The Telegraph: quirky and middling, the England no one hears

Not since a raven flew the Tower, the Wars of the Roses “made this England bleed”, nor even since the very Spitfires shook the Kentish skies has this country seen surer signs of imminent catastrophe. Oh portent of doom! Oh hollow crown! Oh darkest hour!

The Telegraph has fallen. These are the end times now. 

I perhaps overdo it. The venerable newspaper and Conservative Party in-house mag has not folded. Not even neatly, crisply and laid upon the breakfast table of much-maligned Middle England. It is, in fact, in rude health. Black where it should be black, white where it should be white and, as befits the broadsheet market number one, read all over the provinces.

However, its owners have rather forgotten a rather chunky billion-pound debt against which The Telegraph Group was security. Easily done, of course. I do it all the time. Though possibly not for 19 years. Hard to keep the letters at the bottom of the post tray quite so long. 

But perhaps working on the principle that if you owe the bank £100 it’s your problem but if you owe them a billion it’s theirs, the Barclay brothers have not quite got round to clearing a Bank of Scotland bung. And now Lloyds, inheritors of the BoS book, have run out of patience and moved in. Lloyds in Barclays take-over. A headline The Telegraph might otherwise have loved. 

So much, so humdrum. There’s a streak of the rogue-ish almost as mandatory in media proprietors. Beaverbrook, Maxwell, The Telegraph’s very own Conrad Black and, of course, Logan Roy, whoever he might be. Newspaper successions are largely of interest only to newspapers and the sort of people who say “Tory Press” on discovering their ideas don’t enjoy universal appeal, despite what their friends have told them.

But what happens to The Telegraph next really matters. However, before you read all about it, I should declare an interest. I worked for it, you see. For about four years, running its corporate affairs. 

They were halcyon days over at Canary Wharf. A brief spell of vertical Fleet Street when various newspapers went up rather than across and, at nearby West Ferry, the Telegraph shared a print works with the Express and James Bond in Tomorrow Never Dies about, you’ll never guess, a wicked media mogul.

It had characters in abundance; Deedes father and son, a terribly public school advertising department who referred to each other as “the Lord” or “the Earl” and, a floor above, old Etonians like Charles Moore, his office boasting a photograph of the Queen in full fig, snapped through the windows of the state carriage and studying the paper. Her Majesty’s Daily Telegraph. And a fella called Boris Johnson who, I hear, eventually went into politics. Or perhaps he was the evil media genius. I can never remember. 

Others too. Hilary Alexander, the colourful Kiwi fashion editor and Neil Collins – of this parish – The Flashing Blade of editorial conference, hotfoot from the City. The young fogeys of “club class” on comment, the, well, somewhat the same on news and Matt on cartoons. A man so valuable, it was rumoured, that even football clubs balked at the transfer fee.

A vibrant place then. And a successful one. It topped the circulation charts and had an intuitive understanding of its readers, who loved it in return. People left it legacies, thronged to its pioneering yearly charity drive and their letters, in tandem with editorial comment, were the barometer by which Smith Square and Chief Whips read the weather. 

Non-metropolitan, steady, quirky, generous, humorous, and in the best way middling. The England no-one hears. Unless at the ballot box or through the Daily Telegraph. 

And by that constituency it will stand.

When Tony Blair won his landslide in 1997, only The Telegraph declined to kneel down amid universal media genuflection. Tetchy relations then with Alistair Campbell who liked his media to agree with him and is still angrily demanding it even now.

When they came for hunting, The Telegraph backed the Countryside Alliance. 

Then when Brexit came along, it was the Telegraph that held the standard high when the battle raged all around. Other newspapers, those with reputations far fiercer, wilted, it is said, in the heat of social embarrassment among their upper echelons. The Telegraph fought on. 

And now, as the tide of woke rises ever higher, inundating institutions, washing against the waists of government, saturating the fabric of the nation, it is from the Telegraph’s stable mate at the Spectator that Rod Liddle or Julie Burchill rush forth with fingers ready to plug the leaks. 

Then there was lockdown. Against which Allison Pearson stood alone.

Now, forgive my weakness for heroic prose. You may care for none or all of these causes. They are, I grant, a mixed bag, at best, to some. But that’s not the point. 

The point is that amid a broadsheet landscape softly to the left and sometimes more and a broadcast market long ago surrendered, the bland media orthodoxies of our times demand a challenge and one sustained. Nature and debate abhor a vacuum. Even God needs a Devil.

As the placatory speeches are given on the news floor, as the buyers assemble and the consortia gather, somebody will buy the Telegraph, of that there is little doubt. It is too prosperous, too prominent and too attractive not to be snapped up.  

It is what happens thereafter that counts. Just as in 1997, it looks as though the country will once again soon need a counterview and a strong alternative voice. 

“Mind must be the stronger, heart the bolder, courage must be the greater, as our might lessens.” I hope the buyers know their poetry. 

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