Waiting two decades for another chance to snaffle a prized business acquisition is a luxury not afforded to many executives. The Rothermere family, however, takes a more relaxed approach to time.
While most business boards draw up five-year plans, the Rothermeres, having compiled a feared media empire over more than a century, are used to thinking in terms of generations.
It was in the summer of 2004 that Jonathan Harold Esmond Vere Harmsworth, 4th Viscount Rothermere, the tall, curly haired and immaculately turned out proprietor of the Daily Mail, failed in his bid to acquire the Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph.
By Rothermere’s assessment, the failure delighted Rupert Murdoch because it would have created a stable of rightwing newspapers powerful enough to rival the “unique political leverage” of Murdoch’s own titles, then comprising the Times, Sunday Times, the Sun and News of the World.
The softly spoken Rothermere, however, was able to play a longer game. The Telegraph titles were again put up for sale in 2023. Since then, two prospective owners have come and gone, both after internal Telegraph revolts over their suitability. Rothermere has now swooped.
In the process, the 57-year-old has reaffirmed his family’s obsession with British newspapers, after his forebears bought, sold and smashed together some of the biggest titles of their day.
“Lord Rothermere has got a business head, but he’s not sharply business minded,” said Alex DeGroote, a media analyst who has previously worked closely with Daily Mail and General Trust (DMGT). “This sounds a bit cheesy, but he’s genuinely passionate about journalism. I suspect internally, they’ve wanted to unite media businesses that serve centre-right audiences for decades.”
Huge issues remain before the hereditary peer’s DMGT group can clinch the titles. Alongside the competition and media plurality concerns, Telegraph insiders are asking how he will stump up the £500m valuation. However, Rothermere’s hopes of creating a conservative media powerhouse have been rekindled.
It was a bold bid for a proprietor who prides himself on staying behind the scenes, often noting his willingness to let the pugnacious and often brutal views of the Daily Mail contradict his own gentler, more pro-European conservatism.
With the Rothermeres, however, media acquisitions are a family affair. A portrait of Alfred Harmsworth, his great-great-uncle who founded the Daily Mail in 1896, dominates Rothermere’s office. One of his earliest memories was of his father, Vere, taking him to the hot-metal newspaper presses.
A young Jonathan would be included in conversations about the difficult start for the Mail on Sunday in 1982. He remembers the stress of the vicious battle in 1987 between the London Daily News and his family’s Evening Standard, which he later sold.
Rothermere himself flirted with journalism, working as a subeditor and reporter on the Sunday Mail in Scotland, before concentrating on the business side of his family’s group. When his father died of a heart attack in 1998, Rothermere is said to have had about 20 minutes upon returning home from the hospital before company calls began, in effect starting his chairing of DMGT, aged 30.
He has previously sold off profitable parts of the business to refocus on the Mail and other newspaper assets. The Telegraph bid is the latest sign of his keenness to reaffirm the family’s media stronghold. “This is a 20-year plus target acquisition,” said a former DMGT executive. “He doesn’t want the Mail as the only newspaper asset he leaves for his son Vere.”
Rothermere’s decision to take DMGT private in 2021 has also made the Telegraph pursuit easier. “I don’t have to justify myself to anybody,” he said shortly after the decision.
The long pursuit of the Telegraph does not change the fact that the Mail will always be his first love. Favoured figures from the title are invited to his country estate. “He’s a Mail man, through and through,” said an acquaintance.
So what does this Mail man want with the Telegraph, whose rightwing politics have, to some critics, increasingly become even more astringent than those of the Mail? Radical surgery is not on the cards in the short term. “I would not have turned it tabloid,” Rothermere said, in a rare public reflection on his failed 2004 purchase. “The Telegraph is not the Daily Mail.”
He is targeting growth for both titles in the US, where the Wall Street Journal is relatively unopposed as a national title on the centre right. He also believes the Mail, still primarily driven by advertising and the newsstand, can learn from the Telegraph’s more subscription-based model.
In fact, the family’s involvement in the Telegraph has already begun; Rothermere’s daughter is a business reporter at the title.
It also hosts an extended Daily Mail family. Chris Evans, the Telegraph’s editor, is a former Mail executive. He is one of a series of editors across the British media who learned at the knee of Paul Dacre, the uncompromising former Mail editor who worked with Rothermere and his father.
Intervening to change the Telegraph’s politics would be out of character. Dacre, still editor-in-chief at DMG Media, told the Guardian that neither Rothermere nor his father interfered editorially.
“That is the main reason why I turned down very enticing offers to edit the Times and the Telegraph,” he said. “Frankly, I simply didn’t believe that Rupert Murdoch or [the former Telegraph proprietor] Conrad Black would give me that freedom. It’s difficult to overstate how valuable that freedom is to an editor.
“Fleet Street is littered with the corpses of sacked editors who, amid crashing circulations, tried to please their proprietors rather than their readers. The Rothermeres have always understood that. It’s a sacred principle for them that editors are given total editorial autonomy, with the brutally clear understanding that they are dismissed if they produce poor papers.”
Dacre said the hands-off approach came at a cost for Rothermere. “It’s no secret that his own political views were, and are, sometimes at odds with the Mail’s,” he said. “Columnists, news stories, diary items and the paper’s sometimes controversial editorial position would not infrequently cause him embarrassment with his friends and social circle. He never once complained and I cannot tell you how much I admired such fortitude.
“Despite this, he has always enjoyed the company of journalists and counts some as friends. And, yes, he has this extraordinary passion for newspapers which I believe you need if you want to own them because they are irrational beasts that defy normal business logic.
“After the launches of the Mail on Sunday, Metro and MailOnline, the Rothermeres lost countless millions over many years before turning a shilling. And of course, the company lost eye-watering sums on the Standard before reluctantly selling it.”
Another former national newspaper editor was more cynical: “It’s easy not to interfere with the editor if you largely agree with what they put out,” they said.
Rothermere’s light touch approach is perhaps again informed by family history. They have been dogged by criticism over his great-grandfather’s support for fascism and Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts movement in the pages of the Daily Mail in the 1930s.
As for who would edit the Telegraph under his ownership, Rothermere has explicitly praised Evans in a statement on the Telegraph takeover. While that may signal Evans is a sure thing to stay in post, it is also an understandable gesture, given that the guns of the Telegraph’s newsroom have been turned on previous suitors.
With British politics seemingly sliding to the right, there are inevitable political concerns about uniting the Mail and Telegraph at a time when both have been boosting coverage of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party.
Many liberal politicians believe the Mail’s abrasive style has become even starker in recent times, pointing to its championing of talking points pushed by Farage on immigration and the “woke” agenda. Some believe the Telegraph has undergone an even more radical shift, often running radical-right opinion pieces that go beyond those of the Mail.
Tim Walker, a former Telegraph diarist, contrasted its current guise with the staid, establishment-friendly paper overseen by the editor Bill Deedes in the 1970s and 80s. “The Telegraph is now less interested in news and more interested in comment,” he said. “It’s become a very shouty paper. Perhaps Dacre, as a news man, might change that.”
Senior Labour figures are concerned, along with the Liberal Democrats. “Concentrating so much agenda-setting power in the hands of so few would set a deeply concerning precedent,” said Anna Sabine, the Lib Dem culture spokesperson. The former Conservative cabinet minister David Davis is also opposed.
Dacre argued that Rothermere’s papers were already more diverse than most realise. “Remember, the Standard’s readers were upmarket, liberal and metropolitan and espoused views that were diametrically opposed to the Daily Mail’s,” he said.
“For their part, the Mail and Mail on Sunday backed different sides in the Brexit referendum. The Metro was deliberately designed to be apolitical in order to appeal to the young and the i Paper, whose editorial budget was increased by Jonathan after he bought it, couldn’t be more different from the Mail.
“Today, the British media landscape is unrecognisable from a decade ago. British journalism is in a sad and parlous state. The regional and local press is dying. Several Fleet Street papers are a shadow of what they were. And it’s my hope, indeed my prayer, that the regulators now understand and recognise this.”
There are numerous questions about how someone even with Rothermere’s resources has the cash. Most media analysts believe that a more representative price tag for the titles is in the region of £350m, but Rothermere is willing to pay a premium.
DMGT does not have a ready £500m, the price apparently insisted upon by RedBird IMI as it seeks to recoup the loan that gained it control of the titles two years ago.
Rothermere’s previous potential bid for the Telegraph in 2023 involved backers from Qatar. He has developed links in the Middle East, where his events business is performing strongly. In May, he was spotted among delegates with Donald Trump on a visit to Doha.
However, his company has said there will be “no foreign state investment or capital” in the deal, to head off any potential investigation ordered by the culture secretary, Lisa Nandy, under the new laws limiting foreign state ownership. It is understood the plan is to own the Telegraph outright, rather than lead a consortium.
Telegraph staff have numerous other questions. Will RedBird, the fund involved in previous bids, have a role? Will loans lined up for those bids be deployed? Is Rothermere actually paying £500m?
Waiting 20 years has helped Rothermere in some respects. The digital revolution means his team will tell regulators the new group will not be competing with other newspapers, but with the likes of Meta and Google. Meanwhile, the Labour government is pressuring regulators to act in a more “pro-growth” manner.
“Go back five or 10 years and a Mail/Telegraph deal would have been unlikely to go through, and you wouldn’t have seen Comcast [the owner of Sky] look to try and buy ITV’s broadcasting business,” said Becket McGrath, a partner at the law firm Euclid Law. “But deals that historically would not have got through are being done. The [Competition and Markets Authority] is still having a close look, but it is being more flexible with remedies and solutions.”
Some speculate Rothermere may have to offload other titles. That could be painful. He has a personal attachment to Metro. The idea for a London freesheet was first dreamed up by his father, who gave him the task of delivering it.
There have been recent cuts at Metro, which some staff fear is a precursor to a sale. The i Paper also underwent a recent restructure. DMGT figures still feel confident they have a good case for taking on the Telegraph without offloading other titles.
Rothermere has promised to keep the Telegraph and Mail titles editorially separate, regarding them as serving different audiences – broadsheet and mid-market. However, there are concerns inside both titles over cuts and the longer-term plans, given the state of the newspaper industry.
Again, the family has shown a willingness to take drastic action when required. When Rothermere’s father was trying to rescue an ailing Daily Mail in 1971, he merged it with the Daily Sketch, brutally sacking hundreds of journalists in the process. Among them was Barry Norman, subsequently the BBC’s film critic. Walter Terry, the Mail’s political correspondent, was asked to hand out the redundancy letters because everybody liked him.
The Mail made internal redundancies earlier this year, following greater integration of the paper and online product.
However, DeGroote said there were huge backroom savings to be found before newsrooms were touched. “I don’t think they’re going to slash and burn at all, because the journalism is quite different across the two brands. I don’t see there being huge personnel cuts. But the back end of any media organisation will have meaningful procurement benefits.”
Nandy has requested that DMGT and RedBird IMI submit the proposed deal to the government within three weeks, but the outstanding issues will ensure the saga rumbles on well into next year.
“A company that owns the Mail and the Telegraph would have the scale to give both papers a better chance of surviving,” said Dacre. “But, even then, such a company would be a pygmy compared to the giant internet platforms and the BBC from whom most people today get their news. And that news is indisputably, I would argue, presented through a liberal prism. Now that’s a monopoly the regulators would do well to address.”
Vere, 31, Rothermere’s eldest son, is already being groomed to take control of the family empire, holding a senior role in DMGT’s media business. Whether his responsibilities will include control of the Telegraph is the next great chapter in the Rothermere media saga.