three national morning newspapers, three national Sunday newspapers, two London evening papers, four provincial daily newspapers, and three provincial Sunday newspapers. To pay the death duties on Northcliffe's estate, Rothermere sold the Associated Press and the Times. Rothermere was the third richest man in Britain with a fortune in 1922 worth £780 million. One contemporary who knew him called him "a proud, gruff captain of industry" with a tendency to be rude. Rothermere had a fundamentally elitist conception of politics, believing that the natural leaders of Britain were upper class men like himself, and he strongly disapproved of the decision to grant women over the age of 30 the right to vote together with the end of the franchise requirements that disfranchised lower-class men. Feeling that British women and lower-class men were incapable of understanding the issues, Rothermere started to lose faith in democracy. Rothermere's views were best expressed in a Daily Mail leader (editorial) that denounced the democratic reforms of 1918 as a disaster for Britain where it was declared: "that quite a few people now posses the vote who ought never to have been given it". Rothemere was appalled by the rise of the Labour Party starting with the 1918 election as he complained that giving the entire British working class the right to vote had made it conceivable that a Labour government might be formed, a possibility that was inconceivable before 1918. Collin Brooks, the journalist whom Rothermere had appointed as his official biographer wrote: "His prevailing mood was politically one of the deepest pessimism and personally of almost uproarious social mirth. He was convinced that Britain had entered a phrase of decline, had lost her old militant virtues, and in her softness, was lusting after strange idols of pacifism, nationalistion, and everything which would sap self-reliance...His family had at one time all been nominal Liberals, but he among them was a temperamental Tory of the Johnsonian school". Rothermere had a strong streak of ennui, which led him to restlessly walk the streets of London every morning looking for something new or alternatively when he was bored with London to travel around the world. Likewise, he was a womaniser whose relationships with his numerous mistresses prior to meeting Princess Stephanie von Hohenlohe in 1927 were always very brief as Rothermere tended to lose interest in his current mistress almost as he soon as he took her to