"Mail views can be characterised thus: for Britain and against Europe; against welfare (and what it describes as welfare scroungers) and for standing on your own feet; more concerned with punishment than the causes of crime; against public ownership and for the private sector; against liberal values and for traditional values, particularly marriage and family life. It puts achievement above equality of opportunity and self-reliance above dependence.
The Mail celebrates achievement against the odds, particularly where no "state help" has been involved. It believes that too often the taxpayer is being taken for a ride and that bureaucrats are invading areas of private responsibility. A defining Mail story is of a single mother of 10 or 12 children (there is always a wide photograph), most of whom have different fathers, occupying two or three council houses knocked into one. This will be accompanied by a table computing the cost to the taxpayer of maintaining this "feckless" household.
There is of course more to the Mail success than its ideology. It was the first to realise how much newspapers could learn from magazines, particularly the technique of applying a current news story about a celebrity, a fashion or a fad to "ordinary" Mail readers. If Marks & Spencer re-invents itself, then ordinary Mail women are modelling their new range of clothes. If the debate is about whether mothers should go out to work or stay at home looking after the children, then the Mail will interview, at length, examples of both. It has the highest proportion of women readers of any national paper.
The Mail knows it knows its audience. This is often described as "middle England" and predominantly it votes Conservative. It is spread pretty evenly across the AB, C1 and C2 social grades. It may not be as young as some newspaper audiences, but then the country is getting older."
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