Historic price war between the Times and Telegraph 

damaged both papers

Editor Max Hastings was basking in the success of his newspaper, the Daily Telegraph. It was 1993 and circulation was more than a million copies a day, handing proprietor Conrad Black a profit of £60 million a year.

Then, as so often, along came Rupert Murdoch to slip a ferret down their trousers.

One Monday morning in September, he cut the price of The Times from 45p to 30p. The Telegraph was selling in newsagents for 48p. There was no warning. Murdoch struck like a cobra – fast and deadly.

Now, journalists tend to enjoy a circulation war. It is just a more intense version of what they do anyway: Find bigger, better stories, display them boldly, promote them smartly. But a price war? That’s ugly.

It forces the board to examine its strategy, to take hard decisions. Do we ride it out, take the disdainful view that we’re a better product? Or do we get down and dirty with the Digger and undercut the upstart rival?

And the tension and turmoil in the boardroom inevitably filters down to the editorial floor and particularly to the editor.

Hastings by then had been in the chair for seven years. He was pleased with the paper’s achievements since he had become editor. He had taken it from a £12 million loss in the first year to record profits.

The editorial budget had doubled, allowing them to produce an unmatched Monday sports section as well as a Saturday section containing all the TV, arts and motoring features. And they were heading towards their target for colour pages.

Hastings was proud of this and of the way they had done it: small, incremental changes that did not scare off conservative broadsheet readers. He had, for example, resisted calls for a redesign of the newspaper.

The Telegraph had won the Newspaper of the Year award after a ballot of British newspaper and magazine editors. Hastings had put together a formidable stable of writers – who included Paul Hayward, Henry Winter and Michael Parkinson on sport and Alexander Chancellor, Oliver Pritchett and Boris Johnson on the Comment pages.

Among his executives were Veronica Wadley, Jeremy Deedes and George Jones. “I felt a warm affection for them,” Hastings writes in his memoir Editor.

“Working with this group had proved among the happiest experiences I had ever known. We were professionals, with minimal interest in ideology, merely a passionate commitment to producing a great newspaper.”

But he worried that under him, the paper had drifted downmarket and become more “trivial”. Years later, he would meet readers who spoke of the “Hurleyization” of the Telegraph.

But he defends this, saying that “middle market newspaper readers possessed a mounting appetite for trivia about showbusiness, celebrities, royals”. Urged on by his deputy Wadley, he embraced the mood, aware that The Times was doing the same and that he also needed to challenge the Mail.

Hastings had the loyal support of Conrad Black but was aware that it was dependent on delivering commercial success. Management had kept the Telegraph’s cover price above that of The Times,  albeit at the cost of an “acceptable” circulation loss.

Telegraph executives were feeling “triumphalist” towards News International. Since Hastings took the reins in 1986, he had added 40,000 to the Telegraph’s circulation lead.

“There was no sign that any of our rival’s revamps, stunts, recruiting drives had borne significant fruit. All Murdoch’s threats to break us had proved to be Australian wind.”

Then Murdoch played his cover price ace. “If The Times could not defeat us editorially, Murdoch proposed dramatically to change the commercial odds,” Hastings writes.

“Poker-faced, he declared that he considered British newspapers overpriced.”

In fact, Murdoch was exploiting advantages the Telegraph did not have. He subsidised The Times out of the profits of his tabloid Sun and News of the World. The Telegraph estimated his losses at £30 million a year.

In addition, Murdoch had arranged it so that his British companies paid little tax, so you could argue, says Hastings, that taxpayers were underwriting his strategy.

Ever since the first Lord Camrose had halved the price of the Telegraph to a penny in 1929, the paper had kept its cover price below that of The Times and not far above the Express and the Mail.

But lately, first out of dire financial necessity, then deliberate policy, it had bumped up the price. Managing Director Joe Cooke adopted as his motto: “A premium price for a premium brand”.

Hastings warned management against “trying to milk the cow three times a day”. And he argued that the price rise to 48p in February 1993 was not the pursuit of a healthy profit, but “undisguised greed”.

The doctrine that broadsheet newspapers were not price sensitive was about to be put to the test.

In the first six months of 1994, the Telegraph lost only 9,000 sales. The Times’s circulation rose by 72,000 to 485,000. But then the process accelerated.

“I was dismayed almost daily to meet rich men who told me laughingly that they had switched to The Times because ‘your newspaper is so expensive’,” writes Hastings.

“The odd thing was that they meant it. Like everybody else they loved a bargain.”

The paper sought a solution through the competition authorities and the politicians of the day. But no dice.

Nowhere was the crisis more apparent than in Saturday sales. The Telegraph sold 1.2 million on that day and charged 70p a copy. Saturday’s Times was selling for 30p.

Hastings had a meeting with Joe Cooke as well as the marketing director, the advertising director and his own lieutenant Jeremy Deedes. All but Cooke wanted an immediate cut in the Telegraph’s cover price.

Hastings reveals, with refreshing candour, that one of the factors that influenced opinion round the table was the share options held by Telegraph executives. The editor himself stood to make £500,000 in capital gains the following year.

But not if the share price fell, which was certain if the Telegraph retaliated with its own price cuts. Nevertheless, they recommended to Black that the price of the weekday Telegraph be cut to 30p.

In response, Murdoch cut the price of The Times to 20p. By now, its circulation was nearing 700,000. But the Telegraph’s discount first checked the decline, then added 60,000 to their sales.

The price war was damaging both newspapers but, writes Hastings, Murdoch “knew he possessed deeper pockets than we did”.

The Telegraph survived and soldiered on but the game had changed and the rewards were “vastly diminished”.

*****

It is dispiriting to think that somewhere in the White House orbit sits a lackey whose job it is to plot payback for Donald Trump’s enemies.

Which is of course anyone who doesn’t bow to the U.S. President’s superior understanding of the shifting world order and international law.

As Derek Jameson might have said: “Do they mean us?” Well, yes. In Trump’s world, if you’re not an unquestioning friend, you’re an enemy.

So when we sided with the rest of Nato and the European Union to doubt the wisdom of the random bombardment of Iran and Lebanon, the retribution guy set to work.

What he came up with for Britain was a threat to support Argentina’s claim to the Falkland Islands.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer and his Government insisted: “The Falkland Islands are British.” But the damage was done. Argentina’s president Javier Milei was buoyed by the mere hint of U.S. support.

The reality is that Argentina has no legitimate claim to the Falklands. No one lived there when the British settlers arrived. The Dutch and the French had both tried but found the South Atlantic archipelago, 300 miles east of Patagonia, too bleak and inhospitable.

There was no indigenous people (unlike in Argentina, where there were many ethnic groups until they were conquered by the Spanish colonialists).

The  Argentinian claim seems to lie solely in the islands’ proximity to the mainland. How can that be an argument? If it were, the island of Ireland would be British.

When Margaret Thatcher sent a task force to the Falklands in 1982 to boot out the Argentinian invaders, she knew we were on our own.

The French were selling our enemy state-of-the-art Exocet missiles. The Americans remained neutral. President Ronald Reagan could not understand why anyone would want to fight over “this little ice-cold piece of land”.

But Thatcher and Reagan were besties, ideological soulmates, and Reagan promised to help where he could. So he slipped us intelligence and allowed us to use U.S. bases, though at the height of the fighting, he called Downing Street to ask for a ceasefire.

Thatcher refused and saw it through. The victory cost the lives of 255 British Servicemen. The islanders have voted overwhelmingly to remain a British overseas territory.

Yet with the malice and spite that characterises Trump’s administration, it seeks out what it perceives as a weakness. Then a Pentagon memo threatening to change the United States’ position on Britain’s sovereignty of the Falklands is leaked.

It is the diplomatic equivalent of a punishment beating.

Isn’t America a vile place?

*****

The happy couple is usually the name applied to a bride and groom. Are they, though?

In America, more and more brides are turning to therapy to cope with the stress of their big day.

Tensions with family and friends are a factor, says The Times. One bride reportedly felt that one of her six bridesmaids was not happy for her. They have not met since.

Money is another problem. A wedding in the U.S. now costs on average $36,000. In New York it is $99,000. That’s a deposit on a flat.

Then there is parental interference. Whose wedding is it anyway?

It is all too much for some brides, so they see a shrink. “I just spent all this time, all this money… and now I don’t even know if I had fun,” one said.

There is nothing wrong with the institution of marriage. It demonstrates commitment and ties up legal loose ends.

But weddings are extravagant, wasteful and indulgent. Rein them in. Spend the money on something else. That way, you’ll only need the therapist if it all goes a bit Pete Tong.

RICHARD DISMORE

29 April 2026