The Daily Mail owner has the Telegraph titles in his sights as part of a long-held ambition to create a dominant stable of rightwing newspapers
Waiting two decades for another chance to snaffle a prized business acquisition is a luxury not afforded to many executives. The Rothermere family, however, takes a more relaxed approach to time.
While most business boards draw up five-year plans, the Rothermeres, having compiled a feared media empire over more than a century, are used to thinking in terms of generations.
It was in the summer of 2004 that Jonathan Harold Esmond Vere Harmsworth, 4th Viscount Rothermere, the tall, curly haired and immaculately turned out proprietor of the Daily Mail, failed in his bid to acquire the Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph.
By Rothermere’s assessment, the failure delighted Rupert Murdoch because it would have created a stable of rightwing newspapers powerful enough to rival the “unique political leverage” of Murdoch’s own titles, then comprising the Times, Sunday Times, the Sun and News of the World.
