12.03.2026
Selling the Torygraph
Its readership remains stubbornly of pensionable age. Its journalism has become more and more stupid. With ‘AI transformation’ on the agenda, Paul Demarty expects a further descent into worthless slop
It is a bad time to be a Rothermere. The British media clan, owners of the Daily Mail and many other outlets, were on the brink of catching their ‘great white whale’: securing the purchase of the Telegraph papers, and uniting the petty-bourgeois right flank of the British press under a single corporate banner.
Mere moments (in terms of mergers and acquisitions) before achieving preferred-bidder status, however, Jonathan Harmsworth - the fourth Viscount Rothermere - was gazumped by, of all people, the Germans. Axel Springer SE, the pre-eminent German media conglomerate, threw its considerable financial weight behind the rival bidding consortium, officially led by David Efune, publisher of the obscure American rightwing website, the New York Sun. Efune is not a serious player here: it is plain that the new bid, £575 million to Rothermere’s £500 million, is essentially a Springer acquisition.
There is, of course, some amusement to be had in the Torygraph falling into the hands of the hated Boche. As an anonymous Telegraph Media Group (TMG) employee told The Guardian, “Red-faced Brexiteers all over Surrey [are] having conniptions … You would need a heart of stone not to laugh.”1 The long-running saga of the TMG sale, however, has been nothing if not a world tour worthy of a Bond movie. It would almost be easier to name the countries not somehow implicated in bids for the house journal of Albion’s most anxious retired army officers.
Criminal charges
The story begins, for practical purposes, more than two decades ago. In 2004, long-time owner Conrad Black’s media empire was thrown into chaos after a series of dubious related-party transactions resulted in criminal charges (Black would later be convicted of fraud and imprisoned in the United States). That resulted in a fire sale of the Telegraph titles to the eccentric Barclay twins, David and Frederick. The Barclays were of petty bourgeois extraction, but steadily built a business empire in the 1970s and 80s. The Telegraph was their most prominent purchase; they also picked up the conservative weekly, The Spectator. They lived a strange reclusive life, and owned their own Channel island.
David died in 2021; not long after, TMG fell into crisis over unpaid bills totalling £1 billion. It was up for sale again. Paul Marshall, the former Liberal Democrat hedge-fund manager and owner of several rightwing outlets like UnHerd, secured ownership of the Speccy in 2024. The selling of the Telegraph was not so straightforward. A sale was agreed to an investment fund named RedBird IMI in November 2023, but controversy raged at the involvement in the fund of Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan of Abu Dhabi - probably best known in Britain as the effective owner of Manchester City football club.
It is one thing to let a foreign princeling get hold of Man City; but a national newspaper of impeccable Tory heritage? Telegraph staff were up in arms. The following March, the Tory government rushed through rules preventing foreign state ownership of national newspaper titles - the bid was on ice. Eventually, ownership passed to RedBird Capital Partners - effectively the non-Emirati part of RedBird IMI - in 2025. That might have been the end of it, but RCP’s links to the Chinese government rapidly became a sticking point. It was at this point that Rothermere swooped in (having attempted to pick up the titles back in 2004 in the first place).
The only controversy surrounding the Rothermere bid had to do with competition and concentration. Yet even here, the red-blooded British bona fides are suspicious. The Harmsworths are non-doms, resident for tax purposes in France. They are known to have been far warier of Brexit than the political line of their Mail papers might have led one to believe (and indeed the Mail on Sunday, under brown-nosing editor Geordie Greig, plumped for ‘remain’ in the referendum, unlike the daily). Private Eye points out that the holding company, Daily Mail General Trust (DMGT), includes a not-insubstantial corporate events subsidiary, headquartered in the UAE.2
Among such company, Axel Springer seems untarnished by foreign state influence. Yet even it has weirdly explicit commitments to partisanship in international affairs. Its website proudly proclaims:
We stand up for freedom, free speech, the rule of law, and democracy. We support the right of existence of the state of Israel and oppose all forms of anti-Semitism. We advocate the alliance between the United States of America and Europe. We uphold the principles of a free market economy. We reject political and religious extremism and all forms of discrimination.3
This is known to be essentially posed as a loyalty oath to employees of its various outlets, ranging from the German tabloid, Bild, to the ‘insider’ political website, Politico.
Decline
The Torygraph acquisition saga is thus, really, two stories in one. In the first place it is a familiar litany of woe - the endless straitening of the ‘legacy media’ in a hostile environment; and then also the geopolitical story, of how some foreign owners are somehow more foreign than others (in the eyes of our rulers at least).
With respect to the straitening, the decline in the quality of the Telegraph’s output is well-known. Under the Barclays, the paper repeatedly shed large numbers of journalists and sub-editors, and its output became shallower and more sensationalistic. It began to approximate the Daily Mail and Express in all things other than its format (it remains, almost alone on newsagent shelves, a broadsheet). Its political line shifted too, from the stentorian high Toryism of yore to a degraded echo of Faragist right populism.
In doing so, it failed to be particularly successful. The Mail is the gold standard here; its own petty bourgeois enragé comfort zone was well-suited to the era of clickbait and slop, and the click numbers were impressively juiced by the infamous ‘sidebar of shame’ - a strip of smutty pap-snap links to be found on the righthand side of every webpage (including, amusingly, op-ed lamentations about the pornification of everything). For a time, it was the most viewed news website in the world, and is still going strong.
The Telegraph’s attempts to move in this direction were cack-handed. The Maily Telegraph could never out-Mail the Mail. Its readership remained stubbornly of pensionable age. As time passed, it became more and more stupid. Its commercial operations interfered with editorial policy in ways which frequently erupted into scandal. The level of analysis in its opinion pages rotted away into nothing. It remains to be seen if Springer can inject some seriousness back into the paper, but the fact that ‘AI transformation’ is apparently on the agenda hints at a further descent into worthless slop.
This is hardly a road that the Telegraph has walked alone. The growth of social media as the primary channel for people to access news effectively expropriated the crucial asset that allowed things to go on in the old way - the machinery of advertising sales. Online advertising rates were abysmal, and in any case entirely dependent on the platforms themselves. Digital marketing people at the papers effectively had the job of communicating the wishes of the platforms to the media outlets themselves, but even obeisance to these dictates was no guarantee of success. Facebook, for example, made a big push to get its ad customers to make more video content, which they promised would be so much more profitable. It was a lie, based on entirely fabricated internal analytics, and bitterness about this persists on Fleet Street and its analogues to this day.
For true techno-utopian believers, this disintermediation of the legacy media was to be welcomed. As their grip loosened, a far more democratic media scene would emerge. It turned out that they were right that the power of legacy bourgeois media would atrophy, though it has hardly disappeared. The new entrants, however - you could think of American rightwing alt-media empires like Breitbart and the Daily Wire - turn out to be fronts for the same small gang of billionaires. Their output is merely the pure distillate of the worst aspects of legacy media: the brazen lying and self-dealing, the false populism, the total contempt for any content that provokes or demands even the barest minimum of rational thought.
Geopolitics
That brings us to the geopolitics, more or less. The Springer mission statement quoted above places the Telegraph’s probable new owners squarely in a very particular political niche, representing the residual Atlanticism of the European governing class (with that special devotion to Israel, which is a particularly German psychosis). This ideology is, it is fair to say, under unprecedented pressure, with the open contempt of the second Trump presidency, its unashamed intervention in favour of far-right populists in Europe, its extractivist foreign policy, and so on. Yet one only has to note the near-surreal pliancy of German chancellor Friedrich Merz and Eurocrats like Kaja Kallas and Ursula von der Leyen during the present war to see that Europe’s governing class has yet to escape the iron cage of its Atlanticist outlook.
Where exactly that leaves the Telegraph, in its current Brexit-brained ranting form, is a matter of some speculation. In the end, however, it will be managed, if only because it is perfectly plain that the likes of Farage are agents of the US government, and their ‘populism’ certainly does not extend to any recovery of sovereignty from the US. In this respect, their interests are perfectly aligned with those of Axel Springer.
It is this, in the end, that answers the question, ‘Why Springer and not the Emirati bidders?’ One could say there is a difference between foreign state ownership and private ownership, but does this matter in practice? Is the average British Al Jazeera stringer any more silenced in relation to the Qatari monarchy than Politico hacks are in relation to Israel? It is not clear. Both the Springer Weltanschauung and the discreet censorship of AJ are fundamentally state projects, whoever happens to sign off on the monthly payroll.
Springerism, however, is fundamentally consonant with British Staatsraison, which consists in hugging as close to the Americans as practically possible. The emirs of Qatar and the UAE are not so reliable - they have their own interests, largely within the US sphere of influence, but playing an unpredictable role in the Middle East and, increasingly, Africa. They are not to be trusted.
The lesson, perhaps, is that there is always someone paying the piper. Bourgeois news organisations do serve a useful role, by reporting stories and offering institutional protection for journalists, when they happen to irk the rich and powerful. They also serve a profoundly harmful role in limiting the political horizons in society at large. There is no such thing as a newspaper - or TV news station, or YouTube news channel - that does not have some such ulterior motive.
It would be far better, in fact, if the motives were simply not ulterior. There is something admirable about Springer’s loyalty oath, indeed, however dreadful its content - one cannot imagine Rupert Murdoch being honest enough to publish such a thing. A truly democratic challenge to the bourgeois media would, equally, have to wear its heart on its sleeve. Its readers (or viewers) would then be empowered to read (or watch) critically.
It would also, however, require similar kinds of institutional strength as the great media organisations: libel lawyers, armies of journalists, deep expertise in everything from criminal justice to commodity futures. It would need, in short, to draw on a coherent mass social movement for broad political goals - the kind of thing we call a party.