2026-08-10
46 分钟This is The Guardian.
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This article contains some swearing.
The Dacre Dynasty, how Britain's right-wing press was radicalised by Andy Beckett.
Read by Simon Vance.
In 1986, 131 years after the Daily Telegraph was founded, its editor,
Max Hastings, wrote a memo to senior colleagues about the newspaper's nature and purpose.
The Daily Telegraph is nice, he said, in the business of reassurance,
of providing confirmation each morning for our readers that their world is looking pretty safe and stable.
He went on...
We are not a strident campaigning newspaper.
Our business each day is to seek to give our readers the fullest possible information
about what is happening in the world and to suggest what it might mean.
In practice, under Hastings and many other Telegraph editors,
this ethos produced a journalism of pervasive but usually understated conservatism.
Often focused on the English countryside, the value of hierarchy and tradition,
the pleasures of seasonal pursuits such as fox-hunting and gardening, the interests of farmers and retired military men,
and cautionary tales about more reckless lives gone wrong,