The Daily Telegraph is a newspaper with a great past, a pathetic present and an uncertain future. Its ownership is in doubt. Its profits have plummeted. Its editorial slavishness to the prime minister has turned it into such a laughing stock that it is now widely known as the “Daily Boris”.
The newspaper’s crisis is the direct result of bumbling stewardship by its owners, the Barclay twins, Sir David and Sir Frederick, who acquired the Telegraph Media Group (TMG) in 2004 for £665m. For most of their reign they enjoyed the rewards of grotesquely large profits while squeezing the resources of their flagship title, thereby reducing the editorial quality of the Telegraph and its Sunday stablemate.
At the same time, they required the paper to adhere so dogmatically to a Eurosceptic agenda that editors seemed unable to exercise their normal journalistic judgments. Unable to extricate themselves from their masters’ political straitjacket, they published few voices opposed to the central objective of Brexit.
That tunnel vision culminated in acting as propagandist for the paper’s former columnist, Boris Johnson, who had cynically adopted the anti-EU cause in order to satisfy his lust for power.
What irony! The Telegraph’s slavish support for a comic journalist has helped turn the newspaper into a joke.
Along the way, many traditional Telegraph readers – who were not, as legend would have it, retired colonels but a swathe of Britain’s comfortable white middle class – began to desert the paper. In this digital era, when all national newspapers have lost newsprint buyers, the Telegraph’s audience has declined notably faster than that of its rivals.
The circulation fall has been so dramatic that TMG’s chief executive, Nick Hugh, decided in January to remove the Telegraph titles from the monthly sales audits carried out by ABC. His reasoning, according to a company statement, was that the ABC figures were “not the key metric behind our subscription strategy and not how we measure our success”.
Leaving aside the disingenuous reference to “success”, the repudiation of ABC’s audits made no sense because the organisation measures both print and digital audiences. It is therefore possible to chart the rises and falls on both platforms, which helps media agencies to decide how and where to place their advertising. In a diplomatic response, ABC merely called the decision “disappointing”. It might well have said TMG was making a huge error by rejecting the industry’s trusted and transparent audit.
Then again, management errors are par for the course at TMG. A couple of weeks ago it went to war with Britain’s largest newspaper retailer, WH Smith. After increasing the Telegraph’s cover price from £2 to £2.50, it unilaterally decided to reduce the margin paid to the retailer from 21.5% to 17%. WH Smith responded by banishing the paper from sale at 120 of its railway stores.
TMG was forced to sue for peace and reached a new agreement with WH Smith, as it has done with other outlets, such as the Co-op.
The details are supposedly shrouded in commercial secrecy, but I understand that TMG has backed down and failed to secure a deal on its own terms. It was a misstep born out of the publisher’s financial woes, which saw the company’s profits plunge by 94% in 2018 to just £900,000. Until recent years, the company had been regularly returning profits of £50m.
Observers of the Telegraph’s problems could see this crisis coming at least five years ago when the paper’s chief political commentator, Peter Oborne, resigned because of stories being suppressed in order to placate advertisers. How, he asked, can Telegraph readers trust the paper “if advertising priorities are allowed to determine editorial judgments?” Quite so.
And then came the Boris factor. Given the Telegraph’s long-held pro-Conservative stance, it cannot be doubted that many readers were relaxed about the Telegraph cheerleading for Johnson. But the rapid decline in the print audience, and the struggle TMG has had in trying to persuade people to subscribe to its online offering, suggests that its one-note editorial tune is being rejected by a substantial section of its once-loyal following.
Currently, TMG is laying claim to the Daily Telegraph having 400,000 paying subscribers across both print and digital, with Hugh forecasting that a further 100,000 will arrive this year. Full marks for ambition. Nul points for common sense.
You can hear the desperation in the huge discounts offered in last week’s appeals for subscribers: “Freeze your price in place for a year. You’ll save up to £6.30 per week – that’s 35% – and claim a gift card worth up to £75.”
Does TMG really think people will fork out when it has been an open secret since October last year that the Barclays want to sell off their papers? When those reports surfaced, there was speculation about there being a split in the Barclay family. The younger elements were less wedded to the Telegraphs than the brothers, who are now 85.
A Sunday Times report in November quoted a businessman who had done deals with the twins as saying: “The old boys aren’t talking. There’s a bad fallout. They’re all at war.”
That “war” emerged in public in a most surprising manner last week when the high court heard that Sir Frederick had been bugged at the Barclays-owned Ritz hotel by one of Sir David’s sons with the apparent complicity of his two brothers.
That legal case, which involves allegations of the misuse of private information, breaches of confidence and data protection, will play itself out at some future date. But there is now no doubt about the significance of the fraternal dispute. It is Sir David’s sons – Aidan and Howard – who have been responsible for the day-to-day running of TMG, but their attempts to ready it for sale, as the clumsy management tactics illustrate, have been anything but successful.
Nor does the paper’s editorial line help. Having hitched itself to the Johnson bandwagon, it was all very well campaigning for him and for Brexit. But he is in Downing Street now and, like all prime ministers, at the mercy of events, dear boy, events. All governments become unpopular in the end, and defending the prime minister will prove altogether more tricky than attacking on his behalf. What price then for the Daily Boris?