Andrew O'Hagan wrote in the "London Review of Books" in 2017 that Dacre's "worst effect" on the "Mail" "has been to let it seem mired in the things it hates, as if society's worst excesses were mostly an outgrowth of its own paranoid imagination". In his view, under its editor the paper is a "bubbling quagmire of prejudice posing as news, of opinion dressed as fact, and contempt posing as contempt for that portion of the world's population that doesn't live in Cheam". Polly Toynbee in 2004 commented "Read him out the first clause of the press code - the one that tells newspapers not to 'publish inaccurate, misleading or distorted material', and he replies with a straight face that the Mail obeys it".