Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Daily Telegraph was founded by Colonel Arthur B. Sleigh on the 29th of June 1855, originally under the name The Daily Telegraph and Courier. Sleigh started the paper to air a personal grievance against Prince George, Duke of Cambridge. When Sleigh could not pay his printing bill, Joseph Moses Levy took over the paper and relaunched it under a new editorial team.
"Was, is, and will be" was the motto included in The Daily Telegraph's emblem from 1858 onward. It appeared in the paper's official emblem for over a century.
During the Second World War, The Daily Telegraph covertly assisted in recruiting codebreakers for Bletchley Park by using its crossword as a screening tool. Solving the crossword in under twelve minutes was considered an indicator of suitability. The paper organised a competition, and each person who finished successfully was later contacted and asked if they would be willing to undertake "a particular type of work as a contribution to the war effort." The competition was won by F. H. W. Hawes of Dagenham, who finished in less than eight minutes.
In May 2009, The Daily Telegraph obtained a full copy of all British MPs' expenses claims and began publishing them in instalments from the 8th of May. The paper argued the official release would have omitted key details about the redesignating of second-home nominations. The disclosures led to high-profile resignations from both the Labour government and the Conservative opposition, and the paper was named 2009 British Newspaper of the Year.
Peter Oborne, the paper's chief political commentator, resigned in February 2015 and publicly accused the Telegraph of "a form of fraud on its readers." He alleged that the paper's advertising interests had shaped editorial decisions, particularly suppressing coverage of the HSBC Swiss tax-dodging scandal. He also cited a feature about the Cunard cruise liner Queen Mary II appearing on the news review page while Cunard was a significant Telegraph advertiser.
In March 2026, the Telegraph Media Group was acquired for £575 million by the German company Axel Springer SE. The acquisition followed a prolonged ownership battle in which a bid by the Emirati-backed RedBird IMI was blocked by UK law in 2024, and a subsequent bid by RedBird Capital Partners collapsed in November 2025. Axel Springer CEO Mathias Dopfner described the acquisition as a long-standing company goal.