Post and Telegraph

When the price of a second class stamp goes above one pound, then the Revolution should begin. I am serious. The squalor to which Royal Mail has been reduced is the perfect example of everything against which that revolt would be necessary. It was privatised by the under-scrutinised Liberal Democrats, since the Business Secretary on every day of the Coalition was Vince Cable, and the Postal Affairs Minister under him at the point of privatisation was Ed Davey. Oh, the comments that I used to have to reject when I mentioned that the Post Office had had to be cut out of the Royal Mail in 2011 so that the Royal Mail could be privatised, because the City had known, even then, about Horizon, and would have refused to have handled the sale, much less bought the shares. On 24 May 2024, that was confirmed in open court.

Tony Blair knew about Horizon in 1998, but Peter Mandelson made him go through with it. In 2009, 10 years into Horizon, Mandelson tried to offload 30 per cent of the undivided Royal Mail. The eventual privatisation made vast profits for the 16 priority investors, which had been chosen because they were seen as stable and long-term. 12 sold out within weeks. One such, which secured £36 million in six months, was Lansdowne Partners, and one of those Partners was Peter Davies, who had been best man at the first, and then only, wedding of the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne.

Osborne and Mandelson were both shortlisted for the position of Ambassador to the United States, but it was on his way home from Osborne's residence that Mandelson was photographed in November urinating in the street. Mandelson's clearly close friend, Osborne, married again in 2023, and the guests included his close friend and podcast partner, Ed Balls, with Balls's wife, Yvette Cooper. Cooper's candidate at Gorton and Denton was endorsed by Cable. Round and round it goes. Thank heavens for our free and fearless press, eh?

I have been laughing for two years. Could anything have been funnier than the Daily Telegraph begging the State for protection from the "free" market? Yes, there was one thing even more amusing than that. A Conservative Government delivered it. By Statute. The press must be so free that you needed the Government's permission to part-own it. If these publications were this important, then they could not possibly be allowed to go bust, so we are going to be picking up the tab when they otherwise would. You read it here first, as you very often do.

I wanted Telegraph hacks to have had to know that the Mail paid their wages. I wanted them to be told it wherever and whenever possible. But Axel Springer will do. It is all very well to say that your titles were editorially independent when you appointed the editors. Occasional disagreements are one thing, but when did an editor last go rogue? When did the Telegraph or the Mail endorse Labour? Rupert Murdoch's papers turned Labour when he did, and they turned Conservative again likewise. It was not that Murdoch exerted pressure. He employed editors who shared his outlook. Of course he did.

Axel Springer's outlook is unbridled global capitalism, extreme social liberalism, the European Union, its military alliance with the United States, and uncritical support for the State of Israel. That is a coherent ideology, and if you think that it would not be a good fit for the Daily Telegraph, then you have possibly never read it, and certainly never met almost any of its writers. Exactly the same is true of The Guardian. In my direct experience, it is quite the game in certain parlours to present seasoned journalists from other English-speaking countries with comment pieces from The Times, the Daily Telegraph and The Guardian in blind tests, and to revel in their inability to tell which was which. The cues are essentially tribal, especially about class. If you do not pick up on those, then they could all be written by the same person.

But some people do pick up on those cues, almost without realising it. In November, Mike Wood, who as the Shadow Minister for the Cabinet Office would not ordinarily have been an active participant in Prime Minister's Questions, used that forum to call for the Telegraph to be nationalised. He had been Parliamentary Private Secretary to Liam Fox, to Priti Patel and to Dominic Raab, so that was what the Right openly wanted, and may openly want again rather than see their beloved paper fall into the hands of a corporation that embodied the position of the Conservative Party whenever it had been in government.

Reform UK is hoovering up veterans of those Governments and fast-tracking them, while yesterday, Councillor Jack Symon of Redcar and Cleveland Borough Council joined Restore Britain directly from the Conservatives. Restore is Tory 3.0 or however many it is now. Matthew Aplin of the alleged Chinese spy ring was in Reform more recently than he was in the Labour Party, having passed from between them without let or hindrance. With Aplin comes David Taylor, with Taylor comes Joani Reid, and with Reid comes the Labour Together of Josh Simons, on whose slate internal Labour Party elections used to be contested by Councillor Mason Humberstone of Stevenage until last year, when he defected to Reform in a parliamentary seat that Reform expected to win. In October 2016, Taylor went on a nine-day "charity trip" to Nepal with Princess Beatrice. It is a big club, and we are not in it.

If that club has principles, then they are those of Axel Springer. Yesterday, Nigel Farage gave the one-word answer "No" when asked whether under a Reform Government, there would be any "rolling back" either of "abortion rights", which by then will mean decriminalised abortion up to birth, or of "LGBT rights", in which note that T. With Reform as its principal conservative party, Britain may as well be Luxembourg, where a conservative government has made abortion a constitutional right. Reform supports the war in Iran, it wants Britain to participate even more forcefully, and it supports the war in the Ukraine that was now providing anti-drone defences to the Gulf paradises for women, Jews and Christians.

Nor is Ukraine Reform's only point of agreement with the Green Party. Richard Tice wants to legalise cannabis, Farage wants to legalise all drugs, and Lee Anderson signed a select committee report in that direction in 2023. Likewise, the Greens' support for "sex work" is of a piece with Reform's endorsement by Bonnie Blue. Along with the Kristi Noem who was amusingly dismissed by Donald Trump on the same day as our own dear Shabana Mahmood performed a tribute act to her, Miss Blue, who has already contributed to The Spectator, should perhaps be offered a regular spot in Axel Springer's Daily Telegraph.