Influential Is As Influential Does

Two weeks today will be 23 October, the fifteenth anniversary of the proudest day of my life, the day that I was sacked from the Telegraph. I had been planning to mark it by taking over as Proprietor, Publisher, and Editor-in-Chief. 20 quid would been over the odds, but Lloyds Bank would have been welcome to it.

Especially since I had missed out on The Spectator, where my office would have contained Damian Thompson, stuffed and mounted. He has been both many times before. But not in that order. I would have charged people to have been photographed with him, and I would have sold plastic miniatures of him, ideally ones that glowed in the dark. What tune should I have wired him up to have played, how much money should punters have had to have inserted to hear that, and whereabouts upon him should they have inserted it? Hey, ho, I never did get round to organising #Taki4TheSpeccie, so my editorship under a Theodoracopulos proprietorship is not to be.

But although it is now considered one of the "moderates" in the Middle East, a very few months ago the Statute Law was changed on a cross-party basis to stop the United Arab Emirates from acquiring two small-circulation newspapers and a tiny-circulation magazine. Apparently, these things are now the Government's business. If you thought that there was now a Labour Government, then ask yourself why it would care in the least who owned the Telegraph, which is still always described as "influential". Influential over whom?

After today, when it was established that whoever won the Conservative Leadership would do so against the wishes of two thirds of the party's MPs, some of whom I know have already placed bets on a Cleverly Leadership before the end of this Parliament, then the Government should insist that it was the turn of the party that gained 64 seats at this year's General Election, almost all of them from the Conservatives, who have declared that they did not want to recapture any of those seats, nor any that they had lost to Labour, nor either of the twice as many that the Greens had taken from them than from Labour. The President of Global Affairs at Meta and his sometime Chief of Staff, the Vice President for Policy and Strategy of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, should be able to make a few calls and find the readies. Plus the £4:50 that Comcast might want for Sky News. Although really, the Left should get that. When it comes to a television news station, then it is our turn.