The Express has been backing Britain for 125 years... and we're not planning to stop

Michael Parkinson, later the legendary chat show host, was overawed at his first sight of the Daily Express's magnificent art deco office in the heart of London. The year was 1959 and he had just been hired as a feature writer for "the most successful, glamorous organisation in Fleet Street". No British papers dazzled more brightly than the Express titles, with daily sales of more than four million.

Thursday marks the 125th anniversary of the Daily Express's foundation, a milestone that evokes both nostalgia and pride. Fleet Street has long vanished as the home of Britain's newspaper industry, along with great titles like the Morning Post and the News Chronicle, while the press itself is under relentless pressure from other forms of media.

Yet, amid all this change, the Express remains a powerful voice in our national life, resolute in defence of our country's interests and eager to build a better Britain. This is nothing new. Throughout the 125 years of its existence, the Express has always been a tireless campaigner, as shown today in how we have set the agenda on the issue of assisted dying, Give Us Our Last Rights.

The Express has even shaped Britain's destiny, playing a central role in Brexit as the first paper to advocate Britain's independence from Brussels and articulating the case for freedom throughout the Referendum campaign. That sense of mission also inspired Lord Beaverbrook, the dynamic, maverick Canadian whose volcanic energy during half-a-century of ownership pushed the Express to new heights of popularity and influence.

Often capricious, sometimes tyrannical, Beaverbrook was feared by many and loathed by some. Clement Attlee, who served with him in Winston Churchill's wartime coalition, said he was "the only evil man I ever met," while his own granddaughter Lady Jean Campbell felt that "wherever he went, he was like a monsoon. He brought chaos, disorder and life".

His explosive gift for controversy was matched by his passion as a campaigner, most notably in his crusade for tariff reform. His Empire Free Trade initiative led to the adoption in 1929 of the Express's famous logo of a crusader in a chainmail uniform with his sword drawn. The cause of Empire Free Trade faded in the 1930s, but the logo has lasted to this day, a potent symbol of the paper's battling determination.

The paper's founder, Sir Arthur Pearson, had something of the same driven character. The son of a West Country parson, he had started in journalism on the magazine Titbits, but, disgruntled at his low salary, launched his own publication in 1890, called Pearson's Weekly. It was such a success, the first edition selling a quarter of a million copies, that in 1900 he established the Express as a patriotic, pro-Empire national daily.

One high-profile, early coup for the paper was the recruitment of the great Rudyard Kipling to provide "thrilling and dramatic" military stories. The paper was also the first in Britain to put news on its front page rather than adverts, and to provide sports coverage and features aimed at women.

But even with these innovations, the fledgling Express struggled. Circulation stagnated, and losses mounted. Pearson's problems were compounded by his tragically failing eyesight due to glaucoma, which surgery did nothing to arrest. By 1914, aged just 48, he was fully blind and forced to give up his business interests. There was, however, no self-pity about him. He devoted himself to charitable work for the visually impaired and created the St Dunstan's Trust, now Blind Veterans UK. Pearson died in 1921 when he slipped on a bar of soap in the bath, cut his head open and drowned.

By then, the reign of Lord Beaverbrook was transforming the Express's fortunes. He had acquired full control of the paper in 1916 and in keeping with his ambitions, everything about it grew bigger, including its advertising revenues, workforce, circulation and number of pages. In 1918, he launched the Sunday edition and later the Express became the first British paper to carry a horoscope.

New offices were opened in Manchester and Glasgow. A vast army of foreign correspondents was recruited, among them Sefton Delmer, whose gift for languages and grasp of Teutonic culture gave him a unique understanding of the Nazis' rise. Literary giants and popular novelists like H.G.Wells and Barbara Cartland were hired as writers.

Ground-breaking new columns were started, like the much-loved cartoon Rupert Bear in 1920, the whimsical Beachcomber in 1924, and the William Hickey diary column in 1933, edited by the flamboyant Tom Driberg, whose three passions in life were High Church Anglicanism, ideological socialism and promiscuous homosexuality.

Within less than a decade of Beaverbrook taking charge, the Express had turned a profit for the first time. In 1928 the quality of the Sunday edition improved when the tough Scotsman John Gordon became the editor in place of the poetically-minded James Douglas whose gloomy, emotive intensity had brought him the nickname "Fleet Street's sob-sister".

An even more important change followed at the top of the Daily Express when Arthur Christiansen became editor at the age of just 29. A native of Wallasey on Merseyside, he had made his name in the Liverpool press before he joined the Beaverbrook empire. What really transformed his reputation was his magisterial coverage of the R101 disaster near Paris in 1930, when 48 people were killed as the giant airship turned into a fireball.

Christiansen, then assistant editor, had been at home asleep when the news reached him of the crash. Immediately recognising the importance of the story, he rushed back to the Express offices by taxi in his pyjamas. Despite his unorthodox garb, he took command of the vast logistical exercise, producing four successive special editions packed with gripping content.

His reward was the editorship when the incumbent Beverley Baxter left in 1933 to work in public relations. Holding the position for the next 24 years, Christiansen came to be regarded as the greatest editor in Fleet Street's history. He revolutionised journalism by insisting that stories should be told through people and that layout could be as important as content. He was the man "who made type dance," to quote one of his reporters.

From his writers, he sought clarity, inquisitiveness and originality, qualities he found in two of his star wartime correspondents: Alan Moorehead, who won almost universal praise for his reporting on the campaigns in North Africa and North-West Europe; and Clare Hollinworth, whose front-line bulletins showed a deep grasp of military strategy and technology. Beaverbrook served Britain in another way, as Churchill's political. He was particularly effective as Minister of Aircraft Production in 1940, using the same dynamism to boost the output of fighters as he had done with the Express's circulation.

After the war, the Express went from strength to strength. "He raised the newspaper to a pitch of liveliness that was the despair of competitors," said Beaverbrook of his editor Arthur Christiansen. Other fine journalists were recruited such as Chapman Pincher, who became defence correspondent in 1946.

His skill at digging out secrets prompted the Prime Minister Harold Macmillan to complain in 1959: "I do not understand how the Express alone of all the newspapers has got the exact decisions we reached at Cabinet."

Equally revered was the crime reporter Percy Hoskins, who bore resemblance to the Hollywood film director Alfred Hitchcock and who never felt bound by conventional wisdom, as when he predicted in 1957 that the notorious Eastbourne doctor, John Bodkin Adams, would be acquitted on several charges of killing his female patients.

His opinion was dismissed by the rest of the press but he was correct. "Two people were acquitted today," the press baron told him after the verdict. It was Christiansen who was forced out that year, having fallen from favour with the mercurial Beaverbrook. Shattered by this callous disloyalty, Christiansen died in 1963.

Within a year Beaverbrook was also gone. His son Max Aitken, a decorated war hero, took over the company. But he was never at ease with this responsibility and, in 1977, sold it to the Trafalgar House conglomerate. Ownership then passed through two other media firms before Reach, today one of the country's largest press concerns, gained the crown in 2018.

Predictably, Christiansen proved an impossible act to follow.

His successor, Ted Pickering, only lasted four years and after he left in 1962 there were 14 different editors in the remaining years of the 20th century. The revolving carousel did not stop great writers from working for the paper such as Jean Rook, known as the First Lady of Fleet Street, the suave but intrepid reporter Ross Benson and the best-selling novelist Frederick Forsyth.

There was more stability at the Sunday Express, where another tough Scotsman, John Junor, was in charge for 22 years from 1954. Irascible and opinionated, he could provoke hostility or loyalty in equal measure. He was, incidentally, the last "stranger" (ie non-MP) to be called to the Bar of the Commons for showing "contempt for Parliament" after he published an article highlighting the abuse of petrol allowances by MPs.

Although he was reprimanded, the story did him no harm. In its colour and rage at wrong-doing, his exposure was in the finest traditions of the Express' quest for justice which is as strong today as ever.

The great historian AJP Taylor once wrote that "the Daily Express was a paper for everyone from the moment Beaverbrook got hold of it". But those words could also apply to the paper's appeal today.