Germans snap up the Telegraph from under the Mail's nose

Last month Rats in a Sack reported how the Daily Mail was getting nervous about a rival publishing giant sneaking in and buying the Telegraph titles from under its nose. Now, the Mail’s worst fears have been realised – the Telegraph is on the verge of a new owner and, even more hilariously than the Mail’s botched bid is the idea that the second world war-obsessed Torygraph will soon be the plaything of a German firm!

Axel Springer, which owns a string of top Teutonic titles including Bild and Die Zeit, has agreed to purchase the Telegraph Media Group in a deal costing £575 million.

The Daily Mail and General Trust had proposed to buy the company in a £500 million takeover, but the government ordered an investigation on public interest and competition grounds. In the interim, Springer nipped in, with chief executive Mathias Döpfner saying he wanted to “preserve the distinctive character and legacy” of the right wing paper. The firm had previously tried to buy it more than 20 years ago.

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Rats in a Sack

The Mail, fearing the worst, last month launched a hit-job on Springer, with the Mail on Sunday, whose readers are ordinarily not much concerned with the HR policies of German publishing groups, setting its chief attack dog Glen Owen on it.

Under the headline “German publishing group that supports a united Europe launches bid to buy The Telegraph”, Owen told readers how Springer “backs a United Europe” and enlisted former Conservative leader Iain Duncan Smith to rail against “the prospect of a pro-Brussels media giant owning The Telegraph”.

But now the deal is set to go through – and social media wags have been using the New World’s Allister Heath Headline Generator to imagine just how the Sunday Telegraph editor, an extremely strange columnist for the daily edition, might react to it.

Examples include “Why Germans buying the Telegraph is the final, tragic end of the British dream” and “Why German ownership of the Telegraph is the final, fatal symptom of Britain’s moral collapse”. Strangely, though, swivel-eyed Al’s actual take on the purchase may be even weirder than that. Gott im Himmel!