Media Matters
Jeff Bezos… Paul Dacre… Lord Ashcroft… The rumours are growing
Not long after I joined the Daily Telegraph as a young leader writer in 1978, the paper’s circulation soared to more than 1.5 million copies a day. I do not say the two events were connected. The Telegraph put on a sales spurt because the Times was off the streets from December 1978 until November 1979 as a result of an industrial dispute. It resumed its pre-strike sale once the Thunderer was back in business.
Even so, the Telegraph was selling 1.45 million copies in February 1980, while in that month the audited circulation of the Times was 324,260. How are the two titles faring nearly 40 years later? In June 2018 the Times posted daily sales of 428,034, which included so-called ‘bulks’ (ie copies sold at a lesser price) of 91,218. Meanwhile, the once mighty Telegraph has dwindled to a circulation (no bulks are included) of only 370,613.
Looking back over the sweep of four decades, it is inarguable that the Times has kept its nose in the air more perkily than its old rival. Admittedly, Rupert Murdoch (its owner for most of the period) has ploughed hundreds of millions of pounds into the paper, while the Telegraph has been pretty consistently profitable, sometimes mouthwateringly so. But that happy harvest may almost be gathered in. The Telegraph Media Group recently reported a 50 per cent fall in annual profits to £13.7 million for last year, which was in part the consequence of reduced circulation and lower advertising revenue.
There’s little doubt that the deterioration of both the Daily and Sunday Telegraph titles speeded up after the billionaire twins Sir David and Sir Frederick Barclay bought them (plus the Spectator) for £665 million in 2004. They chose a chief executive, Murdoch Maclennan, who was an expert in newspaper presses but hardly qualified to direct a great national newspaper.
Adopting a management style that bore some similarity to that trialled by Robespierre, Maclennan fired and appointed editors with giddy abandon. Good journalists left or were sacked. The
Telegraph’s much-vaunted digital strategy proved less successful than that of rivals. These are of course difficult times for all newspapers. Nonetheless, when Maclennan finally departed the scene last year, the two titles were weaker than they might have been.
Can the paper and its Sunday sister be saved? And are the 83-year-old Barclay brothers willing to sell them? The answer to both questions is ‘possibly’. But as long as the twins hang on to the titles, the chances of reversing their decline are zero. The truth is that they have been enormously successful businessmen but indifferent proprietors. Sir Frederick is thought to be more prepared to sell the papers than Sir David, who is in poor health. It can only be a matter of time before a sale is made. How much time only the Barclays know.
Rumours about would-be buyers abound. The name of Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and, since 2013, owner of the Washington Post, has been whispered. More plausible, in my view, is the interest of a consortium of rich, pro-brexit businessmen, among whom the controversial billionaire Tory Lord Ashcroft is said by some to be numbered. Assessing the likelihood of such an approach succeeding is a bit like estimating the fatalities on a battlefield before the smoke has lifted. It may be that when it does so we shall discover there wasn’t much of a battle after all.
All the same, a recent tweet by Tom Watson, Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, sent some pulses racing. Without offering a shred of evidence, Watson wrote that ‘Paul Dacre [the retiring editor of the Daily Mail] was looking to put a consortium together to buy Daily Telegraph and install himself as editor’. My immediate thought was that this was an idea whose probable basis was a characteristically enthralling speculation by my Mail colleague Peter Mckay. Why on earth would Dacre wish to take on such a formidable challenge on the eve of his 70th birthday? Wouldn’t he be more happily employed as chairman and editor-in-chief of the Mail (a role he has accepted) and writing his memoirs, which could rattle a few cages?
But then further inquiries established that the consortium was not a figment of anyone’s imagination, though at the time of writing I don’t know whether Dacre is part of it. Of course, its mere existence is no guarantee of success. Sir David Barclay may continue to resist a sale. Or it might be agreed in principle, and yet the twins might demand more money than the businessmen are willing to pay. (I have heard the figure of £300 million, which would surely be over the odds for two titles haemorrhaging sales at such a rate.) All I can say is that the best – one might say, the only – hope for the Daily Telegraph is that it is sold soon to the right people.