Private Equity

The Daily Telegraph, the Sunday Telegraph and The Spectator have spent more than 40 years cheering on the acquisition of everything that mattered in this country by all and sundry, including several deeply unsavoury foreign states as such. They howled against the Leveson Report on the grounds that absolutely anyone should be able to own a newspaper and to publish whatever they pleased in it. They have been wrong on the first score, but they were right on the second.

Telegraph Group writers are mostly doing it as a joke, and half the joke to them and to half of their readers is that the other half does not realise that it is a joke. But while it would do for a fairly pricey monthly magazine, a combination of fogeyish news stories with funny pictures, and affected reactionary opinions such as the return of pre-decimal currency because there were references to it in nursery rhymes, is not a viable model for a daily newspaper than could also carry a Sunday paper and a weekly magazine. Yet this is a profitable endeavour.

You see, it is the spooky scare stories that pay the bills. Having bought the paper for a daily dose of amusing hats in one context or another, people will then read everything else in it, in order to get their money's worth. Anyone who stumped up enough cash could have that arrangement, and either the Emiratis simply have more money than our own spooks, or the spooks no longer feel that the Telegraph audience is worth cultivating, or they would have no serious objection to what BRICS Arabs might place before the gin and gymkhana set, or any two of those, or all three of them. Yes, that's it. All three of them.