Incredible timing for the Daily Telegraph this weekend, as its staff still reel from the shock that the second world war-obsessed paper will soon be the plaything of a German firm.
Last week 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.
Suggested Reading
Germans snap up the Telegraph from under the Mail’s nose
Then on Saturday – the very day after the announcement – the cover of the Telegraph’s Review section featured… a large picture of Adolf Hitler and the headline ‘Why would anyone pay to own this?’.
The feature was about the market for Nazi art, rather than the struggling paper’s own woes, but it did seem remarkably prescient, especially as such sections tend to go to press earlier than the main part of a weekend newspaper. Still, it’s the question everyone’s asking!
Social media wags, meanwhile, 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”.
Most popular
How Epstein used sex as a weapon
Iran’s war strategy – to create chaos
Morrissey returns.. and heaven knows he’s mythical now
What Ken Burns’s new documentary tells us about America
