3,000 issues strong
In 1976, a correspondent for this newspaper interviewed Colonel Gaddafi in his Bedouin tent. The Libyan dictator said that The Sunday
Telegraph should be put under the control of a people’s committee “representing all different levels, the workers, the peasants, the merchants and the shopkeepers”. Forty-two years later and Col Gaddafi is gone, but his ideas live on: Jeremy Corbyn has promised to do something eerily similar.
The mission of this newspaper is to inform, enlighten and entertain – and to stand up for the interests and values of our readers. We are conservative and liberal, with a small “c” and small “l”, and nowadays that increasingly means disagreeing with the Establishment. Liberty, tolerance, love of country, common sense and good taste – these are what our readers believe in and these are our principles, too – and for us and our readers, it’s not all about politics but about celebrating “the good life”, everything from sport to travel, opera to reality television.
As we mark our 3,000th issue, we are delighted to report that we are in rude health. We have adapted and embraced, rather than resisted, changing technology, with the result that you could just as easily be reading these words in print, on your computer or on a phone. Every day, more and more of you are subscribing to our digital platforms, our app and website. Our enemy certainly isn’t the free market: it’s the big government authoritarians and the killjoys who would just love to use Parliament to determine what we can and cannot say.
The Sunday Telegraph has exposed businessmen, crooks and, yes, politicians – fearlessly and without favour. We will continue to do so, relentlessly. We believe that government should be as open as possible, that the job of the journalist is to find out exactly what is happening and why, and then to communicate the facts to as many people as possible. The powerful must have nowhere to hide.
None of this could happen without you, the reader, and the fact that you are willing to pay for quality journalism. On behalf of our brilliant writers, editors, production, distribution and commercial staff, we thank you for your loyalty. Here’s to the next 3,000 issues, digital and in print.