Dominic Johnson? Any bells? Nothing? And yet we find Johnson, a party donor now in use as an “investment minister”, playing what he intended to be a decisive role in a media tragicomedy that has set Tory against Tory, peer against peer, and, in an agonising twist, hedge funder against hedge funder: the sale to the United Arab Emirates of the Telegraph.
That newspaper, founded in 1855, is regarded, or disregarded, as a “so-called treasured asset” by Dominic Johnson CBE, as he styles himself on X. A Liz Truss peerage followed Johnson’s gong from David Cameron (coincidentally, he’d lent him a house); perhaps as a never-elected minister Lord Johnson of Lainston considers the civilian designation carries more weight.
Should influential news groups be, like virtually everything else still salvageable from the UK, open to foreign-based ownership? Evgeny Lebedev’s Richmond home is widely considered in this respect to outweigh his father’s service in the KGB. “My view is that we remain an open economy and it’s very important we remain an open economy,” Johnson urged, with all the authority of someone who once ran a hedge fund with Jacob Rees-Mogg.
With his job for life, it may not overly bother Johnson that the culture secretary, Lucy Frazer, has, however, concluded that the UAE’s takeover of a newspaper should differ from its unchallenged acquisition of a football club, real estate, various ports and, possibly, Sizewell C. Last week she issued a public interest intervention notice (PIIN). This will consider the public interest implications of the successful bid for the Telegraph and the Spectator by an investment group backed by the UAE’s ruling family and fronted by an ex-CNN executive called Jeff Zucker (he resigned after failing to disclose a relationship with a colleague), advised by a former head of Ofcom and also featuring Nadim Zahawi. Made in heaven.
Among disappointed bidders for the titles, on sale because of the financial difficulties of their latest owners, the Barclays, are, reportedly, the Murdoch family, the Mail group, and the hedge fund and GB News magnate Paul Marshall. Not remotely that it invalidates their points, but criticism of the UAE sale has been notably impassioned in titles whose owners could yet be potential buyers. It has been moving to find publications once incensed by Richard Sharp’s surrendered chairmanship of the BBC (he’d failed to declare his connection to a secret £800,000 loan made to Boris Johnson) now arguing that, as a Mail editorial put it, “there are certain precious institutions and freedoms which must not be compromised at any price”.
In the Telegraph, Charles Moore, fined for not paying his licence fee and later Boris Johnson’s first choice for BBC chairmanship, also recoiled, fearing for “great British institutions whose future is now in doubt”. Not including, for reasons obvious to regular readers, British institutions his newspaper doesn’t like. “The BBC must kill Newsnight,” it has decided.
Dominic Johnson retorted that “the UAE is a first-class and extremely well-run country,” adding “clearly most of us today don’t buy a physical newspaper or necessarily go to a traditional news source”. And, as he demonstrates, it is possible to forge a rewarding political career without reading any news at all. Unless, hard as it is to credit in a British legislator, he really is aware of the UAE’s control of the press and grim human rights record – such as the prohibition of homosexuality, the indefinite imprisonment and mistreatment of prisoners including British subjects – but still thinks the country “first class”? No, he must have missed that it’s only five years since the academic Matthew Hedges was falsely accused of spying and sentenced to life imprisonment in Abu Dhabi, later pardoned. A few months ago the Foreign Office was ordered to apologise to Dr Hedges for having failed to protect him from UAE torture.
Even William Hague, whose protest in the Times masterfully finessed his own history of promoting fond relations with the UAE, objected that the country is not so much bad, as too different. The proposed deal is “disturbing and should be prevented”.
For UAE-based news consumers long accustomed to top-quality British fawning, its sudden withdrawal must be perplexing. Or it would be if ever reported: local law forbids criticism of the Emirates’ rulers. For years, at least since Boris Johnson liked to describe London as “the eighth emirate”, UK royals, leaders and emissaries have thrown themselves into sheikh worship, affirmed that trifling differences in personal freedom can’t stop the countries being, as Cameron said, “family”. As in any family, there were hiccups – the usual episodes of torture, wrongful arrest, daughter abduction/kidnapping, the assault of a young woman organising a books festival – but nothing serious enough to deter, for instance, Theresa May from addressing a women’s conference. Or post-Brexit Cameron from accepting a teaching job at an Abu Dhabi university.
To judge by the lavish travel, celebrity and property coverage, much of the British media agreed that cultural styles in repression shouldn’t be overstated. Or understated. Best not stated at all.
Dubai is not just, for the Mail, “a perfect destination if you are looking for a relaxing break on the beach or poolside” but, in a Telegraph property report, “shaping up to be great place for adventurous European retirees”. That is, in the same country the Mail’s Stephen Glover now describes as “a virtual dictatorship” run by “charming but ruthless people” whose media practices are ranked below Uzbekistan, where, he notes, “in 2002 two prisoners were reportedly boiled alive”.
Tourists wondering if this despotism is any more compatible with a winter break than it is with Telegraph ownership, might want to wait for Frazer’s conclusions. Should the government find, following the above hints from media supporters, that some assets really must stay British, or sort of, there seems every chance that threats in Dubai will soon return, like those to our precious UK institutions, to normal.
• Catherine Bennett is an Observer columnist
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