If the deal goes ahead, the Daily Mail General Trust (DMGT) will dominate the British newspaper market.
The decline of the newspaper market since the 1990s has opened space for the last-standing media dynasty to claim this prize.
Jonathan Harmsworth, a.k.a. Lord Rothermere, will be the most powerful press baron in the United Kingdom. And the old British press aristocracy will win a victory over nouveau riche ownership.
Harmsworth first tried to buy The Telegraph newspapers in 2004. He faced stiff competition from Richard Desmond, the proprietor of the Daily Express. But the Barclay twins, David and Frederick, outmanoeuvred both of them, purchasing them, as well as The Spectator, for £600 million.
Several attempts to buy The Telegraph titles have already failed. The prospect of foreign ownership is a sticking point, with Parliament passing legislation to prevent it.
Now, The Telegraph media might go for less than they did in 2004, but with DMGT stressing that financing will not be raised abroad.
The prospective deal comes at an opportune time for The Telegraph, which just broke the biggest BBC scandal in years by publishing the so-called Prescott memo, buttressing claims that the BBC is “institutionally left-wing”.
Director-General Tim Davie and Head of News Deborah Turness resigned over the bias claims, highlighted by the BBC’s shoddy editing of a Donald Trump speech.
That was a hell of a scoop for any newspaper.
Exit the Barclays
It’s important to remember that the deal isn’t done yet.
The Daily Mail’s bid to buy The Telegraph will likely have to go through a competition review. The Labour government could take a tough stance and block the purchase in the name of media diversity. This would force DMGT to sell off some of its media assets to buy The Telegraph.
It’s more likely that the government will give the deal its blessing out of fear of reprisals from the Daily Mail.
One thing is certain: either way, The Telegraph will no longer be associated with the Barclays.
They lost the media group in 2023 due to £1.2 billion in debt (note: not the newspaper’s debt). The bank planned to auction the assets to the highest bidder.
David and Frederick Barclay were a rare double-act in British media history. The two of them lived—David is no longer with us—in a mock Gothic castle on the tiny Channel island of Brecqhou, just off the island of Sark.
The plan to auction the papers sparked rumours that Rupert Murdoch would swoop in to claim The Telegraph. Paul Marshall, the man who helped establish GB News and UnHerd, was soon making moves to make a bid of his own.
The Barclay family tried to reclaim their newspapers to no avail. Then Marshall bought The Spectator for £100 million. Although he wanted The Telegraph titles too, he couldn’t raise sufficient funding.
Of course, the super-rich don’t buy newspapers to make money anymore.
The news is a product, but so is public opinion. Shaping the public mind was always the primary purpose of owning a paper.
The Telegraph has suffered the same decline as the rest of the British newspaper industry, with circulation falling from 1.4 million a day in 1980 to less than 320,000 by 2020.
The Barclay era (2004-2023) fits into this longer story of decline at The Telegraph.
It was partly defined by short editorships. The newspaper went through six editors in less than twenty years, compared with just three editors in the preceding two decades.
Once upon a time, The Telegraph was a highly respected, trusted news source, albeit very much a crusty, tweedy Tory newspaper. Today, the newspaper runs plenty of culture-war stories alongside its traditional fixations on cricket and literal warfare.
The newspaper is still one of the last true daily broadsheets. Its unique feel is defined by a particular style guide concerned with the proper description of royals alive and dead, as well as the use of the word “lavatory” instead of “toilet”.
In many ways, the newspaper is a shadow of its former self.
The Telegraph’s opinion pages were always a holding pen for wild-eyed reactionary columnists. But its shift to tabloid-style coverage of social issues is a sign of the times.
In 2023, the paper ran a bizarre story about a new crisis in schools: children identifying as animals, inanimate objects and even the Moon.
This was not an exceptional case.
Famously, The Sunday Telegraph had run a story in 2003 claiming that hot cross buns had been banned. Five local councils took the paper to court over the story, and the Sunday paper had to issue an apology.
Nevertheless, the story lingers in public memory. You still meet people who think hot cross buns have been banned because the Christian cross offends Muslims.
That’s a sad legacy for the newspaper that broke the news of the German invasion of Poland in 1939.
To Sell A Newspaper
Long the unfaltering paper of Tory England, The Telegraph is now caught halfway between the Conservative old guard and disaffected right-wingers fond of Nigel Farage.
Many people expect The Telegraph to be Tory no matter what. But the UK has changed.
The Telegraph played its role cheerleading the disastrous reigns of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss. This also should have been enough to kill its credibility among its readers.
Now the paper must denounce both and pretend it never enthusiastically supported the prime ministers held responsible for two things: a massive wave of immigrants and a huge shock to private pensions.
Naturally, The Telegraph has moved on as if this embarrassing period never happened.
The right-wing press pivoted quickly to attacking the Labour government, as if it had been in power for the last fifteen years.
People will hail Harmsworth as a hero for saving The Telegraph should the deal go through. But the Barclays twins were the heroes of yesteryear when they bought the papers after the downfall of Lord Conrad Black.
The Black era (1986-2004) ended in disgrace, with his lordship being convicted of fraud and obstruction of justice. Despite his protestations of innocence, Lord Black served a brief stint in prison.
The Canadian tycoon later claimed he had been “oppressed” by the US government and was granted a full pardon by his friend Donald Trump.
Black’s purchase of the papers in 1986 was the end of another era for The Telegraph. The newspaper had been owned and run by the Camrose and Burnham dynasties for six decades. This was also the beginning of a long-term shift at the paper.
The paper has certainly been on a journey. The Telegraph later followed its middle-class readership on the Maastricht Treaty rather than backing the Major government. This was a key turning point in British right-wing circles.
Most Tory newspapers, including The Telegraph, were pro-European in the 1970s and much of the 1980s. The rise of right-wing Euroscepticism in the 1990s would later produce Brexit and Reform UK.
Black hired war historian Max Hastings to edit the paper. We can thank Hastings for hiring a young Boris Johnson. Hastings was succeeded by Thatcher hagiographer Charles Moore in 1995.
Hastings and Moore presided over the Eurosceptic pivot of The Telegraph, with a young Boris Johnson as the Brussels correspondent. During his premiership, Johnson would describe the paper as his “real boss”.
The Conservative Party used to be able to turn to the press to gauge what its base wanted. This is still true. But many of the most die-hard Tory voters have turned on the party.
The Telegraph has a similar relationship to the nationalist right as The Guardian has to the socialist left. Although the paper doesn’t go far enough for the most radical nationalists, it supplies the talking points that the radical right needs.
Although the Daily Mail’s bid to buy it could mean more culture war stories, this is far from inevitable. Harmsworth, unlike Murdoch, is not known to have interfered in his papers, preferring to stand in the shadows behind his editors.
This is why Metro, the i Paper and New Scientist (all owned by DMGT) have not been turned into right-wing products. The Telegraph, with all its peculiarities, is a different kind of right-wing paper from the Daily Mail, with its vulgar populism.
Opening The Telegraph is still a reliable barometer of mainstream right-wing opinion any day of the week. Nor is that likely to change should the deal go through.
The newspaper might have to throw more red meat to Reform voters. But this would be true whether or not Harmsworth took over.
Photograph courtesy of Josh White. All rights reserved.
