The sinking Telegraph

How the paper that was once the bible of Home Counties Tories has ended up on the outer reaches of prejudice and fantasy

No glad confident morning anymore

Friends (and others) in recent days have asked me to explain why I have come to despise the Daily Telegraph. Haven’t I got better things to do? One-such, a lifelong devotee, says that I am bitter because earlier this year I was permanently barred from posting comments on the Telegraph Online after I was “very rude” about one of the paper’s columnists.

If only. I was in fact barred for no good reason other than the fact that I was critical of the increasingly unhinged opinions being expressed by Telegraph columnists, most obviously Daniel Hannan, Allison Pearson and Allister Heath. I never swore. Not did I engage in personal abuse (except, possibly, in the case of Boris Johnson). I even agreed from time to time with some of the views offered, usually by Jeremy Warner, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard and – God help me – Charles Moore, all three of them hardened professionals. But I did take issue with those of their colleagues who seem to me to have veered alarmingly to the doom-laden far-right, cleaving to the view that Britain is finished, with blame ascribed to immigrants, Muslims, woke liberals.

From my standpoint on the soft left (yes, I once voted for Tony Blair), the only reason the Telegraph doesn’t more closely resemble the Nazi Party’s official journal the Völkischer Beobachter, is that the law as it stands wouldn’t permit it. But I am in no doubt that most of its columnists would, in 1933, have seen much that made sense to them in the policies of Adolf Hitler. Then, it would have been the Jews and the Communists; today it’s Muslims and the Labour Party.

I should perhaps point out that for three years in the 1980s I was chief feature-writer for the Sunday Telegraph, owned at the time by Viscount Hartwell and edited by the saintly Peregrine Worsthorne. I even laboured for six months or so as an oped writer for the Daily. The Sunday in those days was deeply Conservative, but it was also fun and gave space to writers such as I who had not been raised in the Old School Tory tradition.

The problem with the Telegraph today is not merely that it has skewed dangerously to the right, but that it has no time for contrary opinions, especially when it comes to politics and societal developments. And it has no time for fun at all.

So let’s dive in – and I should say at once that today’s edition is is less than vintage. The online “splash” heading the online edition as I write runs as follows:

Exposed: Labour’s plot to silence migrant hotel critics

Emails reveal Whitehall ‘spy’ unit complaining to tech firms about content mentioning asylum seekers and two-tier policing

The author of the piece, associate political editor Tony Diver, goes on to “reveal” that a congressional committee in the US has unearthed complaints made by UK officials to tech firms, including Tik Tok, about “concerning” views being given space on social media on the subject of asylum-seekers, immigration and “two-tier” policing. Readers are invited to ask if legitimate opinions are being censored by government lackeys keen to hide the true extent of illegal immigration and the proliferation in migrant hostels of “undocumented fighting-age males”.

Hmm.

So what else does the Telegraph have for us today? Well, there’s Robert Jenrick, a former Tory immigration minister widely assumed to be seeking the Conservative Party leadership. The headline on Jenrick’s column runs:

Mass migration is putting British women and girls in danger

According to data, 40 per cent of sexual assaults committed in London last year were by foreign nationals

Jenrick – who some think could end up abandoning the Tories for Nigel Farage’s Reform Party, currently running high in the polls, wastes no time getting to the point:

To many Brits, it has long been a statement of the obvious that mass, uncontrolled migration is fuelling crime. It’s just common sense. Some societies have higher levels of violent and sexual crime, and individuals who migrate from those countries to the UK are unlikely to shed those cultural differences quickly.

You can guess the rest. As it happens, Telegraph readers were not taken in. They know that Jenrick was a minister in the last four Tory governments who only resigned his immigration role when he saw the writing on the wall spelling out a monumental defeat. They can’t stand him.

Anything else? Here’s one by the sublimely named Genevieve Holl-Allen, another stalwart of the political staff

Labour to limit Civil Service internships to working class

Candidates will be judged based on what jobs their parents did when they were 14

Does anyone believe this? I am reminded of the time in the 1970s when the British Army press office in Belfast invited me to take my pick of various outrageous stories kept in a filing cabinet for slow news days. I turned him down and was amused the following morning to see one of the most improbable as a Telegraph page lead.

Allison Pearson seems to have taken the day off today. She must be exhausted. She has been banging on about wokeness, trans people, illegal immigrants, grooming gangs and the uselessness of the police almost uninterruptedly for the last five years. But we can still listen to her most recent podcast, on the ironically named Planet Normal, in which she talks to Essex women about having to live near to immigrant hotels stuffed to the gills with violent asylum-seekers. But we’re in luck. Allister Heath, who edits the Sunday paper in-between getting into a lather about pretty-well everything, holds the fort for her with a piece in which he denounces Labour’s "grotesque lies” about illegal immigration. At least we are spared his further musings on Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, whom he recently nominated to share the Nobel Peace Prize.

And so on and so on, and on. The Telegraph used to be obsessed by getting the UK out of the EU. Today it’s Brexit’s obverse, immigration and foreigners polluting the culture. From time to time, the paper surprises itself with properly researched investigations and out and out scoops, reminding me that when I took Lord Hartwell’s shilling its journalists, including those who voted Labour, were hard-nosed professionals out for a good story no matter where it led. Such hacks would be hard-pressed to work on the paper today.

Before I go on, I have to add that the ownership of the Telegraph group has been up in the air for more than a year, which for those in charge must be like purgatory. I won’t go into what is a sorry saga, involving the Barclay Brothers, the Abu Dhabi royal family and a hard-nosed American private equity firm. I have no idea how the issues will be resolved. What is clear is that the present-day editorial leadership is using the resulting lacuna to stake out a claim for the paper as the voice of the Right, ready to go toe to toe with the Mail and what remains of the Express. Where once the Telegraph was the favourite read of the established middle class, particularly in the Home Counties, exuding confidence and a quiet, almost understated authority, today, in confronting changes that bother us all, it comes across as a shrill and strident instrument of the radical right, demanding the restoration of an England that never properly existed and has no realistic prospect of making a return. I miss the old Telegraph; I find the current paper an imposter whose time is almost up.

The saddest part of all this is that the problems of mass-immigration, violence against women, and girls, transsexuality and personal identity are real and need urgently to be addressed. The same is obviously true of the conflict in Gaza. Just now, as I was starting this paragraph, I received an email from one of my occasional critics with an attachment from the Telegraph “revealing” that a former aid worker in Gaza who claims to have witnessed Israeli troops opening fire on Palestinian civilians had earlier been sacked by his employers and bore a grudge. The implication? Any evidence against Israel in this matter is suspect, and quite possibly made up.

But we should be grateful for small mercies. According to the Telegraph, the embattled leader of the Conservative Party, Kemi Badenoch, “no longer identifies as Nigerian,” prompting this inspired intervention from online commenter Tony Love:

If the islamite/labourite/wokeism and immigrant situation goes on much longer, I will no longer "identify" as British.

Good luck, Tony.