General Trust?

I had never noticed it, but I have been told that one of the changes to my style has been that my posts had become far more often headed by questions. Well, in April, I shall have been blogging for 20 years, and the more you know, the more you know you don't know.

Almost as long ago, I have also blogged elsewhere, and the Mail's capture of the Telegraph makes sense in terms of the dialectical materialism of which I am still not convinced. To what would the Mail have to fall for me to be converted? But the Telegraph has been bringing in staff from the Mail for years, so there may be something in entryism. And notice that this is the change of ownership acceptable to Western Europe's mightiest example of worker-management. Of which other private business might the staff now choose the owners?

Yet why did the Telegraph's care? I thought that proprietors had no editorial control, that "nobody tells me what to write"? These people would have us believe that they were highly employable and entrepreneurial, so why would they not have gone elsewhere, or set up on their own? And if the Telegraph is this important, then why not save the indispensable voice of the "free" market by nationalising it?

That was in fact called for that at this week's Prime Minister's Questions by Mike Wood, the Conservative MP for Kingswinford and South Staffordshire who is Shadow Minister for the Cabinet Office and therefore would not ordinary have been an active participant in PMQs, and who was Parliamentary Private Secretary to Liam Fox, Priti Patel, and Dominic Raab. That was what the Right openly wanted. Keir Starmer dismissed the suggestion, but it has cleared the logjam.

So the Chinese and the Emiratis are going to have to content themselves with our utilities, with our transport infrastructure, and with anything else that they happened to fancy, soon to include England's NHS. Then again, what is to stop them from setting up a newspaper? Did Margaret Thatcher license Militant, or even The Guardian? Would a Government veto over the ownership of newspapers be an acceptable proposition in the United States? If there is a Labour Government, then what is so "influential" about the Telegraph? It has permitted a sale to the Mail both because neither paper had ever endorsed the Labour Party under any Leader, and because British politicians just did not say no to the Mail, which went after their families if they showed signs that they might. Four of the last six Prime Ministers have had to resign because they had lost the Mail. One of them now writes for it. Covid-19 report or no Covid-19 report, and Russian victory in Ukraine or no Russian victory in Ukraine, it may well be about to install him as Editor of the Telegraph.