In modern Britain, we excel at placing crucial infrastructure in the hands of foreign companies. Jingye Group, China’s leading steelmaker and multinational conglomerate, owns British Steel. More than 90 per cent of English water companies are owned by international investors. Much of Britain’s rail companies are being renationalised after a disastrous twenty years of private foreign ownership.
Given this, it was only a matter of time before the conglomerates came for our world-leading media companies. Sheik Mansour, the vice president of the UAE and owner of Manchester City, would now like to add the Telegraph to his portfolio.
Writing in The Times today, Lord Hague urged the culture secretary, Lucy Frazer, to intervene and stop this “disturbing move”.
Hague was clear to state that he is an admirer of the UAE as a moderate leader in a tumultuous region of the world.
“The prospect of important British media institutions the Telegraph newspapers and the Spectator, falling into the ownership of Sheikh Mansour of the UAE is disturbing and should be prevented. I say that as an avowed enthusiast for the Emirates, its achievements and its role in the world.”
Referring to a phone call with a senior Emirati official who was annoyed that the BBC had reported some items that “reflected very badly on some powerful Emiratis,” Hague, then foreign secretary, told the official: “In this country, the media can report what they want to, provided they have evidence.”
Apparently Hague’s interlocutor “found it difficult to comprehend that British ministers could do nothing about media coverage that had implications for Britain’s foreign relations, and that we would regard it as wrong even to try.”
“In his world, there was no clear separation between private and public interest, or between national policy and media coverage.”
Hague criticised the investment minister Lord Dominic Johnson’s comments playing down the danger of selling a bastion of Britain’s free press to a leader of a country with very different cultural ideals. Johnson said that those who were hesitant about the deal were being “sentimental about some of our so-called treasured assets”.
Lord Johnson has been left out on a limb after the government did not endorse his comments. A government spokesperson said he had voiced a “personal view”
In contrast, Hague said it was one of “Britain’s great advantages is that we still have an irreverent, searching, competitive media,” and that this would only become more important as “misinformation” and social media’s selective news feeds compete for our attention.
“It would be a big step in the opposite direction to permit a foreign country, however friendly, to own major newspaper titles. Hostile stories in those papers would be something they would find very hard to understand.
“Our relations with the UAE, as well as our media, would be healthier without that.”
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