead in the sea off his yacht near the Canary Islands on November 5, 1991.²

The paper's publisher is now a subsidiary of Reach plc, a company incorporated in 1904 as the Liverpool Daily Post, the Liverpool Mercury and the Liverpool Echo Limited, renamed Trinity Mirror plc on September 6, 1999, and Reach plc on May 3, 2018, with its registered office at One Canada Square, Canary Wharf.⁷

The Pension Funds

The pension schemes of the Maxwell companies, with more than 32,000 members, were pooled in a Common Investment Fund managed by Bishopsgate Investment Management, a Maxwell-controlled subsidiary, whose assets Maxwell pledged as collateral for loans to his private companies. Administrators and the Serious Fraud Office concluded that roughly 450 to 460 million pounds had been taken; Goldman Sachs, on Maxwell's instructions, had sold blocks of Mirror Group shares marked as pension-fund property.⁸ His sons Kevin Maxwell and Ian Maxwell were acquitted at the Old Bailey in January 1996.⁹ In August 1994 Mirror Group Newspapers apologized "unreservedly" in a London court for its articles of October 1991 about Hersh and agreed to pay him and his publisher, Faber and Faber, "substantial damages."¹⁰