<
https://www.theguardian.com/news/ng-interactive/2026/jul/16/the-dacre-dynasty-how-the-daily-mails-fearsome-former-editor-still-shapes-the-british-press>
"In 1986, 131 years after the
Daily Telegraph was founded, its editor, Max
Hastings, wrote a memo to senior colleagues about the newspaper’s nature and
purpose. “The
Daily Telegraph is … ‘nice’,” he said, “in the business of
reassurance, of providing confirmation each morning for our readers that their
world is looking pretty safe and stable.” He went on: “We are not a strident
campaigning newspaper – our business each day is to seek to give our readers
the fullest possible information about what is happening in the world, and to
suggest what it might mean.”
In practice, under Hastings and many other
Telegraph editors, this ethos
produced a journalism of pervasive but usually understated conservatism: often
focused on the English countryside, the value of hierarchy and tradition, the
pleasures of seasonal pursuits such as foxhunting and gardening, the interests
of farmers and retired military men – and cautionary tales about more reckless
lives gone wrong, often presented through enjoyably detailed reports from the
divorce courts. The Torygraph, as many non-readers called it, could be
inward-looking and “numbingly dull”, says Geoffrey Wheatcroft, the historian of
British conservatism, but it was “thoroughly respectable”. Many of its most
renowned figures, such as Hastings’s predecessor as editor, Bill Deedes, were
“mildness itself”.
Few people say such things about the
Telegraph now. Against strong
competition, it has become one of the angriest rightwing papers in the world.
“Starmer’s Britain is descending into anarcho-tyranny,” claimed a typical
columnist, Allister Heath, also editor of the
Sunday Telegraph, last
September. The same month, another columnist, Allison Pearson, praised the
far-right agitator and convicted criminal Tommy Robinson for his “rough-diamond
charisma”. Last December, the headline of a column by another regular
contributor, Sean Thomas, read: “I prefer foreign autocracies to Labour’s
Britain”.
The paper’s news coverage, once revered for its quirky stories and rich picture
of Britain, has become increasingly partisan, polemical and hyperbolic. “Labour
to unleash up to 12,000 shoplifters,” claimed a front-page headline in April,
above a story about new laws on sentencing. Another April front page warned
that “[Angela] Rayner’s workers’ rights police get power to force their way
into offices”. In 2025, another front page was headlined: “One in 12 in London
is illegal migrant.” After a complaint that the figure was based on an
underestimate of the capital’s population and an artificially wide definition
of “illegal migrant”, the paper was required by the press regulator Ipso to
publish a correction.
A reporter who worked at the
Telegraph from the 2010s until recently told me:
“When I started, you would get handwritten letters from pensioners, telling you
about their garden, about how they dealt with slugs. But as the paper changed,
we got complaints from readers instead: ‘The
Telegraph used to be so nice.
Now it’s so angry.’” A former editor of the paper says: “My private view, like
that of most sensible people, is that the paper is contemptible.” Like the many
other conservative journalists interviewed for this article, he asked to remain
anonymous."
Via Susan ****
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
