‘Expect the unexpected” is the bland but pointed advice given by the evasive editor of the Daily Beast to the bemused William Boot, accidental protagonist in Evelyn Waugh’s deathless Fleet Street satire, Scoop. This has turned out to be durable counsel when observing the ins and outs of newspaper proprietors: much that is solid has a tendency to melt.
So the Spectator (for which I worked in the late 1990s under the Telegraph Group ownership of Conrad Black) had a long period under the sway of the Barclay family, which has come to a debt-laden crashing close. The weekly magazine has been sold for a reassuringly high £100m to the hedge funder Sir Paul Marshall, after an Abu Dhabi-backed bid to buy it collapsed amid concerns that state-backed entities should not own UK news outlets.
