WHEN Conrad Black met Lord Hartwell in New York in May 1985 for the meeting at which he eventually decided to invest £10 million in Hartwell’s The Daily Telegraph — and during which Hartwell unwittingly sold his birthright — he asked for an adjournment and went for a walk with his banker, Rupert Hambro.

Asked for his opinion, Mr Hambro told Mr Black that the Telegraph was the greatest serious newspaper title in the world outside Japan. Some of us, not only in Britain but also in the United States, France and Germany, would quarrel with that verdict but Hambro was certainly correct in his view that the Telegraph masthead alone was worth an enormous amount. Within months the businessman — now, as Lord Black of Crossharbour, the disgraced ex-proprietor of the Telegraph — had won ownership of the title for an outlay of £30 million. Within five years a newspaper heading for bankruptcy under Hartwell was returning a profit of £40 million under Mr Black.

The price of owning the Telegraph papers and The Spectator magazine rose this week to £665 million, the highest sum paid for a newspaper group. But the reclusive Barclay brothers will be relishing their huge triumph in seeing off powerful rivals including Daily Mail & General Trust and the Axel Springer group of Germany.

For the Barclays the glittering prize is the undisputed king of the Saturday broadsheet market, the 12-section Telegraph (see table). A key test of the brothers’ mettle will be the maintenance of that supremacy, especially given the financial firepower of News International, owner of The Times, which wants to see that paper’s circulation overtake the Telegraph, the ancient rival that leapfrogged The Times in the 1930s after cutting its price to a penny.

The pluses and minuses of the Barclays’ inheritance are shown in the table, which includes the Daily Mail, since it competes in Telegraph territory. Headline sales of the latter are at their lowest for more than 60 years. Only 56 per cent of sales, moreover, are at the full cover price compared with 72 per cent for The Times. The Barclays will surely want to end a discounting scheme that loses them at least £1 million of revenue a week — but what if News International responds by reducing the price of The Times?

The Daily Telegraph has more readers than The Times, particularly on Saturdays. Advertisers, however, want affluent young readers, especially in metropolitan areas. But 35 per cent of Telegraph readers are over 65, the highest proportion of elderly readers of any national daily (and the grim truth is that older readers inevitably die). Only 13 per cent live in London. On all counts the Daily Mail is in a superior position and it, too, will be attacking the Telegraph.

The latter’s strength is, as it has always been, in the Tory shires; at 64 per cent, according to research by MORI, it has the highest proportion of readers who would vote Conservative of any national newspaper. The strengths and weaknesses of the daily title are basically replicated at The Sunday Telegraph, which trails more than 600,000 behind The Sunday Times and which at full cover price is outsold by The Observer.

Journalists love nothing more than a takeover, which gives rein to their relish for gossip and rumour. But there are going to be many questions and few answers about the Barclays’ intentions for weeks or even months. They made a good start and will have reassured Telegraph journalists and readers yesterday in a front-page statement. They said that they would not interfere with the paper’s reputation for journalism of the highest standards. Its values would not change and they had no interest in interfering with the papers’ editorial policies. So it looks as though they intend to be hands-off proprietors.

But the deal is unlikely to be finalised until the end of July, when, on past form, the Barclays will make haste slowly and take stock before making any significant changes or appointing new editors and managers. The question that obsesses journalists is whether Andrew Neil, the former Sunday Times editor, now publisher of The Scotsman and The Business, will play a role at the Telegraph papers. He almost certainly will, but given his flourishing TV career he would probably prefer an advisory rather than an executive position.

Whatever the criticisms of editorial see-sawing under Mr Neil, The Scotsman now delivers an operating profit of £8 million on sales of £60 million. That has been achieved through attention to cost-cutting in the back office and investment in journalism. The same policies will be applied to The Daily Telegraph, which is expected to make a profit of about £40 million this year. Interviewed last month, Martin Newland, the Editor, said that it could make a “shed-load” more if it had a proprietor and a strategic financial direction. Well, Martin, you’ve now got both.

The Barclays become national newspaper proprietors in an era when sales of newspapers seem to be in inexorable decline, even if the decline is occurring much more slowly among the broadsheets. There have been several recipes for success to date: swashbuckling proprietors in the mould of Lord Beaverbrook or Rupert Murdoch; alliances of proprietor and editor such as Lord Thomson with Harold Evans, or Lord Rothermere with David English and Paul Dacre; and outstanding and long-serving editors (which include the above).

If the Barclays are not to be swashbucklers, their biggest decisions will be their choice of editors. We shall not, I suspect, know the answer to that question for several months.

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