by Brian CathcartThe editor of the Daily Mail, who is the worst offender by miles against his industry’s code of conduct, has just had himself reappointed as chair of the committee in charge of that code. So he both writes the rules and routinely violates them.Most people would say that takes a brass neck, and of course it’s only the latest evidence that he has such a neck. But Paul Dacre is not secretly congratulating himself, because he doesn’t see things that way.In his own eyes Dacre is a victim. The world is against him, against his paper and against the newspaper industry in general. He wages a daily struggle to draw attention to the cruelty he suffers as he banks his £1.9m salary, and to expose the wickedness of his many persecutors.Take today. A leading article in the Mail rails: ‘Why £2bn fines won’t trouble the bankers’. Such sanctions, the paper says, will make no difference because bank bosses ‘have come to accept penalties of hundreds of millions of pounds as an unavoidable occupational hazard – a cost to be built into the accounts rather than a spur to clean up their act’.All very wrong, no doubt, and a perfectly normal target for newspaper anger, Except that for Dacre it’s not enough to be cross with bankers. It’s got to be about him, and about the industry he apparently carries the burden of leading. So he goes on:‘Now compare the kid-glove treatment of bankers with the ruthless justice meted out to red-top journalists whose “crime” was eavesdropping on celebrities’ voicemail. Yes, utterly wrong – but footling beside the bankers’ iniquités.’Because Dacre’s sense of victimhood clearly gives him no rest, readers of the Mail are subjected to paranoid, hypocritical nonsense like this almost every day. The whole world appears to him through the prism of his own persecution.And nonsense it is – shameless and often revolting nonsense. Take the suggestion that phone hacking was a ‘footling’ offence against celebrities: in writing that, Dacre makes light of the hacking of missing 13-year-old Milly Dowler’s phone, brushes off the systematic hounding of Charlotte Church and Sienna Miller, dismisses the hacking of phones of bereaved families and people in witness protection, and shrugs off sustained eavesdropping on successive Home Secretaries, with all the associated national security implications.(When it suited him Dacre took a different line on this ‘footling’ offence, declaring: ‘Such practices are a disgrace and have shocked and shamed us all.’ But that was three years ago; his shock and shame have worn off.)Hypocritical too. Take, for example, Dacre’s point about bank bosses who treat fines as ‘a cost to be built into the accounts rather than a spur to clean up their act’.This comes from a newspaper with a shocking record of losing libel cases, paying damages and swiftly going on to libel someone else in the same way. The Mail libelled Robert Murat in the Madeleine McCann case and was caught and punished for it in the courts. That didn’t stop it then libelling the McCanns themselves, getting caught and paying up again (albeit in a private settlement).And did those experiences act as a spur to clean up the Mail’s act? Not at all. It went on and libelled Christopher Jefferies in a very similar way. And the Mail’s outrageous libels do not stop. Look at the cases of Baylissa Frederick and Andy Miller – the latter costing the Mail around £3m.One thing couldn’t be clearer. If damages and costs alone were the answer, the Mail would have cleaned up its libel act long ago. As it is, they’re water off a duck’s back. So look out for the next scandal. It will be along any time now.And when it does come along, we may be sure that, somehow, Paul Dacre will claim that the real victim is Paul Dacre.