Auctioning a haunted house.

Who the hell would want to own the Telegraph or Spectator? These ghouls...

Previously: The Pratfall in the Big Hall
On the Aaronovitch vs. Goodwin 'elite' debate: Professional wrestling for the preternaturally boring.

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By means of an artificial system of hidden piping all the lavatories of London empty their physical filth into the Thames. In the same way, the world capital daily spews all its filth through a system of goose quills into one big central paper sewer — the Daily Telegraph. 

— Karl Marx, Herr Vogt (1860)

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In 2016, when the Barclay brothers were touting the Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph around for sale, Amol Rajan — then in possession of just one BBC job as its Media Editor — wrote in a slobbering piece about the papers:

… the Telegraph remains an ornament to Britain and one of the world's great titles.

… At its best, the daily and Sunday papers channel the kind of sceptical conservatism that speaks to and for a patriotic and provincial England.

That was twelve years into the Barclays’ reign, which placed the Telegraph Media Group and The Spectator under the not-at-all-sinisterly named parent company, Press Holdings Ltd. Even at that point, Rajan’s analysis was marshmallow-soft; the Telegraph was not an ornament but an eyesore, and as far from being “one of the world’s great titles” as Eddie ‘The Eagle’ Edwards was from Winter Olympic gold.

The Telegraph titles are profitable but that doesn’t mean they are ‘great’ papers. There are some good writers in their pages but they are vastly outnumbered by plastic provocateurs, posers, and parasites. What was once a tweedy outlet for bumptious Home Counties retirees and Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells types is a permanently angry alt-right fanzine that fills its pages with confected Culture War tales and often jaw-dropping crash and callous commentary.

So why are The Daily Telegraph, Sunday Telegraph and Spectator subject to so much interest now that Lloyds has prised them from the bony hands of the not-yet-dead Barclay brother and put them up for auction?

While the Telegraph titles are no ornament, they will be a sparkly bauble for any buyer, and one that will still catch the eye of broadcasters and the leadership/membership of the Conservative Party. Buying the Telegraph is buying a very expensive megaphone and a level of influence that, thanks to its history, is much higher than its readership.

Beyond that, each potential buyer has a slightly different motivation. Some have made their thoughts public, others are keeping their cards close to their chest.

News UK is in the running but I suspect it won’t try to acquire the Telegraph/Sunday Telegraph — too much crossover with The Times/Sunday Times and potential for issues with the Competition and Markets Authority — preferring to pick up The Spectator (and its summer party) instead. A Spectator source told The Guardian’s Jim Waterson last month that:

People still think Murdoch is the frontrunner and can outbid everyone else. He’s got so much cash, it’s a trophy prize he’s always wanted. You can see it like the end of his career.

As Waterson notes, if The Spectator does become part of News UK’s dysfunctional family, its current chairman, former Sunday Times editor Andrew Neil is sure to get the boot, given “the historic falling out between the two men”.

The Spectator would fit at the pseudo-cerebral end of News’ holdings alongside the Times Literary Supplement and Times Radio (I did say, “pseudo-cerebral”) as well as providing a new source of columnists and presenters. One possible grim future could see Fraser Nelson, the current Spectator editor, shift from Telegraph columnist to Times columnist to Times editor. Such a master of the art of arse kissing could surely work his ‘magic’ on a Murdoch, be that Rupert or Lachlan.

Lord Rothermere, who has increased his power and influence over the family firm since he took Daily Mail & General Trust private two years ago, wants the Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph and the company has explained why to Vanity Fair:

The Rothermere family has a unique record as a custodian of newspapers, and since Lord Rothermere took DMGT private, its focus as a consumer news business puts it in an ideal position to provide the resources, management expertise and long-term decisions the Telegraph needs for its journalism to thrive. 

The Telegraph’s success in building a subscription model will help us reinforce the strength of our existing business. We must stress that editorially the Telegraph will remain independent of our other titles, and we will take steps to ensure this. We do believe there is a strong potential to scale the Telegraph abroad, particularly in the US, just as we have very successfully done with the Mail. 

We believe there is enormous potential in the US, which sadly has become polarised between the left and the right, both in print and in broadcasting, for a centre-right news publication like the Telegraph. The current political polarisation is not healthy for America or the world, and we are convinced there will be a strong market for an alternative that offers an intelligent and accessible conservative viewpoint. The cost efficiencies a successful bid would create across all our titles will help fund this expansion.

DMGT clearly believes it can sell the Telegraph in the US as a kind of Dowton Abbey-does-daily-news product. I suspect it would ramp up the Telegraph’s already full-on coverage of the Royal Family and its right-wing mouth-frothing, differentiating it from the Sidebar-of-Shame powered success of MailOnline by allowing its journalists to continue to use multisyllabic words.

The idea that DMGT — whose editors are past masters of polarisation (ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE, anyone?) — would offer an alternative to division in the US is absolutely laughable. It’s also a deliberately false analysis of the US print market, where the kind of clear political positioning present among UK papers just isn’t there.

One way DMGT could shake off potential CMA issues would be to offload the i paper or Metro from its current stable and argue that the Telegraph — the one stubbornly remaining broadsheet format paper — has a clearly different audience from the mid-market tabloid audience of the Mail titles.

The interest from the German publishing giant Axel Springer — best known in the UK for its ownership of Politico — seems speculative. While the Telegraph has seen the kind of digital growth that would appeal to Axel Springer boss Mathias Döpfner, who lost out on the Financial Times in 2015, I don’t think it wants to deal with the slow decline of the print product. A loose-lipped Axel Springer source told Vanity Fair that, for now, “[the company] just wants to be part of the process, look at the numbers and make a viable valuation”. A very German way of going about things.

Will Lewis — now Sir Will Lewis — who was editor of the Telegraph at the time of its MPs’ expenses smash scoop (which actually came down to ponying up some cash for a CD-ROM), is leading another bid.

Lewis is not popular in some corners of the British press having served as News UK’s in-house witchfinder general as the Murdochs tried to staunch the blood loss from the phone hacking crisis, and has largely been in the US since as CEO of Dow Jones and publisher of the Wall Street Journal between 2014 and 2020. In 2021, he co-founded The News Movement, a dubious youth-audience-chasing operation, with former BBC journalist and executive Kamal Ahmed.

It’s not clear where the financing for the Lewis-led bid is coming from but several of the consortiums are said to be seeking backing from Middle Eastern money. That’s another fact that should but probably won’t lead to CMA intervention.

David Montgomery and National World are also in the running. The company owns The Scotsman — which was once a Barclays property — the Yorkshire Post (which increasingly positions itself as a sort of national publication) and The News Letter in Belfast as well as more than 100 other newspapers and websites in the UK. The Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph could fit into that stable but it’s not clear whether National World can afford them if the hedge funders and foreign wealth funds in the running push up the price.

For that reason, I think the most likely winners with be the terrible tag team formed by hedge-fund boss and UnHerd / GB News sugar daddy Sir Paul Marshall and his fellow hedge-funder (and Republican Party cash hose) Ken Griffin. A spokesperson told The Observer that Marshall and pals want to “revitalise” the Telegraph’s “traditionally Tory brands”. The acquisition of the papers — and not The Spectator, which apparently denied him entry to its garden party this summer — makes sense as part of the formation of a kind of instant empire:

UnHerd already does for Marshall what The Spectator wants to be — a voice of the right and far-right while pretending to be merely “heterodox” — and GB News has a number of presenters who are current or former Telegraph editors/columnists. By acquiring the Telegraph titles, Marshall would increase the influence of his other outlets and have ample opportunities for cross-promotion.

Seeking an expert in the thinking of media sociopaths, Vanity Fair wisely turned to former Sun editor and howling blackhole of immorality Kelvin Mackenzie:

Upscale heritage brands have been successful around the world, and they’re the only ones who’ve really made the transition to digital while many of the startups have turned out to be commercial disasters. 

If you look around, The Financial Times, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Times, they’ve all been successful. So The Telegraph is viewed as an opportunity to be in the digital age with a heritage brand that has unfulfilled potential. 

The bet is that they can turn this into a successful subscription-based product. And also, these big heritage brands give you a calling card at the top table, certainly in the UK.

Crack out the ‘Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know Just Made A Great Point’ meme. The Telegraph is the media equivalent of an abandoned wasp’s nest; waiting to be occupied by another swarm. I’d say Marshall could remake it in his own image but its distorted, screaming visage already resembles the face he’s shown the world through UnHerd and GB News.

Goldman Sach is running the Telegraph and Spectator auctions. They kicked off last Friday — October 20th — with 20 potential bidders in the running. Most are likely to drop out quickly (either because of regulatory roadblocks or simply because they cannot make the financing work) and the process is expected to end in February.

I’m not a betting man — this business doesn’t produce enough excess cash for that — but if I found £20 in the street, I’d stick it on the malevolent Marshall plan. He wants it more than the analytical Germans or the wonkish Will Lewis and has none of the regulatory issues that DGMT or National World might have to manoeuvre through. Crucially, he can get his hands on the cash to do it.

It might be worrying if the Telegraph weren’t already unhinged beyond all hope of recovery. Having the paper go from the plaything of one reclusive multi-millionaire monster to another is almost unworthy of a shrug. The best we can hope for is that the inevitable meltdown is entertaining.

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