Telegraphed Intentions

... or 'Their Masters' Voices': Daily Mail and Times columnists get stuck into the auction for the Daily Telegraph's zombie corpse.

Previous: The Free Speech Tsar's Red Top Palace
Evgeny Lebedev used the House of Lords like he uses the front page of the Evening Standard: To get extremely expensive cheap heat.

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In the battle for ownership of The Daily Telegraph, Sunday Telegraph, and The Spectator, columnists at other titles were always going to be deployed as weapons — and what a bunch of weapons they are. The arsenal of arseholes has been activated by a bid fronted by former CNN boss Jeff Zucker, backed by the UAE, and designed to pay off the Barclay family’s £1.5 billion debts and secure control of The Spectator and The Telegraph titles.

RedBird IMI, the Abu Dhabi-backed investment fund, said it will take control of the media properties after agreeing to settle the Barclay family’s loans, but sources within Lloyds, the banking group to which those debts are owed, say. the auction process — which began earlier this year — is continuing.

Two of the other players in that process — Daily Mail Group & Trust (DGMT) which is chasing the Telegraph titles and News Corp which wants The Spectator as a toy for its semi-detached chairman emeritus Murdoch — have used columnists at The Daily Mail and Times to attack the attempt by “the sheikhs” to take over the Telegraph.

Let’s start with Stephen Glover at the Mail, whose resemblance to one of the undead in a Romero flick makes him perfect for picking over the steaming viscera of a slowly dying newspaper group. He begins with nostalgia for a time when Britain produced its own hereditary media barons:

The Daily Telegraph has long had a special place in my heart. It was the first newspaper I worked for, as a green and inexperienced young journalist. I was lucky to get the job.

In 1978, when I arrived, the paper's editor was Bill Deedes. He was a former Tory MP and Cabinet minister who was famous for being the model for William Boot - another inexperienced journalist - in Evelyn Waugh's hilarious pre-War novel, Scoop.

The paper's proprietor was Michael Berry, Lord Hartwell, the second son of Lord Camrose, who had bought the Telegraph in 1928. Michael Berry was shy, reserved, hard-working and patriotic. I remember him above all as a man of rectitude.

He didn't spoil his editors or journalists, either. Occasionally, Bill Deedes could be spotted of an evening waiting in Fleet Street for a bus to take him to Waterloo Station, and back home to Kent.

A more honest assessment of Lord Hartwell would note that he was a catastrophe as a businessman and, after early circulation successes, presided over a paper that was soporific and simply out of step with the modern world. Peregrine Worsthorne, who edited The Sunday Telegraph, an expensive ‘innovation’ close to Hartwell’s heart that cost the company Brinks trucks full of cash, said:

[The Daily Telegraph] was a boring paper… it never shocked or upset readers with views they didn’t like. As it stood, the fact that was so much of it was unreadable worked in its favour… 

When a financial crisis hit in 1985, precipitated by the urgent need to invest in modern printing technology, Hartwell was outflanked by Conrad Black who started off with a £10 million investment in return for 14 per cent of the company but seized control nine months later. Once he had 51 per cent of the shares, Black installed his men in the top jobs and shoved Hartwell into the position of chairman, where he languished in a far less grand office for 18 months before being shuffled into retirement.

The Guardian’s obituary for Hartwell described him as the “last of Britain's real press barons,” which was kind and true in the sense that he was a gentleman amateur who could not cut it in the post-Murdoch world of corporate-raiding, union-busting, gimlet-eyed bastards. Black was 41 when he took the Telegraph titles from under Hartwell’s nose and, like Murdoch, was the nepo baby son of a colonial media baron. While his ownership of the Telegraph earned him a peerage, Lord Black of Crossharbour is also a convicted fraudster who only gained a pardon thanks to Donald Trump.

The Barclay Brothers were hardly more moral than Black and that’s worth keeping in mind as Glover writes, using the Mail’s patented Outrage of Nuneaton voice, that:

What would [Deedes or Hartwell] who had both served with distinction in the War, have said about the news that an investment fund largely backed by a member of the Abu Dhabi royal family is on the verge of acquiring the Telegraph, its Sunday sister, and The Spectator magazine? 

I don't know for sure but I’m willing to bet something racist followed swiftly by, “How much are they offering? And how much would I get?” Of course, Glover’s answer, ventriloquising his dead colleagues, is quite different:

Bill, who was one of nature's pessimists, would have likely seen it as further proof of the inexorable decline of Britain. Michael Berry would have been bewildered that his beloved newspaper is about to fall into the hands of a member of a foreign autocratic regime. 

Lord Rothermere, DMGT’s owner and Glover’s ultimate boss, is a non-dom for tax purposes — the primary purpose being to pay as little as possible — which is really following in the family tradition as his father spent decades living in Paris with the mistress who eventually became his second wife. Rupert Murdoch is an Australian with US citizenship acquired to beat foreign media ownership rules, but who’s continued to disproportionately influence politics and society through his UK holdings. And Lord Lebedev, the son of a ‘former’ KGB officer, sold a chunk of the Independent to Saudi Arabia and was elevated/dumped into the House of Lords by Boris Johnson as repayment for the slobbering support offered to him during his time as Mayor of London. Again think about that as Glover throws his hands in the air and exclaims like a 1940s B-movie dame in distress:

Much has changed in our country since I first stepped into Fleet Street, but even I am amazed that this should be taking place. How is it possible? Can it be stopped - as I've no doubt it would be in most European countries?

It’s possible because the fire sale of British companies to foreign owners has been a nice little wheeze for decades and that doesn’t stop just because these particular putative foreign owners are egregious, want something Glover actually values, and have a skin colour darker than a shade Farrow & Ball might describe as ‘sour milk’.

I don’t think individuals who aren’t British citizens should be allowed to have control of major media properties in the UK at all, but it’s curious that Glover finds his rectitude — something he normally couldn’t locate with both hands — when his master is trying to buy the paper in question. He also has to deal with the inconvenient fact that the fine and upstanding Lord Rothermere also recently scouted around for Arab cash:

In the event that the auction still takes place, the prospective bidders, I should emphasise, include Daily Mail and General Trust, owner of this newspaper. It is true that DMGT has had talks, already discontinued, with prospective minority investors in the Middle East. But it was never proposed that any such investors should have the slightest editorial influence over the Telegraph titles in the event of DMGT acquiring them.

Glover is right to detail the UAE’s hideous human rights record and significant history of threatening, censoring, jailing, and murdering journalists. His outrage starts to fray slightly when he writes this, however:

Could readers of the Daily Telegraph, were it to fall under the sway of Abu Dhabi, depend on balanced and measured coverage of developments that might blow a hole in Sheikh Mansour's finances? I don't believe so. Even the distant prospect of censorship is unconscionable.

The Mail, while railing against the finances of its enemies will attack their non-dom statuses and taste for complex webs of trusts and offshore entities, but you will never see a dickybird about the activities of its parent company nor its proprietor. There is constant censorship at work there; in Mail world, Rothermere is only ever a delightful philanthropist and the much-respected big boss. The very close and consistent censorship at the Mail is no unconscionable to Glover because it pays his wages; in fact, in an Emperor’s New Clothes style, he would argue himself hoarse that Rothermere has never once metaphorically exposed his arse.

Glover — sticking with the non-aggression pact between the newspaper proprietors — makes sure to mention Murdoch and Lebedev who he claims “[never profess] anti-democratic views” and “[champion] a free press”. The press in Britain is, in fact, very expensive and it is usually the public that pays the price.

In The Times, Juliet Samuel — herself a recent Telegraph alumna — plays the same game, pretending that the familiar British journalism refrain ‘no one tells me what to write’ is a fundamental truth rather than a comforting fairy story for hacks:

… I am well aware that The Telegraph has its detractors. I hear from them regularly. Remainers hate it for backing Brexit. Lefties hate it for backing Thatcherism. Covid authoritarians hate it for being the only media outlet to oppose lockdown (we should be glad there was one).

Of course, it’s true that the paper was never going to advocate turning Britain into a socialist’s idea of paradise, but newspapers are entitled to have views on the world and writers who share that worldview are entitled to work for them.

They can still foster pluralism and debate. During the seven years I worked there, I wrote sceptical pieces on Brexit, both favourable and unfavourable pieces on lockdown measures and hawkish pieces on China even while the paper had a commercial deal with China Daily. No one ever told me to shut up.

There’s a contradiction that we’re just meant to ignore: Samuel argues “newspapers are entitled to have views on the world and writers who share that worldview are entitled to work for them” while also trumpeting that in “seven years… no one ever told [her] to shut up”. The point is that no one needed to tell her to shut up. If she was ever going to propose ideas outside the Telegraph’s narrow and performative game of ‘debate’, she would not have been employed there in the first place. Having worked for drink-driving enthusiast Paul Staines at the Guido Fawkes blog and CityAm, Samuel was a known quantity for the Telegraph and gave them exactly what they wanted.

For anyone — like me, for my sins — who reads the Telegraph’s mosaic of madness, conspiratorial thinking, and spite on a daily basis, Samuel’s description of the paper is praise that defies parody:

I happen to believe that The Telegraph, with its more than 750,000 subscribers, is still a great British institution with a degree of influence over our civil society. And, like most of us, I am thoroughly fed up with this country letting precious and sensitive assets fall under the control of those who share none of our values and are often hostile to our interests.

“Precious and sensitive…” Are we talking about the same Daily Telegraph here? The one that employs Alastair Heath? Camilla Tominey? Allison Pearson?

Samuel continues: …

… I believe our public debate has an awful lot to lose, especially with public discourse fragmenting into a morass of unverified social media posts, and even those who hate what The Telegraph and Spectator stand for should agree.

Let’s review today’s comment pieces from the Telegraph to get a snapshot of its contribution to “public debate”:

MICHAEL DEACON
Gary Lineker is making an utter fool of himself over Israel

JILL KIRBY
The ‘sick’ are perfectly capable of working

MATTHEW LYNN
Mass migration has been an economic and political catastrophe

Wow, what a range of viewpoints that are in no way designed to respond to and provoke more social media discourse while feeding the dwindling readership’s desire to see others suffer.

Samuel’s final line is right:

There is no need for a British media fire sale and every reason to prevent it. 

So too is her demand that the government block the deal and do so in a way that is far more efficient and robust than its feckless enablement of the Saudi investment at the Independent. But her motivation is more than suspect, even as she acknowledges News UK’s interest in acquiring The Spectator, and the idea — shared with Glover — that the current selection of proprietors isn’t engaged in both subtle and blatant censorship is so clownish that she should slap on greasepaint to deliver it.

Extremely rich individuals buy newspapers not to make money or build a sustainable business but as tools of influence and a megaphone for their worldview. Presenting The Telegraph et al as a means of presenting truth is just so much media marketing.

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