Daily Express

• 1. Introduction

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  The Daily Express first hit newsstands on the 24th of April 1900, and within decades it had become the most widely read newspaper in the world. At its peak under a single proprietor, it sold four million copies a day in the 1940s. That number has since collapsed to a fraction of its former height. But the paper's influence over British public life, its political campaigns, its legal battles, and its controversies have shaped the press landscape in ways that long outlasted its circulation records.

  How did a London broadsheet become a global sales leader, only to spend the following half-century in near-continuous decline? Who built that circulation machine, and what did they use it for? And why did a newspaper once described by the Duke of Edinburgh as "a bloody awful newspaper" full of "lies, scandal and imagination" remain one of Britain's most recognisable mastheads more than a century after its founding?

• 2. Pearson, Aitken, and the Early Innovations

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  Sir Arthur Pearson founded the paper in 1900 at a moment when British newspapers still led with advertisements on their front pages. The Express broke from that convention early, putting news front and centre instead. It also added gossip, sport, and features aimed at women readers, carving out territory other papers had ignored.

  Pearson lost his sight to glaucoma in 1913 and sold the title in 1916 to Max Aitken, a Canadian-born Member of Parliament representing Ashton-under-Lyne. Aitken had already been knighted in 1911, and in 1916 he became a peer, taking the title Lord Beaverbrook. He would go on to define the paper's character for the next half-century.

  Beaverbrook moved quickly to expand the brand. He launched the Sunday Express in 1919 as a companion title. The Daily Express introduced Britain's first newspaper crossword puzzle in 1924, while the Sunday Express became the first Sunday paper to include one as well. These were not minor features; they turned daily newspaper reading into a kind of ritual for readers.

  Production expanded beyond London in 1927, with presses opening in Manchester and Glasgow. The paper's headquarters shifted in 1931 to the specially commissioned Art Deco building at 120 Fleet Street, a statement of ambition in glass and black Vitrolite.

• 3. The Beaverbrook Machine

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  Arthur Christiansen became editor in October 1933, and under his direction the paper's daily sales climbed from two million in 1936 to four million in 1949. He retired in 1957. That growth did not happen quietly; it was driven by an aggressive circulation war with rival popular papers that reshaped how British tabloid journalism operated.

  Beaverbrook told a Royal Commission on the press in 1948 that he ran his papers "purely for the purpose of making propaganda." He made no apologies for it. The paper had already demonstrated that editorial stance most vividly on the 7th of August 1939, when its front page carried the headline "NO WAR THIS YEAR." Less than a month later, Britain and France declared war on Germany following the invasion of Poland. That front page, later photographed floating in dirty water, appeared in the 1942 film In Which We Serve.

  The paper had spent the late 1930s actively supporting Neville Chamberlain's appeasement policy, a stance Beaverbrook backed. During those same years, on the 24th of March 1933, the Express had run the front-page headline "Judea Declares War on Germany," referring to the Anti-Nazi boycott of that year.

  The paper's popular culture contributions ran alongside its political projects. Alfred Bestall's Rupert Bear cartoon appeared in its pages, as did the satirical cartoons of Carl Giles, both beginning in the 1940s. The ruralist and fascist author Henry Williamson also wrote for the paper over a span of half a century.

• 4. The Adams Affair

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  John Bodkin Adams was arrested in 1956, suspected of murdering up to 400 wealthy patients in Eastbourne. Nearly every major paper at the time, egged on by leaks from the police, declared Adams guilty in print.

  The exception was the Daily Express. Percy Hoskins, the paper's chief crime reporter, was adamant that Adams was a naive doctor being prosecuted by an overzealous detective named Herbert Hannam, whom Hoskins had clashed with on earlier cases. Lord Beaverbrook himself questioned why Hoskins was defending someone most of Fleet Street had already convicted.

  Adams was cleared in 1957 of the murder of Edith Alice Morrell, with a second count withdrawn. After the verdict, Beaverbrook phoned Hoskins and said: "Two people were acquitted today." Hoskins then secured an exclusive interview with Adams, conducted at a safe house away from the rest of the press. Archives released in 2003 indicated that police believed Adams had actually killed 163 patients, a figure that lent the acquittal a distinctly uneasy complexity.

• 5. Decline, Sales, and the Desmond Years

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  Beaverbrook died in 1964, and the circulation he had built began to fall almost immediately. Daily sales dropped below four million in 1967, below three million in 1975, and below two million in 1984. The rise of the Daily Mail under David English, and of The Sun under Rupert Murdoch and editor Larry Lamb, absorbed much of the readership the Express had held.

  In 1977 the paper converted from broadsheet to tabloid format, six years after the Mail had made the same switch. In the same year, the construction company Trafalgar House bought the paper. A 1982 spin-off created Fleet Holdings under Lord Matthews, but in 1985 United Newspapers mounted a hostile takeover and absorbed it.

  In 2000, Richard Desmond, publisher of the celebrity magazine OK!, bought Express Newspapers for £125 million. Controversy immediately surrounded the deal because Desmond also owned softcore pornography magazines. Editor Rosie Boycott and columnist Peter Hitchens left; Hitchens moved to The Mail on Sunday, calling the new ownership a moral conflict of interest.

  Under Desmond, the paper's legal exposure mounted. Between 2008 and 2009, Express Newspapers paid £1,570,000 in libel damages across several cases, covering a member of the Muslim Council of Britain, footballer Marco Materazzi, sports agent Willie McKay, and parties involved in the Madeleine McCann disappearance. Media commentator Roy Greenslade concluded that Express Newspapers paid more in libel damages over that period than any other newspaper group in the country.

  In late 2008 the company began cutting 80 jobs to reduce costs by £2.5 million, and in late August 2009 announced plans for a further 70 redundancies across the group's titles. By December 2016, the Daily Mail's gross daily sales were 1,491,264; the Daily Express had fallen to 391,626.

• 6. Madeleine McCann and Libel on the Front Page

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  From the 3rd of August 2007 to the 10th of November 2007, the Daily Express dedicated at least part of the next 100 consecutive front pages to the disappearance of Madeleine McCann. Of those 100 pages, 82 featured the story as the lead headline, often using the word "MADELEINE" in red block capitals above a photograph of the child.

  The McCanns' family acknowledged early on that some journalists may have overstepped. But after more than 100 stories across the Express, the Sunday Express, the Daily Star, and the Daily Star Sunday accused Kate and Gerry McCann of causing and covering up their daughter's death, the family launched a libel suit in March 2008.

  On the 19th of March 2008, all four newspapers ran a front-page apology. The Sunday editions followed on the 23rd of March, and a further statement was read at the High Court. The newspapers also agreed to pay damages, which the McCanns said they would direct toward the search for their daughter. Media commentator Roy Greenslade called the front-page apology "unprecedented" for four major papers acting simultaneously, while describing the original coverage as "a substantial libel" that shamed the British press.

  In October 2008, the Express also apologised and paid damages to the group who had become known as the "Tapas Seven" in connection with the same case.

• 7. Political Allegiance and Crusades

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  With two exceptions since the Second World War, the Daily Express has endorsed the Conservative Party at every general election. In 2001 it backed the Labour Party, and in 2015 it backed the UK Independence Party, becoming one of the first media outlets in the UK to publicly demand withdrawal from the European Union. UKIP leader Nigel Farage signed the paper's "Crusade for Freedom" petition and urged others to do the same.

  The "Crusade for Freedom" had launched on the 8th of January 2011, with cut-out vouchers in each copy of that day's edition. Readers could sign the pledge and send it to the paper's headquarters, where the petition was being compiled. The first week brought around 370,000 signatures, representing just over half the paper's daily readership. Ian Botham and J D Wetherspoon chairman Tim Martin both gave interviews for the campaign's special launch edition.

  In 2013, the paper ran a front-page declaration: "Britain is full and fed up. Today join your Daily Express Crusade to stop new flood of Romanian and Bulgarian migrants." Aberystwyth University's Student Union banned the paper from sale in response, though a student vote overturned the ban in March 2016. Romanian politician Catalin Ivan publicly expressed outrage at the campaign.

  In April 2018, new editor Gary Jones appeared before Parliament's Home Affairs Select Committee and said he had found past pages of the Express "downright offensive" and that they had contributed to an "Islamophobic sentiment" in the media. He said he would work to change the paper's tone.

• 8. The Reach Era and What Remains

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  In February 2018, Trinity Mirror bought the Daily Express and other Northern and Shell publishing assets from Desmond for £126.7 million. To mark the acquisition, Trinity Mirror renamed itself Reach plc. Hugh Whittow, who had edited the paper since February 2011, resigned, and Gary Jones took over as editor-in-chief.

  By June 2022, average daily circulation stood at 201,608, a figure barely comparable to the four million copies the paper once sold each day. The Sunday Express had 93,754 readers as of September 2025.

  In 2023, Reach launched a US version of the title, called the-express.com, operating out of New York City. In November 2025, the Express offered compensation to two freelancers after being accused of plagiarising their work. The current editor as of September 2025 is Geoff Maynard, who took over that month from Tom Hunt.