I've never been a follower of this paper, but know a lot more about it in recent years since frequenting the Mailwatch forums. I have a close friend who has read it for years and is developing increasingly nutty views regarding things like low energy lightbulbs.

I know it has always been regarded as the Torygraph, and the house newspaper of the Conservative Party, but has it become noticebly more right-wing since the Barclay Brothers bought it?

Would previous owner Conrad Black have given an obvious nutter who treats facts as petty inconvenveniences such as Delingpole a regular column? Printing drivel such as this can't be doing much for its pretensions towards being a paper of record.

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"To the living we owe respect, but to the dead we owe only the truth."
Voltaire

At Leveson today, John Prescott said of the Barclay brothers:

His wife, Barbara Amiel, never let a fact get in the way of a half-baked opinion, especially one about Islam or the BBC. Mark Steyn is full of shit. And I'm sure there were others.

I think the online content has made a difference. When it was just a printed paper, you were limited by space to the number of cunts you could physically fit in. Now, there's room for Hannan, West, Delingpole, Gilligan, Murray, Gardiner, Young, O'Neill, Thompson, Odone and no doubt loads of others I've never read.

There are some OK rightwingers too- Daniel Knowles looks about 14, but can be interesting. Peter Oborne can be excellent. Brogan can be perceptive. There's an economics chap who is sensible too. And Mary Riddell as a token lefty.

My parents got the Telegraph, mum still does, (who knows why, my Dad was Old Labour and Mum always voted Labour apart from Tory in '79 and SDP in '83. They said they liked the crossword ).
I therefore read it from when I was old enough (mid '70s) until I left home (mid '80s) and I've glanced at it ever since when visiting my Mum.
My impression is that it is not so blatantly the Tory house newspaper as it once was. In the eighties Thatcher could do absolutely no wrong in it's eyes, it went off the boil when Major took over and gradually started cosying up to Blair as '97 drew near.
Around the time the Barclays took over (2004), it reverted to conspicuous Tory support, but that may be coincidental as, by then, the general media love affair with Blair was over anyway.
Since around 1990 it has striven to become more populist and shake off it's rather stuffy image. To give you an idea, the only popular culture stories I remember it lowering itself to cover when I was young were Lennon's murder and Live Aid.
It's standards of journalism have also slipped.

So in answer to your question, IMO it's more right wing under the Barclays than it was in the '90s, but less so than it was in the 70s and 80s.

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That subtle admixture of the absurd and the surreally plausible...

Or Israel.

I think Charles Moore made quite a difference. As Hastings said, it would give the Tories the benefit of the doubt. Under Moore, it gave up on Major and backed Redwood. Hastings would have had enough sense not to do that.

Private Eye used to refer to it as the Daily Hellograph.

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Sick Left-wing Zealot.

That was in the '90s when it went downmarket chasing the Mail's readership.

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That subtle admixture of the absurd and the surreally plausible...

Iron out the natural ebb and flow of circulation and The Telegraph always always always under-performs when their lot are in office. The venerable Steve Anderson, Saatchi's head of press buying and certainly no pinko, always reckoned it was because their readers had less to complain about and didn't feel the need to rile themselves in the morning.

Politics aside, Steve was rarely wrong about anything.

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Brigate di Transizione

Well-off blokes in not wanting to pay tax shocker. The Telegraph really does like to work itself into a lather about the 50% rate - you'd never guess it was owned by a pair of tax-dodging weirdos.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/lett ... neurs.html

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Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle.

I've always seen the Telegraph as the paper the Mail thinks it is but isn't, and the Mail as the paper the Telegraph would like to be (for the money/readers) but doesn't want to stoop to because of it's inbuilt broadsheet snobbery.

I assume once Mail readers reach a certain level of income they feel they have to be seen to be buying the Telegraph instead, like shopping at Waitrose and M&S as opposed to Tesco and Sainsbury's.

I think there's more of a dividing line than that. Mail readers tend to graduate to the Express.

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Soppy anti-British, pro-crime, anti-education, pro-immigration, anti-family nonentity

Several bizarre comments on this story about Santorum dropping out of the US Presidential race suggesting that Ron Paul is actually winning the primaries but some unspecified conspiracy is keeping him out. For example:



Hmmmm....

Getting their retaliation in first? Or just preparing the excuses in advance?

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Where there is great doubt, there will be great awakening; small doubt, small awakening, no doubt, no awakening.

That'd be the rigged electroic voting system that put George W Bush into power. Some people really do believe that black is white.

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"To the living we owe respect, but to the dead we owe only the truth."
Voltaire