Liberals should care about the collapse of serious conservative journalism. Not because the Spectator and the Daily Telegraph were ever friends to progressive politics (they weren’t), but because a functioning liberal democracy depends on a press that engages honestly with reality across the political spectrum. What has replaced these publications’ particular brand of reactionary journalism is something considerably worse: reactionary journalism stripped of any pretence to intellectual seriousness. And that is bad for everyone.
Let us be clear about what these publications actually were. The Spectator spent much of the twentieth century providing intellectual cover for policies that entrenched inequality and treated the interests of the powerful as synonymous with the national interest. The Telegraph was the unabashed voice of privilege: the paper of the officer class, the Home Counties, the quietly certain that things were arranged more or less as they ought to be. To mourn their decline is not to pretend they were ever on the right side of history. It is simply to note that the seeds of today’s dysfunction were present in the editorial culture all along: a culture that prioritised tribal comfort over truth, and consistently failed to hold power to account when that power wore a blue rosette.
The lurch, and what drove it
And yet something has demonstrably changed. For the Spectator, the decisive rupture came with its 2024 sale to Paul Marshall, a hedge fund manager, prominent evangelical, and close associate of the National Conservatism movement, and the owner of GB News, a channel that functions less as journalism and more as a continuous political rally for Nigel Farage and Reform UK. Marshall paid £100 million for the magazine and installed Michael Gove as editor. The publication that once required its contributors to at least gesture at engaging with evidence has narrowed into something more nakedly ideological: anxious, combative, and increasingly indistinguishable from the culture war content that saturates right-wing media globally.
The Telegraph’s story is one of prolonged ownership chaos. The Barclay family’s grip weakened, a takeover by an Abu Dhabi-backed consortium collapsed amid government concerns about foreign state control, and the paper has been through a protracted sale process involving RedBird IMI, RedBird Capital, and ultimately the Daily Mail group. Through all this uncertainty, the editorial instinct narrowed to pure survival: chase the audience, amplify the outrage, keep the clicks coming.
The economics of manufactured grievance
Digital publishing destroyed the old business model. What remained were subscriptions and digital advertising, and digital advertising rewards engagement above everything else. Engagement is most reliably generated not by the measured or the genuinely informative, but by the enraging and the relentlessly tribe-affirming.
The result is a state of permanent performative outrage: a daily rotation of stories about transgender people in sport, net zero zealots destroying the countryside, woke institutions betraying Britain, and progressive elites conspiring against ordinary decent folk. A reader who consumes either publication daily does not emerge better informed. They emerge angrier, more convinced their way of life is under coordinated attack, more certain that anyone who disagrees is either a fool or an enemy. That is not journalism. It is a radicalisation pipeline, one that happens to be written in elegant prose and sold on the prestige of centuries-old mastheads.
Why liberals should care
This is where the argument matters most for Liberal Democrats. The culture war agenda being amplified by these publications does not target liberals incidentally. It targets liberal pluralism deliberately. The values these publications now exist to undermine are precisely the values liberalism is built on: tolerance of difference, good faith engagement with complexity, the idea that democratic life requires us to share a common factual reality even when we disagree profoundly about what to do with it.
The Spectator, whatever its political sins, once maintained a literary and arts culture that connected it to a serious intellectual world beyond Westminster. That tradition no longer anchors the magazine’s identity. The editorial centre of gravity has shifted entirely toward identity mobilisation. A space for considered thought has been hollowed out in favour of managed outrage.
A functioning democracy needs journalism that holds power to account across the ideological spectrum. The Spectator and Telegraph have abandoned even the pretence of that function. Their readers deserve to be informed rather than inflamed. And a liberal democracy functions better when even its most conservative voices are tethered, however loosely, to something resembling reality. These publications have cut that tether, and all of us, not just conservatives, are poorer for it.
* Tanya Park is a Lib Dem County, Borough & Town councillor in Eastleigh, Hampshire and writes at A Just Society, a liberal policy project making the case for radical progressive policies grounded in liberal principles.
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10 Comments
I understand a German organisation has moved into the fray of purchasing them. If true,will that change their outlook?
I think we need to give more information about Paul Marshall as the comments in this article do not give a full picture.
Paul Marshall was a member of the Liberal Democrats until 2015 before leaving due to his support for Brexit. Prior to that he had been a researcher for Charles Kennedy, stood for parliament for the SDPi-Liberal Alliance in 1987, and donated hundreds of thousands to the Party. He is also well known for his philanthropy, topping the Sunday Times Giving List in 2024 having given over £145 Million to various charities over a 12 month period.
I notice you describe Marshall as a ‘prominent evangelical’ – yes he is a committed member of the Church of England, but I’m sure that being a committed Christian is not something we would attack him for.
So I have no problem with the Spectator or the Daily Telegraph selecting stories to report that they believe should be in the public domain. Indeed, it helps to balance out some other media outlets that similarly select news to report that they belief supports their agenda.
The Spectator, which used to contain interesting articles, albeit from a centre right perspective, is now Reform UK’s house magazine.
Thanks, Joan. The Marshall Liberal Democrat history is a fair context and worth including, and you’re right that I didn’t mention it. Though I’d gently suggest that the trajectory from Charles Kennedy researcher to owner of GB News and installer of Michael Gove at the Spectator is itself rather telling about the journey the British right has been on.
On the evangelical point: I’m not criticising his faith, and I’d ask you not to suggest I am. Describing someone as a prominent evangelical in the context of the National Conservatism movement is a political observation, not a religious one. NatCon is an explicitly political project, and Marshall’s role in it is well documented and relevant to understanding his editorial intentions.
But I have to be direct about the ‘balance’ argument, because I think it significantly undersells what’s happening here. There’s a meaningful difference between editorial selection, which every publication does, and the systematic manufacture of grievance that the piece describes. A publication that runs a considered piece arguing against net zero policy is making an editorial choice. A publication that runs a daily diet of stories designed to convince readers that trans people, immigrants, and progressives are conspiring to destroy Britain is doing something qualitatively different. Calling that ‘balance’ lets it off rather lightly.
Paul Marshall may well have given “hundreds of thousands” to the Liberal Democrats, but that was probably loose change given his net worth at the time. He has since given MILLIONS to prop up GB News.
When he was with the Lib Dems he was a malign influence seeking to move the party to the right, fortunately he only partially succeeded.
I would like that party hierarchy to come clean about what this individual did donate, and what policies he tried to change in the 2000s. If we try to cover this up it may well come out in the open anyway in time, so better a little embarrassment now, than a lot later.
@ Steve Conner
I find your insinuations of conspiracy a little odd. I would expect Marshall’s donations were all declared as required by the law at the time. £200k is the figure available on the Internet, together with £1 million to the Centre for Reform think tank. The Orange Book and its promotion of market solutions and personal choice is well known, as is the identity of its authors.
It is perfectly reasonable for Liberal Democrats to look to personal choice and market forces as possible solutions to social problems – those are liberal things. I suggest the party is at its most creative when when social liberalism and economic liberalism engage constructively.
The test as to whether those solutions are acceptable must be whether they are compatible with the pre-amble to the constitution – and not whether they were advanced by an (extremely wealthy) member of the party who subsequently moved his support elsewhere.
Given the UK’s current levels of public debt and the public’s view that they are over taxed we urgently need policy solutions to the UK’s problems that don’t need too much money. The market is a powerful tool that should not be overlooked.
The pollical market place to the “left” is pretty crowded right now – it’s the centre that is crying out to be occupied so an allergic reaction to anything “right” – although understandable with Farage on the loose – may not be wise.
“A publication that runs a daily diet of stories designed to convince readers that trans people, immigrants, and progressives are conspiring to destroy Britain is doing something qualitatively different.”
I’d call it a propaganda sheet, but the content is still editorial choice. And as much as we may dislike it, the idea that “progressives have been conspiring to destroy Britain” has been a staple of the likes of the Daily Mail and Telegraph forever. See the famous Yes Minister sketch.
Let’s not get hung up on what we don’t know about Paul Marshall. There is plenty that we do.
Paul Marshall bankrolled the Orange Book, a major and successful project to change the Liberal Democrats from a centre-left party to a right-wing party. What its promoters called the “Clegg Coup” followed it up a few years later. Clegg won the LD leadership on a motherhood-and-apple-pie campaign, then months later, declared himself in favour of “Big Permanent Tax Cuts” – the decimation of welfare, in other words. Then, Cameron helped him put it all into practice. Meanwhile, Marshall stopped claiming to be a liberal, and settled down on the far right.
Since 2010, Britain has been largely run by rich donors, commercial lobbyists, and compliant politicians. Starmer, a plastic politician created by Morgan McSweeney and Josh Simons, is carrying on where Clegg led, pitching to the centre while delivering to the Right. That’s why Gorton and Denton will give a massive vote against the old-established political parties. They have all been rumbled!
@David Allen, “a massive vote against the old-established political parties” is true of so many people today, especially since the expenses scandal of 16 years ago and in many places we Lib Dems are either ignored or seen as part of that establishment. This is why Tanya is right in saying that manufactured grievance by right way media that is removed from reality is an important issue. People are also confused as to who can provide solutions to our problems and no longer turn to their traditional party loyalties; they are in a kind of vacuum as to what to believe. Strong right wing messages repeated many times in these circumstances therefore have a great attraction and their half-truths (or even tiny element of truth) give them credibility.
Mmm, I read The Spectator and enjoy it. It’s not the editorial bent of The Economist or The Guardian (which I also enjoy) but I do like getting another perspective. Though some of their authors are outrage generators (Brendan O’Neil) there is a wider cast that right interesting pieces. Like Tim Shipman who they recently nabbed.