There is some sense of relief at the Telegraph, where the newspaper’s sale appears to be limping on despite concerns buyers were struggling to attract investment. The US investor RedBird Capital Partners, the majority partner in the consortium, is due to send its proposals to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport (DCMS) within days. Joint investor International Media Investments (IMI) of Abu Dhabi will be limited to a 15 per cent stake after new legislation was introduced capping foreign state ownership in the British press.
But the DCMS could yet trigger a Competition and Markets Authority inquiry. The human rights groups Reporters Without Borders and Index on Censorship are also calling for the sale to be stopped because of what it claims are links between RedBird Capital and the Chinese state (RedBird denies this). As one Telegraph staffer says: “We’ve been stuck in limbo for two years now – nothing would surprise us about how much more of a car crash this sale might turn out to be.”
The US podcaster Candace Owens – whose British husband, George Farmer, is a member of the GB News board – is scraping together the cash to fight the defamation lawsuit brought by Emmanuel Macron and his wife, Brigitte. They are taking action against Owens for repeatedly claiming Brigitte was born a man and is actually her brother, Jean-Michel Trogneux. (That Brigitte’s birth was reported in a local paper and there are multiple pictures of her family seem somehow irrelevant to Owens and her 6.9 million followers on X.)
Owens has resorted to flogging $23 #FreeEmmanuel T-shirts to help with the legal fees after her frequent appeals to President Trump to defend her have failed. Still, there is the hope her father-in-law, the former Tory party treasurer and metals trader Michael Farmer – believed to be worth upwards of £150m – may pitch in.
It’s almost the semi-finals of the latest series of MasterChef, a bizarre season in which disgraced hosts Gregg Wallace and John Torode still appear, while two contestants are missing after they demanded to be edited out. And while the BBC is keeping very quiet about it, the new series is just a fortnight from starting filming. “It’s business as usual,” explains one insider, “although the BBC [is] desperately hoping no one notices.” After the misconduct allegations against Wallace (and a complaint against Torode for racist language), there was much hand-wringing by the broadcaster over whether the show could continue. In reality, there was never any question that it would – largely because it only this year finished building a purpose-built MasterChef set at a multimillion-pound development in Birmingham as part of its “Across the UK” scheme to divert funding out of London.
Even stalwart Sun staff stifled a gasp when they saw Lucy Connolly’s words across the front page: “I was PM’s political prisoner for a year.” As one Sun staffer says: “It may have been a heavy sentence for a young mum, but this isn’t Haiti.” Wherever we are, it’s far from where we were 13 months ago when the Sun backed Starmer, saying: “It’s time for a change.”
Connolly called for people to “set fire” to “all” hotels housing asylum seekers after the Southport attack and was jailed after pleading guilty to incitement of violence. Yet, bastion of law and order, the Telegraph, marked her release with an interview that described her as: “Delicately pretty, with a heart-shaped face and liquid-chocolate eyes, Connolly came across as warm and bubbly – and in no way racist.” This, despite Connolly signing off the offending X post: “If that makes me racist, so be it.”
There has been much celebration over at the Guardian after its victory in a four-year libel case brought by the actor and director Noel Clarke. The Doctor Who star sued over reports in which 20 women accused him of bullying and harassment, including unwanted touching or groping, sexually inappropriate behaviour on set, the covert filming of a naked audition and sharing of explicit pictures without consent.
Huge resource was poured into fighting the claim as Clarke tried to force the title into settling – at one point hiking his claim to £70m. But Justice Karen Steyn found the Guardian team had succeeded in establishing both its truth and public interest defences. The Guardian editor-in-chief, Kath Viner, tells me the judgement is “very positive for the media as a whole” – a delight surely shared by those defenders of free speech at the Mail? Or perhaps not… In 2022, the year after the Guardian published its investigation, the Mail ran a 3,000-word interview with Clarke in which he called the paper’s reporting “modern McCarthyism”.
Journalists at Reach, owner of the Mirror, Express, Daily Star and more than 100 other titles await the latest fall of the guillotine with a new round of redundancies to be announced in coming days. Staff fear recently introduced digital traffic targets that rate performance by the number of clicks will determine whether they are for the chop in the latest round. As one concerned journo says: “It’s great news for those writing rage-baitey Meghan Markle-type stories… and looking pretty bleak for the rest of us.”
Snout Line: Got a story? Write to tips@newstatesman.co.uk
[See also: North Korea’s guide to going nuclear]
Content from our partners
Related
This article appears in the 27 Aug 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Gentle Parent Trap