In case you hadn’t noticed, The Telegraph has gone bonkers. Completely batshit.
Once, it was the grown-up voice of British Conservatism — stiff upper lip, officer class, snobbish but sensible. Now it prints provably false nonsense in a tone of shrieking hysteria designed to farm clicks, likes, and shares.
In the last year alone, The Telegraph has had to issue 88 corrections and apologies. Some of them are truly absurd.
Manufactured Outrage, Fake Headlines
Take this article:
It triggered three separate corrections. Or this one:
That needed two apologies. And this one?
That one had to be pulled altogether. Made-up from top to bottom.
The subjects of the articles that needed correction illustrates the obsessions of the Telegraphs new owners:
There was supposed to be a second Leveson Inquiry to look into press ownership and accountability after the phone-hacking scandal. But the Conservative Government kicked it into the long grass. In the meantime, papers are scrambling to appear cleaner than they are — issuing corrections and apologies to avoid a more serious reckoning under a future Labour Government.
But here’s the catch: the lies go viral, the corrections don’t.
Journalism Without Standards
Social media is eating journalism alive. Emotional, button-pushing content performs better than facts. It may be false, but it feels true — more exciting, more vivid, more flattering to your sense of self than the real world, which is boring, complex, and humbling.
This kind of journalism feeds on loneliness, offering a sense of belonging, of danger, of purpose. You’re not just reading the news — you’re part of a movement. An army of the aggrieved.
Follow the Money: Ownership and Influence
The rot set in as ownership changed. For decades, The Telegraph was the property of the Barclay Brothers — secretive, tax-avoiding neo-feudalists holed up on a Channel Island like some kind of plutocratic Dracula cosplay.
They lost the paper in a row with creditors, and it was bought by a US private equity outfit called RedBird, still mid-takeover after two years. One of their investors is Sheikh Mansour of the UAE royal family. There are rumours that some of the takeover funds may have come via Chinese state-linked sources.
The Labour Government, to their credit, has tightened the law on foreign control of British media. But The Telegraph’s descent — its growing obsession with anti-immigrant and anti-Government culture war stories — neatly coincides with this shift in ownership.
They’re not the only ones. GB News loses nearly £1 million a week, and is propped up by Legatum, a Dubai-based fund with curious links to Russia.
The Collapse of Conservative Flexibility
This isn’t just about dodgy media barons. It’s part of a broader ideological rupture on the right — a civil war within British Conservatism itself.
The British establishment — schools, banks, civil service, the army, Oxbridge, the City — is deeply conservative. But it’s a conservatism that flexes. That bends with the wind. It resists change, then co-opts it.
This is why the Tory Party could oppose suffrage and still give us the first female and first ethnic minority PMs. It’s not progress — it’s survival instinct. It’s how the establishment stays in charge.
The last great exponent of this was David Cameron: Etonian, rich, and cynical enough to call himself a “liberal conservative”. Social liberalism, green credentials — whatever it took to detoxify the brand and keep the party in power.
The Telegraph matched this tone: pompous, dull, backward-looking — but ultimately pragmatic. It was anti-ideological. A weather vane for the shires.
Enter the Authoritarian Right
Then came the new breed. Emerging first in the US, and spreading here like Japanese knotweed.
These hard-right conservatives didn’t just hate liberalism — they hated the very idea of compromise. To them, making peace with feminism, anti-racism, climate change or economic fairness wasn’t political strategy — it was betrayal.
They weren’t just anti-liberal. They were anti-democratic.
They had their own weird canon: low taxes, sure, but also white nationalism, climate denial, Islamophobia, eugenics, and an end-of-days style paranoia lifted from American evangelical culture.
This wasn’t a grassroots rebellion. This was a splinter group of the elite — a breakaway establishment faction, at war with both liberals and pragmatic conservatives.
Silicon Valley Joins the Party
And then came the tech billionaires — the “libertarian” elite who believe democracy is just an obstacle to their whims.
They didn’t care about tradition or nationhood. But they saw in this hard-right movement a vehicle for raw, unaccountable power. Together they developed a winning formula: disinformation, data manipulation, and electoral interference. No need to compromise. Just cheat.
This axis of billionaires and authoritarians gave birth to a new kind of conservatism: centralised, statist, illiberal, and dishonest.
Brexit: The Establishment’s Civil War
Brexit was when this factional war spilled into the open.
Cameron — pragmatic, patrician — led Remain. Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage — showmen for the authoritarian right — led Leave, backed by foreign money and high-tech manipulation.
This was a coup within the establishment. Not populism from below, but a palace revolt from within.
And they won.
Johnson’s fall and Truss’s rise marked the point of no return. The hardliners were now in charge.
The Tories Are Spent. Reform Is the New Right.
Today’s Conservatives are a hollowed-out shell. The old guard — pragmatic, managerial, flexible — have been purged.
In their place is Reform UK: the ideological hard-right party now occupying the Tory Party’s old network of donors, media allies, and influence. The ghost has left the building.
The Telegraph’s Madness Is a Mirror
The Telegraph was once a dull, snobbish weather report for Tory England. Now it’s a culture war tabloid shrieking into the void.
Its transformation is symbolic of a larger shift. This is no longer journalism. It’s propaganda. It no longer cares if stories are true or false — only whether they serve the cause.
And when truth no longer matters, neither does right or wrong.
I suspect that Islamophobia is far more prevalent among the wide British Right than white supremacy, and the Conservative Party’s recent leaders seem like they are trying to leverage that disparity to keep the party relevant in an age of rising Faragism. Neither the current Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch nor her predecessor Rishi Sunak are white, but both come from ethnic groups (Nigerian Yoruba or Hindu Indian) that have their own grudges against Islam and Muslims.
Shortly after becoming Conservative leader, Kemi Badenoch said: “I find it interesting that everybody defines me as being Nigerian. I identify less with the country than with the specific ethnicity [Yoruba]. That’s what I really am. I have nothing in common with the people from the north of the country, the Boko Haram where the Islamism is, those were our ethnic enemies and yet you end up being lumped in with those people.’”
I’m not so sure. When you dig below the surface a lot of the language about asylum seekers; “invasion” “fighting age men” is drawn straight from white nationalist conspiracy theories. It is an interesting phenomenon that the Conservative Party became much more diverse, right at the time that it was becoming much more nativist. I suspect that if Sunak and Badenoch had started their careers a few years later their ascent to the top would have been an awful lot harder. They were both, I think, beneficiaries of Cameron’s drive to make the Tories more representative of modern Britain. In order to get to the top both of them had to support policies which meant their own families wouldn’t have been allowed into the UK. By making it about Muslims made it easier for them.
I also think that Britain is still gripped by Edwardian Imperialist racism. The Empire wasn’t just racist, it has a hierarchy of races, white protestant Englishmen at the top, the other races strictly ordered from top to bottom. This is why the Telegraph was much more comfortable with Sunak as PM (a Brahmin Hindu) than it would be with Sadiq Khan, and supports Farage over Badenoch. I also suspect that is why many on the left prefer the Arab cause over Israel.
Is the “Torygraph” really supporting Farage over Badenoch: if that were indeed the case then that would confirm my suspicion in a really vivid way, that the Tory press is turning into a Reform press!
And while the late-Victorian-thru-Edwardian British Empire certainly had a fetish for “martial races” (which amongst other things made them see Nigerian Muslims more favourably than Christians) I though that was more of an aristocratic thing, and an unlikely explanation for how so many on the left came to support the Palestinian cause.
Yes, the “Torygraph” really has switched to Reform. Farage has picked up the whole network of influence money and preferment that the Conservatives spent centuries building up
Years ago I used to go to meetings of Palestinian Solidarity Campaign. Their view of Israel and the Middle East was soaked in nostalgic racism and white saviour complex
Aren’t the people who complain about a “millionaire exodus” effectively arguing that the UK should be a tax haven, while overlooking that it is far too big to be one?
Tax havens live off the taxes paid by their wealthy foreign residents, but (by definition) they have to have tax rates that are substantially lower than of other countries. This means that they can only exist as parasites on other economies much larger than themselves, which imposes an upper limit on their size.
Switzerland (population 8.9 million) is likely close to that upper limit, while most (even Ireland at 5.3 million) are substantially lower than even that.
I wouldn’t be so sure about the UK not being a tax haven. The City of London links into a network of tax havens around the world, some in the channel islands, some in the Caribbean. A massive industry of financial institutions, law firms, private schools, estate agents, michelin starred chefs, art dealers exists to service their clients. For at least a century The City of London has been the home for money whose owners are worried that the people they took it from might try and take it back. Indian Maharajahs, Arab Oil Sheiks, Greek Colonels, Latin American Presidentes, African Dictators, Russian oligarchs, all kept their ill gotten gain in the UK. London was one of the key global points where dark money and regular financial flows could interact.
Two things have changed – firstly Governments have started looking at the this wealth as a source of tax revenue, and secondly that the owners of this money (particularly from the Gulf and Russia) have started to infiltrate long established networks of politics, power and influence to start and take control over the direction of British politics. The Brexit vote as a key moment, and the current attempt to force the Government to scrap it’s Net Zero plans to boost the economy and power of Russian and Gulf states is the most recent
It is indeed reasonable for London to be a tax haven (that’s what the whole “Singapore-on-Thames” thing was all about) but it is not possible for the entire UK to be one.
Good point about how the UK Right has become more climate change denialist due to the influence of money from foreign petrostates.