Sharia Gammon

Consumers of the Spectator and the Waily Toryguff may soon be empurpled by moral indignation more patriotic even than their usual, as both publications are in peril of being bought (or seized, as Britain's leading liberal newspaper hath it) by the ruling house of Abu Dhabi. Charles Moore, who has edited all of the rags now on sale, bleated they are great British institutions which should not be controlled by a foreign power; the Australo-American ownership of the Murdoch Times being quite a different matter, as it was never sufficiently great to be edited by Charles Moore. Sir Iain Duncan Scum called for the Government to intervene in the free market and prevent "somebody in the Middle East" from buying the lily-white pages comprising what people of Sir Iain Duncan Scum's intellectual eminence regard as a paper of record and molesting them with his swarthy Arab digits. Mainland bidders include a gambler with shares in GB News, favoured channel of the Farage Falange, and the owner of the Rothermere Daily Stürmer; so clearly there remains some hope that those charming Barclay boys may yet find a worthy heir.