Rothermere’s Telegraph takeover: ‘a right-leaning media powerhouse’

“The Lords of England have stopped the barbarians at the gate of The Telegraph,” said Due Diligence in the Financial Times.

After a drawn-out sale, described as the “auction from hell”, the media group is set to end up in the hands of Lord Rothermere – owner and chair of Daily Mail and General Trust (DMGT), whose great-grandfather co-founded the Daily Mail in 1896. If the government and competition regulators clear the £500 million deal, “the tie-up will create one of the most powerful right-leaning media groups in Britain”.

The UK likes to present itself as “open for business”. Not in this case. For more than two years, ministers and the newspaper’s own reporters have “helped fend off potential buyers from New York to Abu Dhabi”. When Gerry Cardinale’s RedBird Capital withdrew earlier this month, it cleared the way for Rothermere to pounce.

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It’s not clear how DMGT (which also owns Metro and The i Paper) will fund the deal, which will give it more than 50% of circulation in the UK newspaper market, said Dominic Ponsford in Press Gazette. But given that newspapers are “a far smaller part of the media than they were”, it’s unlikely to be blocked.

Plenty of Britons will have misgivings about the creation of “a right-leaning media powerhouse” when the populist Reform UK party is riding so high in the polls, said Bloomberg. But regulators should consider that the Telegraph has been “a stranded asset” for several years, said media analyst Claire Enders. “It’s a case of industrial logic”: there should be “operational synergies” of £40 million to £50 million annually. And after the spurning of so many foreign suitors, there’s also “a face-saving dimension to this deal”. As former FT editor Lionel Barber told The Guardian: “This is a very British stitch-up.”