Was, Is, And Will Be

Telegraph hacks would not ordinarily consider that employees should have any say as to who their employers' proprietors were to be. Yet they ran a highly successful campaign to stop their paper from being bought by RedBird IMI. Thus was secured for the erstwhile opponents of the Leveson Report a change to the Statute Law to require government approval of such acquisitions in the future. They got that legislation out of the Conservatives. How the world turns.

And how has it worked out for them? Axel Springer SE has no sentimental attachment to the idea of the Telegraph, halfway between Evelyn Waugh and P.G. Wodehouse. If the axe really is about to be swung around Telegraph Towers, then the axemen could still save huge amounts of money if they replaced the axed with the people who had just been sacked from The Canary, publishing them under assumed names that suggested country houses and public schools, and then seeing whether or not anyone could tell the difference.

If you gloated over the debanking of Nigel Farage, then you cannot bemoan that of The Canary. Or if you cheered on the numerous hatchet jobs on Jeremy Corbyn, then you cannot object to the same treatment of Reform UK, even before we began on the head-spinning hypocrisy of Zack Polanski, who as a Liberal Democrat participated actively in the antisemitism scam against a political project that dared to suggest an alternative to the neoliberal economic order.

As it is, a Labour Government is deploying RAF Typhoon fighter jets to aid the Saudi devastation of Yemen, as if Saudi Arabia were short of military equipment. So much for the joint defence agreement, signed in very Mecca, between NATO Turkey, nuclear-armed and expansionist Pakistan, and the soon to be nuclear-armed Saudi Arabia, the nerve centre of the global Islamist terrorism that has already given it control of Syria, to the jubilation of every noisy Western know-nothing. Turkey has lately raided the popular and critical Halk TV, thereby halting its live broadcasts, while the Mayor of Istanbul, Ekrem İmamoğlu, is on trial for 140 charges including corruption and running a criminal organisation, leaving him open to a prison term of up to 2430 years. He had been expected to contest the next Presidential Election on behalf of the Republican People's Party until the courts nullified its most recent congress and reinstalled its previous leaders. In NATO, our forces can be subject to officers who were answerable to the regime in Turkey.

But then, we love a good dictatorship. In the last few hours, the King has both hosted a State Banquet for the Sultan of Oman and made him a Stranger Knight of Garter, as befitted the Head of the last princely state of the British Empire, which plays host to the three GCHQ bases of Timpani, Guitar and Clarinet. Those tap into the undersea cables that pass through the Strait of Hormuz, before obediently passing on their findings to the United States National Security Agency. There is the British military base at Duqm. There is the Omani-British Joint Training Area. There is the training role of the Police Service of Northern Ireland. And so on. Yet since August, Oman has had an alliance-cum-business-partnership with Iran, which is one of the many reasons why Iran would have no need of the cast of the Fairford Farce. Amidst the hilarity, the rearrest of two of them just to stop Donald Trump from having a tantrum is a truly shameful episode, calling, in the fullness of time, for resignations at the very highest levels.

Will those calls be made in the Telegraph? Hardly. As much as anything else, it has already made itself friendless enough. If it did not rue the day that it had insisted on its present owner rather than the other one that was available, then it should ponder that by obtaining primary legislation to give the final say on such matters to the Government, it had empowered a Prime Minister with the closest possible ties to the spurned United Arab Emirates. And he, in turn, should mull over his arming of Saudi Arabia while the Saudis were arming the Sudanese Armed Forces that were engaged in an exceptionally vicious war against the Rapid Support Forces, themselves armed by the Emiratis, who should just set up a newspaper in Britain and tell anyone who did not like it to take it up with Andy Burnham.