The Daily Telegraph

• 1. Introduction

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  The Daily Telegraph was founded on the 29th of June 1855 by a man trying to win a personal argument. Colonel Arthur B. Sleigh had a grievance against Prince George, Duke of Cambridge, and he started a newspaper to air it. That paper cost two pence and ran to four pages. Within a generation, it would carry a motto that lasted more than a century: "Was, is, and will be."

  The story of how that quarrelsome four-page sheet became one of Britain's most powerful and controversial newspapers spans war coverage that diplomats feared, a crossword competition that helped recruit codebreakers, a political expenses story that brought down careers, and ownership battles that drew in Abu Dhabi money, German publishers, and a vote in the House of Lords. How a paper built on the promise of independence became a byword for Conservative loyalty, and how it fought to survive into the digital age, is a story that touches nearly every corner of British public life.

• 2. A Paper Born From a Grudge

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  Joseph Moses Levy, the owner of The Sunday Times, agreed to print Sleigh's new paper and collected the printing bill. When Sleigh could not pay, Levy took over. His goal was plain: undercut every rival in London. The Daily News and The Morning Post were his main targets, and he intended to beat them on price.

  Levy appointed his son, Edward Levy-Lawson, who would become Lord Burnham, and Thornton Leigh Hunt to run the editorial side. Lord Burnham relaunched the paper with a slogan that promised readers "the largest, best, and cheapest newspaper in the world." Hunt spelled out what that paper would actually do in a memorandum to Levy, writing that it should "report all striking events in science, so told that the intelligent public can understand what has happened and can see its bearing on our daily life."

  The paper's circulation reached 270,000 by 1856. Its independence and its foreign coverage caught early notice. In 1876, Jules Verne wove The Daily Telegraph into the plot of Michael Strogoff, whose war correspondent character Harry Blount is depicted as brave, resourceful, and willing to take great personal risks to bring accurate news ahead of rival papers. By 1937, the paper absorbed The Morning Post, a rival with a traditionally conservative readership among the retired officer class, and briefly ran under the combined name The Daily Telegraph and Morning Post before reverting to its familiar title.

• 3. Scoops, Crosswords, and Codebreakers

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  In 1908, The Daily Telegraph printed an interview with Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany that damaged Anglo-German relations and added to international tensions ahead of World War I. Three decades later, the paper's foreign coverage would make history again. In 1939, Clare Hollingworth, a novice reporter, filed an eyewitness account of Germany's preparations to invade Poland. That story has since been described as "the scoop of the century."

  During the Second World War, the paper's own offices on Fleet Street came under almost daily Luftwaffe bombing raids beginning in November 1940. Printing shifted to Manchester, at Kemsley House, run by the proprietor's brother. Manchester sometimes printed the entire run of the paper when the London offices were under threat.

  Behind the paper's public face, The Daily Telegraph was quietly helping Britain's intelligence services. The ability to solve the paper's crossword in under twelve minutes was treated as a recruitment indicator for Bletchley Park's codebreaking operation. The Telegraph organised a crossword competition, and each successful finisher was contacted afterward and asked whether they would be willing to undertake "a particular type of work as a contribution to the war effort." The competition itself was won by F. H. W. Hawes of Dagenham, who completed the crossword in less than eight minutes.

• 4. Conrad Black and the Barclay Brothers

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  Both the Berry and Levy-Lawson families remained in control until 1986, when Canadian businessman Conrad Black bought the Telegraph Group through a complex chain of holding companies. Black's firm Ravelston Corporation held 78% of Hollinger Inc., which in turn owned 30% of Hollinger International, which in turn owned the Telegraph Group alongside publications including the Chicago Sun-Times, the Jerusalem Post, and The Spectator.

  On the 18th of January 2004, Black was dismissed as chairman of Hollinger International over allegations of financial wrongdoing. The same day, reports emerged that the Barclay brothers had agreed to purchase Black's 78% interest in Hollinger Inc. for £245 million. Hollinger International sued to block the sale, and United States judge Leo Strine sided with the board, blocking Black from transferring his shares. On the 7th of March 2004, the Barclay brothers launched a new bid targeted only at The Daily Telegraph and its Sunday sister paper rather than the full Hollinger Inc. The then-owner of the Daily Express, Richard Desmond, had also sought to buy the paper, selling his interest in several publications to raise funds, but withdrew in March 2004 when the price climbed above £600 million. Daily Mail and General Trust also withdrew a few months later. The Barclay brothers ultimately paid around £665 million to acquire the Telegraph Group in late June 2004.

  With the purchase came a quiet shift in political signalling. Sir David Barclay told The Guardian that the paper might no longer be the automatic "house newspaper" of the Conservative Party, saying: "Where the government are right we shall support them." The editorial board nevertheless endorsed the Conservatives in the 2005 general election, and the paper's political loyalty remained broadly intact.

• 5. Expenses, Investigations, and Influence

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  In May 2009, The Daily Telegraph obtained a full copy of all the expenses claims of British Members of Parliament and began publishing them in instalments from the 8th of May. The paper argued that the official release of expenses information would have omitted details about the redesignating of second-home nominations. The revelations led to high-profile resignations from both the ruling Labour administration and the Conservative opposition. The paper was named 2009 British Newspaper of the Year and its investigation was named Scoop of the Year, with William Lewis winning Journalist of the Year.

  In September 2016, reporters posing as businessmen filmed England football manager Sam Allardyce offering advice on how to get around Football Association rules on player third-party ownership, and filmed him negotiating a £400,000 deal. Allardyce left his position by mutual consent on the 27th of September, saying "entrapment has won."

  The paper's investigative record was not without controversy. In December 2010, reporters secretly recorded Business Secretary Vince Cable, who said he had "declared war on Mr Murdoch" over the News Corporation takeover bid for BSkyB. An undisclosed part of that transcript was leaked to the BBC by a whistleblower who objected that The Telegraph had not published Cable's comments in full. The Press Complaints Commission later upheld a complaint that the paper's use of subterfuge in that operation had not been justified by the public interest. A firm of private investigators subsequently found "strong suspicion" that two former Telegraph employees who had moved to News International had obtained the transcript and leaked it.

• 6. Advertising, Editorial Independence, and the Russia Question

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  In February 2015, the paper's chief political commentator, Peter Oborne, resigned publicly and accused the Telegraph of "a form of fraud on its readers." Oborne alleged that advertising interests had shaped editorial decisions, citing in particular the paper's coverage of the Swiss tax-dodging scandal involving the bank HSBC, which he said had been suppressed despite wide coverage elsewhere. Jay Rosen at New York University described Oborne's resignation statement as "one of the most important things a journalist has written about journalism lately."

  Oborne also pointed to a long feature about the Cunard cruise liner Queen Mary II that appeared on the paper's news review page, noting that Telegraph competitors did not treat the story as major news and that Cunard was an important Telegraph advertiser. He further linked the paper's silence on democratic demonstrations in Hong Kong to Telegraph commercial ties with China. The paper called the statement an "astonishing and unfounded attack, full of inaccuracy and innuendo," and later issued new guidelines on how editorial and commercial staff would work together.

  The question of commercial influence had arisen a year earlier in a different form. As of 2014, the paper received £900,000 a year to carry the supplement Russia Beyond the Headlines, sponsored by the Russian government's official newspaper. In July 2014, the paper was also criticised for carrying links to pro-Kremlin articles about the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, which had appeared as part of a commercial deal and were later removed. In 2016, the Hong Kong Free Press reported that the paper received £750,000 annually to carry a supplement called China Watch as part of a deal with Chinese state-run newspaper China Daily. In April 2020, following criticism, the Telegraph removed China Watch from its website alongside another advertisement feature by Chinese state-run media.

• 7. The Ownership Battle

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  In June 2023, Lloyds Bank moved to take control of the companies owning the Telegraph titles and The Spectator following a breakdown over a financial dispute. By October, bankers had seized control and begun approaching potential buyers. By November, the bid had been agreed with RedBird IMI, a joint venture between RedBird Capital Partners and International Media Investments, a firm based in the United Arab Emirates and owned by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan. The deal would have seen the Barclay family repay a debt of £1.2 billion to Lloyds Bank.

  Conservative MPs raised national security concerns about the Emirati-backed bid, and culture secretary Lucy Frazer issued a public interest intervention notice on the 30th of November. Chairman Andrew Neil threatened to resign if the sale was approved, saying: "You cannot have a major mainstream newspaper group owned by an undemocratic government or dictatorship where no one has a vote." Fraser Nelson, editor of The Spectator, also opposed the sale. In March 2024, the House of Lords voted in a law restricting foreign governments to a 0.1 per cent stake in British newspapers. In April 2024, the UK government effectively banned the Emirati bid.

  In May 2025, RedBird Capital sought to lead a new consortium to acquire the paper for £500 million. On the 14th of November 2025, RedBird dropped its bid citing negative media coverage and regulatory scrutiny. A deal struck on the 22nd of November would have transferred ownership to the Daily Mail's owner DMGT, but that arrangement also fell through. In March 2026, the Telegraph Media Group was acquired for £575 million by the German company Axel Springer SE, which purchased the shares of the previous owner after its own earlier takeover attempt had failed due to concerns raised by the UK government. Axel Springer CEO Mathias Dopfner described the acquisition as a long-standing goal and stated the company intended to preserve the paper's editorial character while advancing its reach in the English-speaking world.

• 8. Circulation and the Digital Shift

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  At its peak in 1980, the paper's print circulation reached 1,439,000 copies. By December 2018 that number had fallen to 363,183, and the paper withdrew entirely from newspaper circulation audits in 2020. The Telegraph's digital strategy predates most of its competitors: on the 15th of November 1994, the paper launched what became Europe's first daily web-based newspaper, hosted on a Sun Microsystems Sparc 20 server and connected via a 64 kbit/s leased line from Demon Internet. At that moment, an estimated 10,000 websites existed in total, and around 1% of the British population had internet access at home.

  An early coup for the website was coverage of Ambrose Evans-Pritchard's reporting on the Whitewater controversy, which drew a large American audience and prompted the Clinton administration to issue a 331-page rebuttal in 1997. Telegraph.co.uk became the most popular UK newspaper website in April 2008. In November 2012, international readers began to encounter a subscription paywall requiring sign-up after 20 free articles a month; the same system rolled out in the UK in March 2013.

  By December 2023, the Telegraph Media Group reported 1,035,710 total subscriptions: 117,586 for the print edition, 688,012 for the digital version, and 230,112 for other subscriptions. At that point, print was the smallest slice of an audience that had once belonged entirely to the physical paper. By October 2023, telegraph.co.uk ranked as the tenth most visited UK newspaper site, drawing 13.8 million monthly visits compared to 38.3 million for the BBC.