The Daily Mail is not so uniquely British after all

I am thinking of starting up a free internet site called ‘Cancer and House Prices’.

I am thinking of starting up a free internet site called ‘Cancer and House Prices’. Every day, a new piece of information, which I will make up, about tumours and property values and perhaps how these two phenomena are unexpectedly linked. I will also run photographs of young people you have never heard of but who sing in The Saturdays or star in things like Hollyoaks — largely nubile women in thongs with large breasts and tattoos — and supply a paragraph or two about how they haven’t got cancer or that they are about to buy a house, or simply live in a house, and how much it is worth. I expect to clean up, with all the online advertising that comes my way.

The Mail Online is about to become the world’s most popular news site, a phenomenal achievement as well as being a comment on what precisely the world wants, rather than what decent-minded bien-pensant liberals assumed it wanted. Karl Marx foresaw a golden future for the working classes which involved, as I remember, working in the morning and reading Plato in the afternoon. Things have worked out differently; the working classes, or at least the lower middle classes, may indeed do a spot of work but they will not read Plato in the afternoons. They will read Peter Hitchens instead, and then some stuff about tumours, slebs and house prices.

The Daily Mail online version currently reaches about 70 million people, a substantial proportion of them in the USA. It is the second most popular news site in the world, after the New York Times. But its rise has been exponential and it is likely to claim the top spot some time this summer.