In 1989 an ebullient 24-year-old reporter arrived in Brussels to cover European politics for the Daily Telegraph. Boris Johnson had been fired by his previous employer, the Times, for fabricating a quote from his own godfather, the historian Colin Lucas, but the shamelessness that would propel him ever upwards in British public life was already fully formed.
The Brussels posting made Johnson’s career. A string of inventive stories only lightly tethered to facts on perfidious Eurocrats were sent to the Telegraph newsdesk. Every minor regulatory tweak became an assault on British institutions; one week it was sausages, the next it was prawn cocktail flavoured crisps.
Over five years in the job, Johnson helped shape the tone of surging Euroscepticism on the British right, with the Telegraph leading the charge that would culminate, eventually, in Brexit.
Last month Johnson, now a disgraced former prime minister but still a darling of the right and a columnist with the Daily Mail, met the next owner of the Telegraph. Three decades from the prawn cocktail scandal and nearly 10 years into the sunlit uplands of Brexit, the paper most closely associated with British nationalism is in the process of being acquired by, of all things, a German.
Mathias Döpfner landed in London in late March on a charm offensive, seeking to put regulators’ minds at rest about his proposed acquisition of Telegraph Media Group. According to news website Semafor, the Axel Springer boss also met senior figures on the political right, including conservative leader Kemi Badenoch and Reform’s Nigel Farage. The political coalition the Telegraph helped create was being asked, in effect, to give its blessing to a new owner from the Continent.
[ Axel Springer buys Telegraph in £575m dealOpens in new window ]
Most observers assume Döpfner will be successful and the Telegraph will become part of Berlin-headquartered Axel Springer, owner of a portfolio that includes Germany’s Bild and Die Welt, as well as the digital outlets Politico and Business Insider. If the Brexiteers are feeling queasy about receiving their marching orders from Berlin, they are not showing it publicly.
The sale, if concluded, will bring years of confusion and drift to an end. Previous owners, the Barclay family, lost control when an outstanding debt of £1.2 billion was called in by Lloyds Bank in 2023.
It looked for a time as though the new owners would be RedBird IMI, a US-Emirati consortium backed by Abu Dhabi’s sheikh Mansour bin Zayed. But opposition, including from writers on the Telegraph’s own pages, to letting the 171-year-old paper fall into Gulf state hands led the then conservative government to pass legislation banning foreign state entities from owning more than 15 per cent of British newspapers.
For a while, it appeared that DMGT, owner of the Daily Mail and controlled by Lord Rothermere, would succeed. But that would have put more than 50 per cent of the UK national newspaper market in the hands of one company, a prospect the regulator declined to entertain. DMGT’s bid stalled, its exclusivity lapsed, and Axel Springer moved in with a £575 million all cash offer that RedBird IMI, desperate to extricate itself from the saga, found irresistible.
[ Real-life ‘Succession’ ends: Lachlan Murdoch takes control and siblings take cashOpens in new window ]
Döpfner has wanted a Fleet Street title for some time. He bid for the Telegraph in 2004 and was in the running, again unsuccessfully, for the Financial Times in 2015. The acquisition of Politico in 2021 for about $1 billion was a statement of intent: Springer wants to be a serious player in English-language news publishing. The Telegraph is the crown jewel that has eluded him until now.
Which raises the obvious question. Why is the broadly pro-EU Springer so keen to acquire not just the flagship of Euroscepticism but of outright Europhobia?
The Telegraph has not exactly moderated its views since 2016. If anything, they have hardened considerably, the paper becoming a reliable organ of post-Brexit grievance culture, always alert for evidence that Brussels, Berlin and Paris have not forgiven Britain for leaving.
Döpfner’s answer, when pressed at an event in February, was studiously vague. “We are believers in centrist politics,” he said. “We think that freedom of speech and freedom of expression is a fundamental part of that. So we should not narrow the corridor of public discussions.” This seems to mean the editorial line is not his immediate concern.
The Telegraph has a reasonably well-developed digital strategy and has been attempting to make inroads into North America for some time. Döpfner is plainly less interested in the apocryphal red-faced colonels from Tunbridge Wells who make up the Telegraph’s core print readership, and more in the potential audience of younger online subscribers who share the Springer group’s broadly centre-right, pro-market, transatlantic outlook.
The ambition is to build a credible and authoritative presence on the anglophone centre-right that straddles both the Channel and the Atlantic.
That sets the stage, at some point, for a direct confrontation with the other great conservative news conglomerate, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. With the Succession-style legal dispute over the family trust now resolved to the 95-year-old’s satisfaction and with Lachlan Murdoch installed as heir apparent, the coming battle for the soul of mainstream anglophone conservatism may prove the defining media story of the decade ahead.
Meanwhile, back in the Telegraph newsroom, there will surely be some interesting conversations. The paper that Boris Johnson helped build into the bible of Brexit, one invented story about bent bananas at a time, will soon be taking its editorial cues, however loosely defined, from a man in Berlin who believes passionately in European co-operation.
Don’t mention the war.