There are people who like the idea of living in a hotel, but nobody wants to die in one. Margaret Thatcher checked in to the Ritz in December 2012, a couple of weeks after she was diagnosed with bladder cancer. ‘She loved the Ritz,’ her private secretary recalled. ‘She was looked after by beautifully dressed young men: the world wasn’t bothering her anymore.’ Thatcher spent the next three months in a suite that cost £3660 a night. She died in her bed on 8 April 2013 after suffering a massive stroke. According to her biographer Charles Moore, the bill for her stay was ‘well into six figures’. Thatcher made a ‘five-figure contribution’; the rest was covered by the then owners of the hotel, David and Frederick Barclay, identical twins who appeared on the Sunday Times Rich List later that month with a combined fortune of £2.3 billion.
This wasn’t the first time the Barclays had helped to house Thatcher. After leaving Number Ten she had moved into David’s former home, a six-storey house on Chester Square in Belgravia. He had already agreed to sell the property to someone else, but when he heard that Thatcher was struggling to find somewhere to live, he pulled out of the deal and sold the lease to a trust established on behalf of Thatcher’s grandchildren for £290,000 (a generous price even then). Over the years she had also stayed at the Barclays’ castle on the private island of Brecqhou (as did Tony Blair and David Cameron), and on their 197-foot yacht, the Lady Beatrice. Not long after her death, a bronze bust of Thatcher was installed in the Ritz’s lobby.
By then the brothers had been in the hotel business for half a century. Born within ten minutes of each other in 1934, they grew up in a family of ten in a two-bedroom flat in Shepherd’s Bush. In the early 20th century, Jane Martinson writes in You May Never See Us Again, identical twins tended to be ‘treated almost as a single entity’. David and Frederick would often dress in matching clothes, a habit they retained for most of their lives. Surviving stories from their early years seem cherry-picked to burnish their reputation: when they were evacuated to Coventry, at the age of nine, they set up a scheme in which farmers paid the boys to look after their bikes while they went to market. A childhood neighbour claimed that the Barclays had once stolen her tortoise. ‘There was talk about the tortoise having been sold for half a crown,’ she later told the Times, ‘but I got it back.’
The Barclays left school at fourteen and, after a spell working in construction, moved into property. In the late 1950s London was experiencing a housing boom, not least on the Barclays’ home turf of West London, where the slumlord turned property mogul Peter Rachman was making his fortune. The brothers set up an estate agency in Notting Hill. One day a woman came in looking to move to a particular street in the neighbourhood so that she could be near her elderly father. Frederick showed her a small house on the street, and the woman made an offer well above the market rate. ‘Frederick had just sold his brother David’s house without telling him first.’ There was plenty of money to be made from residential property, particularly after the Rent Act of 1957 abolished the caps introduced during the war, but the Barclays soon discovered that there was even more in hotels. Having bought up buildings and converted them into boarding houses, they then started turning the boarding houses into hotels. In 1964 they bought a terraced house in Paddington, which became the Hyde Park North Hotel; by the end of the 1970s they had opened fifteen hotels.
Their ascent wasn’t without setbacks. In 1960 Frederick and a younger brother, Douglas, who ran a sweet shop together in Shepherd’s Bush, were declared bankrupt after failing to pay their landlord the hundreds of pounds they owed him. But it was in the 1970s, Martinson writes, that the brothers came closest to financial ruin. A number of their hotel purchases had been made possible by loans from the Crown Agents for Oversea Governments and Administrations, a government entity which had originally overseen grants to the colonies before expanding into financial services in the 1960s. But when the property market crashed in 1973 and a banking crisis followed, the Crown Agents began calling in its debts. The Barclays owed £9.5 million – around £100 million in today’s money.
Most of those who had borrowed from the Crown Agents were forced into bankruptcy. But in 1976 the Barclays’ bad debts were sold to a company called Trenport for £3 million, at a loss to the Crown Agents of £6.5 million. In 1978 Trenport sold them to Russet, a company based in Jersey, which sold them back to the Barclays a few months later for just £400,000. Over the next decade the brothers sold two of the hotels they had almost lost in 1976, making tens of millions of pounds. An investigation by the Economist last year found that the Barclays secretly controlled both Trenport and Russet. ‘They made a huge profit on buying back their own debt so cheaply,’ the paper wrote, ‘at the expense of the British taxpayer.’ Not only had the Barclays, who appear to have still been living in the UK at the time, evaded paying any taxes on their profits – a criminal offence – but they did so through ‘a deal that looks like fraud’.
The brothers’ breakthrough came in 1983, with the purchase of Ellerman Lines, once one of the biggest shipping companies in the world, for £46 million. Within five years they had sold off all of Ellerman’s divisions – its breweries business, which included 850 pubs, went for £239 million. A template had been established. In 1999 they teamed up with Philip Green to buy the retail firm Sears, which owned a number of high-street clothing chains and a mail-order business. These were all sold within six months, making the brothers and Green some £250 million, twice the amount they had put into the deal. Another signature was the Barclays’ use of offshore shell companies. When they bought Littlewoods in 2002, they set up three interlocking shell companies for the purpose; over the next two decades, Martinson writes, ‘there would be at least 35 different companies based on or linked to the original Littlewoods purchase.’ In the 1980s, the Barclays had been pioneering in their use of leveraged financing, a practice more common in the US at the time. Now, just £100 million of the £776 million they offered for Littlewoods was their own equity; much of the rest came from the bank HBOS.
This time the Barclays held on to the company, but they quickly made drastic changes. Within a few months of buying Littlewoods they had sacked more than two hundred people, sold the company’s landmark headquarters in Liverpool and withdrawn the company from the Ethical Trading Initiative. ‘The first three years of the Barclays’ ownership of Littlewoods is a case study in how they used debt to buy businesses on the cheap, using the proceeds from future sales to pay off some of the debt – a type of transaction the private equity business would go on to dominate.’ There was also an unexpected boon when accountants realised that Littlewoods had paid too much VAT between 1973 and 2004. The Barclays claimed the money back – even though they had owned Littlewoods for only two of the years in question – and by 2010 HMRC had paid them £473 million.
Each twin played a distinct role when it came to their business dealings. According to Martinson, David was the ‘dominant ideas man’, the ‘strategic visionary’ who took the lead in negotiations, while Frederick had ‘control of the detail’. Yet what people tended to remark on was how little difference there was between them – even David’s first wife, Zoe, sometimes struggled to tell them apart. It wasn’t simply that they often wore identical outfits (the only clue as to which twin was which being that they parted their hair on opposite sides). It was also the amount of time they spent together, their way of finishing each other’s sentences. In the words of Brian Basham, a PR man who had worked for them, ‘they were Tweedledum and Tweedledee.’ Philip Green put it more bluntly: after meeting them for the first time, he reportedly described them as ‘fucking weirdos’.
The Ellerman deal, Martinson writes, ‘took the Barclays’ finances into another league’. They bought neighbouring mansions in Chester Square, and their first yacht. When the first edition of the Rich List was published, in 1989, the Barclays were at number 27. They moved to Monaco the following year. One of the themes of Martinson’s book is that the story of the Barclays’ rise is ‘the story of modern Britain’, and they were certainly creatures of the 1980s, with their highly leveraged takeovers of old, lumbering companies they would unsentimentally dismantle. But in a corporate culture that was still fairly traditional, not everyone welcomed their methods or their manner. Remarks made about the Barclays often had an edge. Martinson quotes interviewees who said that in the 1980s the brothers looked like ‘wide boys’ and ‘spivs’. Sir David Scott, the Charterhouse-educated chairman of Ellerman at the time of the takeover, described them as being ‘dressed as for yachting’ (their summer uniform consisted of stripy blazers, white trousers and matching tasselled blue shoes).
Having to deal with such people can’t have done much to alter the brothers’ sense of being at odds with a hidebound establishment. That feeling became even more ingrained after they bought Brecqhou, one of the smaller Channel Islands, in 1993. They soon demolished the old manor house and replaced it with a castle designed by Quinlan Terry. More than a thousand builders were hired, working around the clock; they had their own pub, built for them by the Barclays, with a portrait of Thatcher behind the bar. The result, Martinson writes, was ‘almost like a child’s drawing of a castle’: a square neo-Gothic building with gilded turrets, hundred-foot-high grey walls and the Barclay clan’s motto, ‘aut agere aut mori’ (do or die), emblazoned in stone above the entrance. Inside, there was a 260-foot-long banqueting room, a decompression chamber and a library with a ceiling based on the Sistine Chapel. It was the largest private home built in Britain for two hundred years.
Brecqhou may have belonged to the Barclays, but it still fell within the jurisdiction of Sark, an island less than a hundred metres away, which had a population of around five hundred.* And while Sark didn’t levy income tax, under its feudal system anyone who bought a property was required to pay a tax known as the ‘treizième’ – a thirteenth of the purchase price – to the island’s seigneur. The Barclays did pay a treizième of £179,000 to the seigneur at the time, Michael Beaumont, but it wasn’t long before they challenged it by issuing Beaumont with a summons claiming that Brecqhou didn’t fall under Sark’s jurisdiction. (They withdrew from the proceedings in 2000.)
The Barclays weren’t afraid of antagonising their neighbours. They liked to point out that the seigneur’s residence was within range of the cannons they had installed on Brecqhou. When the editor of the parish newsletter printed a picture of the obsessively private brothers having a conversation in a public lane, she received a letter from their solicitors. In 2007 one of their companies launched its own newspaper on Sark. Copies were put through residents’ doors; according to Martinson, anyone who ‘asked not to receive it could expect a negative story in the next week’s edition’. Others were attacked for even less: when Beaumont’s wife had a stroke, the newspaper accused the island’s only doctor of ‘wilful negligence’ for letting her be transported to a hospital on Guernsey by lifeboat rather than using the Barclays’ helicopter. The doctor resigned, triggering the first protest on Sark in decades, outside the newspaper’s office; he later told Panorama that, on account of the Barclays’ ‘enormous wealth’, he had decided that ‘the best thing to do would be to get as far away from them as possible.’ When Beaumont died in 2016, the Sark Newspaper’s front page referred to his ‘abuse of power, his abuses of human rights and crimes against humanity – all of which has been unseen in the Western world since the days of Nazi Germany’. (That same week his son received a letter from David offering to buy the seigneurship. He didn’t offer his condolences.)
The Barclays did invest in Sark. They put up £200,000 to replace a hall on the island and improve the school’s facilities, but in 2008 they sued to have the money returned on the grounds that they hadn’t been told the hall would have a bar. (They lost the case.) They bought four of the six hotels on the island, as well as various shops and restaurants. Then, the day after the island’s 2008 general election, in which none of the nine candidates they had backed was elected, they sacked all 140 of their employees.
Why did the Barclays – or David, at least – care quite so much about what happened on Sark? From the outside, the battles with the islanders and their rulers looked almost laughably one-sided. Yet the Barclays really do seem to have felt that a tiny car-free island represented the kind of entrenched, arbitrary power they hated. Being forced to pay the treizième after years of successful tax avoidance would have brought this home for the first time but, more than that, it seems to have punctured the idea of Brecqhou as a haven of absolute independence and freedom. In trying so doggedly to pursue their libertarian fantasy, the brothers only found themselves more enmeshed with other people.
When the Barclays bought the European, in 1992, newspapers still looked like a decent investment. It was just six years after Rupert Murdoch’s defeat of the print unions at Wapping, and ‘the door was open to new owners looking to cut costs in an industry that had grown used to healthy sales and advertising revenues.’ Robert Maxwell had launched the European in 1990 with the idea of producing Europe’s ‘first national newspaper’. But the tone of its coverage changed after the Barclays took over, and in 1998 the managing editor, Peter Millar, resigned, complaining that the paper had become ‘a last refuge for a handful of xenophobic nationalists from the ruptured rump of the Tory party’. By then the brothers had bought three more publications, the Scotsman, the Edinburgh Evening News and Scotland on Sunday, and launched another, Sunday Business. Brian Groom, the editor of Scotland on Sunday at the time, told Martinson that David sent him faxes almost every week, ‘a mixture of comments, suggestions and sometimes criticism’ which never quite extended to telling him what stories he should or shouldn’t publish. At the 1997 general election, the editors of the Barclays’ Scottish papers were given a free hand, and all three endorsed Labour – the only time a Barclay publication ever did so.
When Conrad Black’s company Hollinger began to struggle for funds in the early 2000s and put Telegraph Media Group, which owned the Telegraph newspapers and the Spectator, up for sale, the brothers sensed an opportunity for a ‘once-in-a-lifetime purchase’. Until then, they had tended to swoop in for unloved and undervalued businesses. This time, however, they faced competition from eight other bidders, and in July 2004 they paid £665 million for TMG. It wasn’t, in retrospect, a very good time to buy a newspaper: within a few years advertising revenues and print circulation would start to plummet. (In the decade after the brothers bought the Telegraph, its print circulation fell from almost 900,000 to around 500,000.) But the Barclays quickly set about cutting costs. Within a year, a fifth of TMG’s 1500 employees had lost their jobs. This upheaval extended to the top of the masthead: the paper had six different editors in the first decade of the Barclays’ ownership, where the previous six editors had lasted 79 years combined.
‘As the pressure to meet profit targets and therefore reassure lenders increased,’ Martinson writes, ‘journalists talked of more aggressive commercial demands from senior managers.’ In 2015 the veteran columnist Peter Oborne resigned from the Telegraph. He explained his decision in an article for openDemocracy, lamenting the declining standards at the paper. There was ‘a great deal of evidence’ suggesting that the distinction between editorial and advertising had ‘collapsed’: when Oborne wrote an article critical of HSBC, for instance, the paper had chosen not to publish it. The bank’s ‘extremely valuable’ account made it, a Telegraph executive had told him, ‘the advertiser you literally cannot afford to offend’. In fact the relationship went beyond advertising. At the time, HSBC owned £200 million of debt from customers who had bought items from Shop Direct, one of the Barclays’ companies, on credit. In 2012 another Barclay business, the delivery firm Yodel, took out a £242 million loan from the bank. The Telegraph’s sensitivity to the Barclays’ interests appeared to take other forms too. In the autumn of 2014, when they were vying to take control of the company that owned Claridge’s from Paddy McKillen, an Irish businessman with links to the Qatari royal family, the paper ran eight front-page stories in two months accusing Qatar of funding terrorism.
Newspaper ownership wasn’t a natural fit for the Barclays. Leery of attention of any sort, they found themselves under much closer scrutiny after buying the Telegraph. ‘I think the Barclay brothers want a quiet life,’ Dominic Lawson, editor of the Sunday Telegraph at the time of the takeover, once said, ‘but you should not own a newspaper if you do not want any aggravation. It is the wrong line of business.’ But the brothers, David in particular, seem to have been fascinated by newspapers. Even before they had acquired any titles of their own they would quiz their employees on the stories of the day. David once said of the Telegraph that he ‘owned the toyshop and got to play in it’. That wasn’t the only advantage to owning the Telegraph. Brian Basham, the Barclays’ former publicist, thought they had ‘bought respectability’. It certainly opened doors: David’s eldest son, Aidan, who was the chair of Telegraph Media Group, met David Cameron four times in 2010 alone. A few years later, David told the journalist Tim Walker that Cameron kept calling and was ‘desperately keen to get some time alone with him’.
Martinson is a former media editor of the Guardian, yet she devotes comparatively little space to the workings of the Telegraph under the Barclays. This owes something to the fact that Aidan ran day-to-day affairs, but also reflects her view that the role of a media baron is less hands-on than it’s often made out to be: ‘Owners rarely need to give direct orders to influence content.’ David’s obituary in the Telegraph, from January 2021, captures this well: ‘It had always been the brothers’ policy to intervene barely at all in editorial decisions – though their editors knew that they supported Margaret Thatcher’s enthusiasm for small government, free markets, lower taxes, wealth creation and providing the means of social mobility to everyone.’
Also mentioned in the obituary was what may be the most significant political legacy of the Barclays’ ownership of the Telegraph: the brothers’ ‘scepticism towards the excesses of the European Union’. It was in his Telegraph column, for which he was paid £275,000 a year, that Boris Johnson came out in favour of Brexit in March 2016. (According to Dominic Cummings, Johnson referred to the Telegraph as his ‘real boss’.) A couple of days before the referendum the Telegraph published an editorial full-throatedly endorsing Brexit: it predicted that ‘a world of opportunity’ awaited a ‘fully independent Britain’. And once it was clear, early on the morning of 24 June, that Britain had voted to leave, Frederick invited Nigel Farage – who has described him as ‘a great friend’ – to celebrate with his campaign team at the Ritz. Frederick was seen rushing through the hotel, ‘happily bedecked with fluttering Union flags, to greet his guests’ with a breakfast of champagne and kippers (the nickname for Ukip supporters). Within a few months a bust of Farage appeared at the Barclays’ headquarters in St James’s.
‘I’ve never seen two people so in tune with each other,’ a former associate of the Barclays told Martinson. As the brothers got older, however, divisions emerged. Frederick dismissed David’s campaign to become seigneur of Sark as the ‘Sark nonsense’. His wife, Hiroko, didn’t get on with David’s second wife, Reyna (some members of Frederick’s side of the family were said to refer to her as ‘Taco Bell’). But the real sticking point was the question of how to divide up the family assets. David had four sons, the two eldest of whom, Aidan and Howard, played important roles in the Barclay businesses. Frederick had a daughter, Amanda, who didn’t appear ‘to have inherited much of [her father’s] business nous or interests’. To David, it therefore seemed obvious that his sons should inherit more than half the empire (this was to be transferred to the next generation before either of the brothers died, as part of what is euphemistically called ‘estate planning’). Frederick wasn’t convinced at first – according to Hiroko, the brothers’ disagreements grew so heated that they came to blows – but eventually agreed to hand over half of his share to David’s sons, leaving Amanda with a quarter of the business. It was, Frederick later said, the greatest mistake of his life.
In 2013 David told Frederick that, since he hadn’t contributed enough to the running of Brecqhou, he was no longer welcome on the island. The following year, shortly before his eightieth birthday, Frederick left Monaco and moved back to London. It was the first time the brothers hadn’t lived in the same city, or even the same neighbourhood of the same city. But the decisive break, in Frederick’s telling, came when he started trying to find out the full extent of the debts held by the Barclay businesses. In September 2019 his nephews, who controlled his access to funds, stopped giving him money, claiming that the company finances were in a dire state. Frederick started to fear that they were deliberately misleading him; the nephews, meanwhile, claimed that he was behaving strangely, and speculated that he was suffering from ‘cognitive dysfunction’.
That autumn, Alistair, David’s youngest son, planted a bugging device disguised as a plug adaptor in the Ritz conservatory, which the family used as a private meeting room. Over the next two months, almost a hundred hours of Frederick’s meetings were bugged. ‘A man so publicity-shy he was rarely seen in public had some one thousand conversations recorded.’ (In a WhatsApp group chat with Aidan and Howard, Alistair referred to these recordings as ‘podcasts’.) After Frederick noticed that his nephews knew a suspicious amount about his dealings, his lawyers installed a camera in the conservatory, which filmed Alistair putting the plug adaptor in his pocket.
The Barclays, well accustomed to deploying their lawyers, now ‘turned the law on each other’. Frederick and Amanda sued Aidan, Howard, Alistair and two others. The defendants admitted liability for the surveillance of Frederick but argued that, in light of the changes in his behaviour, their actions had been ‘necessary and reasonable’. In June 2020 they offered to pay damages. The affair would have been mortifying for any family, let alone one as private – and, until not long before, as close – as the Barclays. Seven months later, David died from pneumonia brought on by Covid. Frederick did not attend the funeral. He did make a rare public statement, though. ‘We were twins from the beginning until the end,’ he said. ‘He was the right hand to my left.’
For much of their career, the brothers had benefited from the favour of individual bankers: first at the Crown Agents, then at the Royal Bank of Scotland and HBOS. Many of their biggest deals were made in the decade of easy money before the 2008 crash: the purchase of the Telegraph in 2004 was made possible by a £400 million loan from Peter Cummings, their man at HBOS, who had also financed the Littlewoods takeover. But in 2009 HBOS was taken over by Lloyds TSB. Three years later, Cummings was fined £500,000 by the Financial Services Authority and given a lifetime ban from banking. When António Horta-Osório became CEO of Lloyds in 2011, he asked to see a list of the bank’s largest outstanding toxic loans. At the top were the Barclays, who owed £1.6 billion. Their empire was built on debt, in the expectation of constantly rising revenues and valuations. But few of the Barclays’ businesses had ever been especially lucrative, and by the mid-2010s a number of them were struggling. Their delivery company, Yodel, lost more than £600 million between 2012 and 2015. Also in 2015, Littlewoods started paying compensation for mis-selling private protection insurance – by 2021 it had issued £583 million – and Telegraph Media Group’s operating profits began to drop, falling to as little as £7.8 million by 2018.
Few people knew just how large the Barclays’ debts were. ‘The family as a whole continued to live extraordinarily extravagant lives,’ Martinson writes, ‘giving the impression to most outsiders that their finances were in great shape.’ In 2016 Frederick paid £30 million for a flat in St James’s, which he fitted with a ballroom (both brothers were keen dancers) and a hyperbaric oxygen chamber. Even family members who didn’t work for the Barclays might buy a painting or a car and charge it to the company. Their finances were also extremely complex. ‘Offshore holding companies are common in finance, but even seasoned financiers expressed surprise that a group whose business operations were all based in just one country should have so many layers in so many offshore jurisdictions.’ For a while this afforded the brothers a kind of protection: even Lloyds, when it started trying to claw back what it was owed, struggled to determine quite how much money the Barclays still had and where they kept it.
Some light was shone on the Barclays’ finances when Frederick found himself in court again. After 32 years of marriage Hiroko had left him in 2019, citing his ‘unreasonable behaviour’. It was only then that she realised all she had to her name was a joint bank account with Frederick, which was overdrawn to the tune of nearly £6 million. In May 2021 a High Court judge, Jonathan Cohen, ordered Frederick to pay her £100 million – one of the largest divorce settlements ever awarded in the UK. By the summer of 2022, however, the deadline imposed by Cohen had passed, and Frederick still hadn’t paid Hiroko a penny. The problem, he explained to the judge, was that ‘there’s no money.’ He claimed that, since his nephews had ‘turned off the tap’ almost three years before, he had received no income from the Barclay empire, attributing this both to the feud and to the state of their businesses. (Despite it all, Frederick’s nephews had loaned him the money for his legal fees.)
Here too, the Barclays’ use of offshore trusts made it difficult to evaluate Frederick’s claims: ‘The complexity of a system in which many, many trusts and hundreds of companies in a range of jurisdictions are managed by a family treasury operation,’ Martinson writes, ‘is perhaps summed up best by the fact that none of the people who gave evidence seemed to understand it.’ Even if there was enough money for Frederick to give Hiroko what he owed her, the fact that it was offshore made it difficult for the High Court to force him to pay up. Cohen decided there wasn’t sufficient proof that Frederick had the means to pay the full divorce settlement, but found him in contempt for failing to pay Hiroko the £245,000 he owed her for legal fees and maintenance (Frederick paid her that smaller amount soon afterwards). The judge pointed out that during the period in which Frederick had been ‘pleading impecuniosity’, he had spent more than £7.5 million suing his nephews in the bugging case. Even now, four years after the settlement was awarded, it’s not known whether Frederick has paid any of it.
One of David Barclay’s favourite mantras was: ‘Businesses are for buying and selling – and don’t forget the selling.’ He and Frederick had built their fortune on being canny about when to buy and when to sell. But what they ended up with was a bloated family company of the sort that they had once swooped in to devour. Even as their debts mounted, they were reluctant to part with the businesses they cared about most. They did sell the Ritz to a Qatari investor in 2020, but having come close to putting Telegraph Media Group up for sale in 2019 the family then decided to hold on to it. Eventually, however, Lloyds managed to decipher the ownership structure of the key companies in the Barclay empire. In May 2023, it called in the receivers to B.UK, a holding company registered in Bermuda. It took two weeks ‘to get down to the operating business, with Lloyds taking over one board at a time until they sent letters dismissing Aidan, Howard and the family consigliere Philip Peters as directors of Press Acquisitions, the company that effectively controlled Telegraph Media Group’.
Lloyds now controlled one of the most-read newspapers in the UK. It wanted to get TMG off its hands. And the process seemed to be wrapped up unusually quickly: in November 2023, a company called RedBird IMI acquired TMG by repaying £1.16 billion of the Barclays’ debts. Then it transpired that Sheikh Mansour of Abu Dhabi, the vice president of the UAE, had a majority stake in RedBird IMI. More than a dozen Tory MPs wrote a letter warning that the takeover posed a ‘very real potential national security threat’, and Rishi Sunak’s government announced that it would ban foreign states from buying British newspapers, effectively killing the deal.
An auction got underway. The Spectator was sold separately to Paul Marshall, the hedge fund manager who owns the website UnHerd and co-owns the TV channel GB News, for £100 million.† So far the highest bid for the Telegraph – more than £550 million – has come from Dovid Efune, the Manchester-born owner of the New York Sun, a relatively obscure conservative paper. Unlike the Barclays, Efune isn’t shy when it comes to sharing his views with the world. In 2011, he wrote that Jewish settlers in the West Bank (which he referred to as ‘Judea and Samaria’) have ‘often borne the brunt of Arab aggression’ and are ‘restricted’ in their ability to defend themselves. The solution, he wrote, was to establish a second Jewish state, in the West Bank, which would have the additional benefit of giving ‘the local Arab population
In real terms, the sums offered for the Telegraph and the Spectator add up to barely half what the Barclays paid for them twenty years ago. But even that might be too much: like the Barclays before him, Efune is heavily dependent on financing, and so far none of the investors he has been courting seems convinced of the merits of the deal. Suitors may have been put off by TMG’s own warning last year that a review of its historical accounts had identified ‘potential irregularities’, leaving any future owner open to ‘a potential risk of future possible repayment claims’. These irregularities seem to relate to payments made to the Barclays: according to the Telegraph’s business editor, Christopher Williams, under their ownership it was not uncommon for orders to come in demanding that millions of pounds be paid out at very short notice. In total, TMG loaned £278 million to the Barclays – money that is unlikely now to be recovered. A series of suspicious activity reports has been sent to the National Crime Agency.
Send Letters To:
The Editor
London Review of Books,
28 Little Russell Street
London, WC1A 2HN
letters@lrb.co.uk
Please include name, address, and a telephone number.
