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For a medium-sized, privately owned UK business with annual revenues of £254mn in 2022, Telegraph Media Group has captured an awful lot of public attention recently. It culminated this week in the government rushing to change the law to prevent it being taken over by an acquirer that many of its journalists protested against. Who says Fleet Street is losing its touch?
Like steel mills and car plants, UK national newspapers are in a traditional industry that carries a lot of clout. The most successful days of the Telegraph as a print newspaper are in the past but it now has plenty of digital readers, including many Conservative MPs and peers. A planned £600mn takeover by the Abu Dhabi-backed fund Redbird IMI hardly stood a chance.
There is an issue of principle here: whether a foreign state should be allowed to acquire a large UK news publisher. Foreign proprietors have already taken over swaths of the national press, from Rupert Murdoch’s acquisitions of The Sun and The Times to Nikkei’s 2015 purchase of the Financial Times. Until now, the influence of another country has not really come up.
But this principle has been subsumed by politics and a sudden effort by Rishi Sunak’s government to prevent the Telegraph and Spectator magazine falling into what his party regards as the wrong hands. “Never argue with a man who buys ink by the barrel,” goes the saying about the power of the press, and it also applies to digital news publishers fighting for their interests.
I would not blame Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, a vice-president of the United Arab Emirates, for feeling rather bruised by his treatment. Sheikh Mansour, who majority owns Manchester City football club, provided about 75 per cent of the backing for the acquisition attempt. Although the UAE is an important investor in the UK, he has got a lot of grief for his trouble.
Politics has intruded because of the Telegraph and Spectator’s importance to the Tory party at a vulnerable moment. Sunak’s administration is not strong enough to resist party pressure to block the bid, organised in the House of Lords by Baroness Tina Stowell. History may record this as another episode in the miserable drama of a divided and declining government.
Conversely, it illustrates the surprising resilience of national newspapers as a media and political force in the UK. When I briefly worked for The Daily Telegraph in its last days on Fleet Street itself in 1987 (the building was later occupied by Goldman Sachs), it worried about the fact that its readers were dying. Well, guess what? There turned out to be a renewable supply of conservative older people.
It was a strange animal, a hybrid between a broadsheet and a tabloid: weighty coverage was leavened with juicy court stories. Founded in 1855 as the “largest, best and cheapest newspaper in the world”, it then had a print circulation of more than 1mn. This has fallen sharply, but it had 587,000 digital subscriptions in 2022 and remains integral to the Conservative party.
Fleet Street was a rotten borough, a place near Westminster from which a few proprietors exerted outsized influence on politics and policy. Look no further than this week’s events for proof that this is still how things are expected to be. If governments were immune to proprietorial whims, the party would not be worried about the identity of the Telegraph’s new owners.
The larger principle is not about nationality but editorial diversity. It would not especially matter — it could be rather fun — if the French or German governments decided to publish and distribute their own newspapers or news magazines in the UK to advocate their favoured policies. As long as they did not dominate Westminster, this would widen debate.
You might object that the UAE is not democratic, but neither is China and I assume the government does not intend to shut down the London office of China Daily. The proposed new law would only apply to takeovers, not to existing ownership, but important questions are being overlooked in the rush. This is why media merger law is focused on plurality and stopping dominance.
The irony is that the government may end up making national newspapers and their digital products even more narrowly controlled by intervening in this way. Murdoch’s News UK would like to buy the Spectator, and DMGT, which owns the Mail titles, has expressed interest in the Telegraph. There is a danger of this becoming a traditional Fleet Street carve-up.
Many Conservative MPs would be happy for the Telegraph and Spectator to fall into such hands, or those of Sir Paul Marshall, the hedge fund multimillionaire. They would certainly prefer it to ownership by a US media fund backed by Sheikh Mansour. But that is not a matter for the law.
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