Who will buy the Telegraph? I’m going to admit that there was a time when I wouldn’t care.
Ah, the fact you do so now, suggests that as you’ve got older, you’ve joined that great drift to the Right, that, in keeping with my middle-aged spread refusing to budge I’m drawn to the land where middle-class comforts are not only allowed but encouraged, where police officers must be restored to the beat, rafts of migrants in the Channel should be repelled, those on benefits have to learn to stand on their own two feet.
Not true. The reason I bother about the ownership of the Telegraph is that I worry about the suppression of free speech. Along with the newspaper, The Spectator might be sold as well. And I am anxious as to where it will end up.You really are a lost cause, if you get your kicks from reading about the exploits of Taki, if Douglas Murray is your thing. To which I can reply: not at all, there’s plenty more in the Spectator than that, when did you last read it?
What concerns me is freedom of expression. Where once I could pick up the Guardian and know there would be room for all manner of views, I don’t anymore. These days, if it’s the broad church I am after, I am best served by those twin bastions of the Right, the Telegraph and the Times, with a weekly dose of Spectator. Once, while working on the Independent, it would have been, of the rest, the Guardian first.
I still write for the Independent. Not the Guardian. Not when it can find no place for Suzanne Moore and Hadley Freeman. Not when it gives the impression of being edited by Kath Viner but with a commissar’s bureau, sitting in judgment alongside. Put a foot wrong, Kath and they will have you. Which, I guess, is why you don’t.
Both Moore and Freeman committed the sin of expressing opinions that ran counter to the paper’s transgender orthodoxy. For that, they were tarred and feathered, chained to a lamppost, then tied to a ducking rope. If they floated, they were in league with the devil; if they sank, they were cleared but by then they’d drowned.
At the Guardian, the punishment for free thinkers, those who might be possessed of thoughts that are not on-message, is banishment
That did not happen, of course. At the Guardian, the punishment for free thinkers, those who might be possessed of thoughts that are not on-message, is banishment. Ostracisation in titles that do not belong, that are to be sneered at and dismissed — something Guardianistas do very well. From their high moral ground, they will watch the downward path of Moore and Freeman. Their values are shot, by daring to speak out on one issue. Henceforth, nothing they can say or do can redeem them.
In Moore’s case, 338 colleagues signed a letter to the editor, complaining about her March 2, 2020 column: “Women must have the right to organise. We will not be silenced.” In it, wrote Moore: “It is said that sex is merely assigned at birth, rather than being a material fact — actually, though, sex is recognisable in the womb (which is what enables foetal sex selection). Sex is not a feeling. Female is a biological classification that applies to all living species.”
Then, “How did we arrive at a situation where there are rising numbers of teenage girls presenting at clinics with gender dysphoria, while some who have transitioned are now regretful and infertile? Male violence is an issue for women, which is why we want single-sex spaces. Vulnerable women in refuges and prisons must be allowed to live in safe environments — the common enemy here is the patriarchy, remember? Women have the right to call out the violent men who rape. We have the right to speak and organise without being told that speech is itself dangerous. You can tell me to ‘die in a ditch, terf’ all you like, as many have for years, but I self-identify as a woman who won’t go down quietly.”
What’s telling, if Moore is to be believed, and I do believe her, is that many people on the paper said in private afterwards that they agreed with her, that they were too afraid to speak out for fear of losing their jobs. Uncowed, Moore continued. She wrote on unherd.com: “My argument to my paper has always been if we don’t have this discussion then the Right will. The Spectator and the Times have covered stories we haven’t, and I have had to write what I wanted to in the Telegraph. Journalism means going into no-go areas. The liberal Left looks not virtuous but naïve.”
That’s why the sale of the Telegraph matters, to the Right, Centre and incredibly, to the Left. Ideally, whoever buys it, I’d like my old Guardian back; I want to read it first.
