Liam Halligan got the call on Thursday, October 29. “Last Thursday, the Telegraph rang to tell me my column is being scrapped,” Halligan wrote. He had been asked to keep writing “Economic Agenda,” the Sunday Telegraph column he had filed since 2003, “until the end of November, as per my contract.” After that, it ends.
So, at the Telegraph, does Planet Normal, the podcast Halligan co-hosts. He called it “the decision of the Telegraph management to scrap them” and “obviously a huge personal blow.” He would not say why it happened. “Why this decision has been made… is for others to judge.”
Others did. “Well, there goes the main reason for subscribing to the Sunday Telegraph,” wrote Andrew Neil. Former Prime Minister Liz Truss, who a day earlier had posted “Complete self-immolation by the Telegraph,” said the paper “continues the purge.”
Halligan is not alone. Reform UK leader Nigel Farage’s regular paid column is ending. Pearson, a Telegraph columnist since 2010 and one of the paper’s best-known populist voices, is reported to be negotiating her exit. As many as 100 jobs are expected to go. All of it has happened since Germany’s Axel Springer completed its £575 million takeover on June 30. In March, the company had promised to “back an investment program in TMG to grow and expand the business.”
For many of the paper’s readers, and for much of Britain’s online right, the question is whether the Telegraph, the paper that backed Brexit, is going woke.
The record so far shows three things. A promise of investment has turned into cuts. Halligan’s column and Farage’s regular slot are going, and Pearson is reported to be on her way out. And the new owner has a documented corporate culture, and a documented record inside its German newsrooms, that bears directly on how a paper covers gender and Europe.
Who Owns The Telegraph Now.
Axel Springer is the Berlin-based publisher of Die Welt and the owner of Politico and Business Insider. Since April 2025 it has been a family company: Friede Springer and chief executive Mathias Döpfner “together hold 95 percent of the shares,” the company said in a restructuring that handed its classified-ads businesses to private equity firm KKR and Canadian pension fund CPP Investments.
Since June 30, Döpfner has held “75% or more” of the voting rights in Telegraph Media Group Holdings, and Friede Springer more than half of its shares. The holding company’s board is three Axel Springer directors, all at the publisher’s Berlin headquarters. Carolin Hulshoff Pol runs the business as chief executive. The editors, Chris Evans at the daily paper and Allister Heath at the Sunday Telegraph, were kept on.
The deal ended a long sale saga in which a bid backed by RedBird and a later approach from DMGT were both drawn into government intervention orders. Springer’s purchase, oddly, got no such treatment. In April, Labour Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy said she was “not currently minded” to issue a public-interest or foreign-state intervention notice.
On October 16, the government closed the last of the old orders: “All regulatory interventions under the Enterprise Act in relation to TMGH are now closed.” A week later, the cuts came.
What Döpfner said he was buying was explicit. He wanted to help the Telegraph “become the most read and intellectually inspiring center-right media outlet in the English-speaking world,” he said in March. “The Telegraph stands for freedom, personal responsibility, democratic values and a belief in open societies and market economies.” The same announcement promised: “Editorial independence is sacrosanct at Axel Springer.”
The Promise.
The headline commitment in March was money. “Axel Springer will back an investment program in TMG to grow and expand the business,” the company said.
By October, the plan looked very different. The Guardian reported that between 50 and 100 editorial redundancies were being examined, and that consultants had floated side ventures such as “price comparison sites and healthcare.” Döpfner had reportedly told a leadership summit that the company “could not cut its way to growth.” One source put it simply: “The path to growth is not to cut jobs.”
Springer has made bolder promises before. When it bought Politico in 2021, Döpfner told the Wall Street Journal: “There will be no restructuring, no synergies, no mergers and no cost-cutting.”
The Telegraph got the restructuring, fast.
The Cuts.
On October 23, Hulshoff Pol told staff the company would “transform The Telegraph from a leading British newspaper into a global, AI-powered premium media and intelligence business.” She pointed to the sale process: “During the sale process, The Telegraph had limited ability to invest, adapt and move at the pace the market demanded.”
Newsroom insiders told the Guardian they expected as many as 100 people to lose their jobs. The company would not confirm the number. “Some staff were told on Thursday they were being fired.” The culture and sports departments were “particularly hard hit,” according to insiders.
Press Gazette relayed reports from Bloomberg that the comment and analysis team would merge with features and lifestyle, and from Guido Fawkes that the culture, fashion, and sport desks had been cut while the politics team was less affected. Health and travel are being folded into a single features department. Staff told the Guardian the newsroom felt like “a morgue.”
Most of the reported cuts fall on unnamed culture, sports, and production staff, and no full list exists. The names readers can see are another matter: Halligan, Farage, and, reportedly, Pearson are prominent populist voices.
The Names.
Liam Halligan has been a Sunday Telegraph columnist since 2003 and co-hosts Planet Normal. His announcement on X drew 1.63 million views, by his own count. He says the podcast will continue “as and when notice periods allow… on another platform.”
Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, has written for the paper since 2016. On November 2, the Guardian reported that “his contract to write regularly for the title is to end.” Sources suggested Axel Springer had decided not to renew it; sources close to Farage said he had resigned. Parliament’s register of interests lists the arrangement: “Writing articles,” payer “Telegraph media group,” “£4,000.00 paid monthly” for “16 hours a month.”
Allison Pearson is “understood to be in negotiations about leaving,” the Guardian reported on October 28, citing sources who said she was “preparing to announce her exit imminently.” One insider described “some sort of negotiation to make an elegant departure.” A Telegraph spokesman said the company “could not discuss the employment status of individual staff members.” The Guardian also reported that her relationship with the paper had been “strained over subjects she raised in her columns,” particularly immigration, and that some managers disliked the attention from a 2024 police investigation over a social media post.
Online, the list grew faster than the facts. Andrew Bridgen said columnist Sherelle Jacobs had been “sacked,” and Laura Dodsworth’s Free Mind Substack reported her “said to be leaving.” Jacobs had a column in the paper on November 6. The New World, relaying Guido Fawkes, has added defense writer Con Coughlin, Philip Johnston, and Dia Chakravarty to the departures.
Lisa Markwell, the paper’s head of long reads is also reported to be leaving.
The Owner’s Catechism.
To understand why readers suspect politics, look at how Axel Springer describes itself.
The company runs on a short creed it calls the Essentials. According to Springer’s own history, the principles were “written into the AG’s articles of association in 1970. And: in the employment contracts of journalists.” Döpfner has been clear about what that means for staff. In 2021 he told the Wall Street Journal that the principles, which then included support for “a united Europe,” “are like a constitution, they apply to every employee.” Anyone who disagreed “should not work for Axel Springer, very clearly,” he said.
That quote went viral in Britain at the end of October. On October 31, a widely shared X post claimed the Telegraph‘s new owners required every employee to support a united Europe, raising “serious questions tonight for Lisa Nandy.” It drew thousands of likes, and versions of it spread fast.
In June 2025, months before the Telegraph deal, Springer rewrote the Essentials. The current version begins: “We stand up for freedom, free speech, the rule of law, and democracy.” It goes on to “advocate the alliance between the United States of America and Europe” and the “free market economy.”
What has not gone is the idea that staff should share the owner’s values. Springer’s pro-Israel principle remains, and in April, Middle East Eye reported that Döpfner had told Politico staff that those who fundamentally reject support for Israel may not be a “good fit.” The same month, a Döpfner letter to Telegraph staff setting out the five Essentials leaked to Owen Jones.
Döpfner’s own self-description is the one that matters most for the Telegraph‘s politics. “We are believers in centrist politics,” he told Semafor in March, adding that “we should not narrow the corridor… We should widen it.” He went on to host both Tory leader Kemi Badenoch, billed as “Britain’s new Iron Lady,” and Farage on his podcast.
The LGBTQ+ Network.
The sharpest questions about Axel Springer’s culture were put to British readers by Charlotte Gill, who has herself written for the Telegraph.
“I need to show you something about The Telegraph’s new owner, Axel Springer,” she posted on November 1, in a thread that drew more than 2,400 likes. Gill turned British readers’ attention to Axel Springer Queerseite, the company’s LGBTQ+ staff network, which is hosted on Springer’s own website. She published its glossary of LGBTQ+ terms, and its Instagram posts marking “Trans* Day of Remembrance,” “Non-Binary People’s Day,” and “Trans* Awareness Week,” along with a collaboration tag for an account called “Dax Puppy.” The National Pulse detailed the materials days later.
Her Substack headline was blunt: “The Telegraph’s new owner – Axel Springer – believes in gender identity madness.” So was her conclusion about the paper’s gender-critical reporting: “I somehow doubt these types of story will ‘make the cut’ in the future.”
The most revealing account, though, comes from the network’s own founders. In an October 10 interview with the German site queer.de, marking Springer’s 80th anniversary, they described how the network began in 2014. “We presented it to the board, Mathias Döpfner. He said he thought it was great,” said co-founder Philipp Kaste. It now has 820 members.
They then described what happened in 2022, when Die Welt ran a guest op-ed titled “How ARD and ZDF sexualize and re-educate our children.” Kaste called it a “Scheißartikel,” a shit article. “We raised it loudly,” he said, recalling the moment “when Matthias said: this article is rubbish, he doesn’t want to see anything like it again.”
Asked whether the network had forced the removal, Kaste said: “No, we can’t do that.” Instead, he said, “After about a week it was removed by an editorial decision. Afterwards, mechanisms were tightened, for example the checking of guest contributions.”
Döpfner’s public verdict at the time was scathing. He called the op-ed “unterirdisch,” abysmal, and “superficial, condescending and resentment-laden,” while insisting he wanted the debate to continue.
The founders were also candid about who left afterward. “Certain old-conservative people left this company,” Kaste said. His co-founder Dirk Walsh added that some left “because Bild was too queer, because the place was too ‘woke.'” Kaste went further: “Some who found Springer too ‘woke’ are now at Nius. Personally I take that as a bit of a success for our Queerseite.”
The same founders insist they do not police the newsroom. “None of us would stand in front of an editor-in-chief and try to restrict editorial freedom,” Walsh said. Their interviewer pointed out that a Welt am Sonntag column by Jacques Schuster last year, complaining that readers were being pestered with LGBTI topics, is still online. “Of course,” Kaste replied. “That’s part of it.” Their interviewer observed that Springer “demonstratively commits to LGBTI rights.”
That is the precedent British readers should keep in mind. It may not yet govern the Telegraph, but it shows what the owner has tolerated, and acted on, in its own newsrooms.
Kemi’s Telegraph.
On the fight for the right, the change is in the signed columns, rather than the paper’s unsigned editorials.
For American readers: Kemi Badenoch’s Conservative Party and Farage’s Reform UK are competing to lead the British right, and until this month Reform led the Conservatives in the Telegraph‘s own poll tracker. Which party should lead that fight is a central argument in British conservative politics.
Before the sale, the paper’s editorials backed Badenoch but kept the door open to Reform. In May 2025 they backed her attack on Labour’s EU “surrender.” In September 2025 they argued “Britain must have a united Opposition.” Even after Springer took over, they called “Reform’s benefit plan” in August “a promising start” and in September defended Reform against Labour’s proposed cap on foreign donations. In August, a column by Heath himself complained that the two parties were “squabbling like children as world burns.”
Several columns have since hardened. On October 10, Janet Daley’s headline read: “Good riddance populism, welcome back Labour vs the Tories.” Five days later, Stephen Daisley called Reform “a party of barely contained bedlam,” while granting that “Opposition to mass immigration… is not a racist position” and that “the party is gaining substance.”
Then, on November 10, came Daniel Johnson’s column, “Kemi’s cavalier approach has her laughing all the way to Downing St.” “Uniting the Right does not mean pacts with rivals. It means defeating them,” Johnson wrote. “There is no deal to be done between Badenochians and Faragists: theirs is a fight to the death.”
Johnson quoted Badenoch’s own declaration, “No, no, no: I am the Right,” praised her for denouncing the “ethnonationalists of Reform and Restore,” a reference to Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain, and predicted she would be the next prime minister. The paper’s news pages ran its poll tracker under “Tories overtake Reform in Telegraph poll for first time,” then “Tories pull five points ahead of Reform.”
The current polls are close. YouGov’s survey of November 8 to 9 put the Conservatives on 21 and Reform on 20, with Labour on 27. Badenoch has long had cheerleaders on staff; sketch writer Tim Stanley has spent nearly two years calling her “mummy.”
The Readers.
The reaction on the right was immediate. Laurence Fox accused the paper of “far centrist extremism” and later dubbed it the “Remainergraph.” Laura Dodsworth’s Substack welcomed departing readers: “Stackers, Make Room: The Telegraph Diaspora Is Coming.” The Daily Friend ran “Farewell, Telegraph.”
The Spectator answered with satire in the voice of a smug centrist, “Rejoice! The Telegraph is saved,” celebrating that “The likes of Nigel Farage and Allison Pearson are, at long last, being flushed down the lavatory.” Some readers on X took it literally.
The “woke owners” charge began before Gill’s thread. “The Telegraph going woke since it was recently purchased by Axel Springer…” one user wrote to Fraser Nelson on October 23, the day the cuts were announced.
The National Pulse‘s Editor-in-Chief, Raheem Kassam, quoting Talk presenter Alex Phillips, put the case bluntly on November 1: “The Telegraph is now a paper of the left. The longer you subscribe, the longer you fund the propagandists of your own decline.”
Readers have followed with a visible wave of public cancellations on X, clustered between October 30 and November 7.
Some of the anger recycled older grievances. A viral complaint that the paper had refused to put a Robert Jenrick article online, retweeted by Pearson on November 2, was originally posted by Colin Brazier in March 2025, more than a year before Springer arrived. And not everyone on the right accepts the woke charge. “If new Telegraph owner Axel Springer is woke,” one podcast account asked, what was its chief executive doing at the ARC conference in June? But ARC is centre-right at best, especially in a U.S. sense.
Follow the Money.
The commercial case for the cuts is not the story of a loss-making paper. The Telegraph‘s 2025 accounts, covering the last full year before Springer, show a pre-tax loss of £3.9 million, according to Press Gazette‘s reading of the filings. The paper’s own headline called it “Takeover saga pushes The Telegraph to a loss.” Press Gazette attributed the loss to the cost of the sale, with fees for lawyers, accountants, bankers, and consultants topping £40 million over three years, and to a £4.2 million write-down of the Chelsea Magazine Company. The same accounts also showed an underlying pre-tax operating profit of about £48 million, the Guardian reported.
By the end of 2025, before the sale, digital subscribers across its products had risen 12 percent to 947,000, according to Press Gazette. Digital subscription revenue rose 8 percent to £87.4 million.
The pressures were real, but they were about cash and the future, not a failing paper. A £50 million Lloyds loan could not be renewed and had to be paid off, pushing cash flow negative. Springer lent the business £7 million in early 2026 “when cash appeared to be tight.” Travel and lifestyle revenue fell 20 percent as Google’s AI Overviews swallowed search traffic. Print still makes up 53 percent of revenue, and print advertising fell 10 percent. By August 2026, the Telegraph‘s UK online audience was down 11 percent year on year.
Döpfner’s answer starts with America. In July, the Guardian quoted him telling staff: “The centre-right audience is vastly underserved in democracies around the world. So, the biggest opportunity is, of course, the US.” The October memo’s “global, AI-powered premium media and intelligence business” is the vehicle.
Some senior Telegraph journalists think Springer simply overpaid. Marr reported their frustration at “almost no due diligence” and “paying over the odds.”
The 2025 numbers show an operationally profitable paper with a growing digital base, hit by takeover costs, debt, and falling traffic. Its new owner is cutting desks that insiders say include culture and sport, and losing Halligan, Farage’s regular column, and reportedly Pearson, while it chases a new audience abroad.
What Comes Next.
There are concrete things to watch. Who, if anyone, takes over Halligan’s “Economic Agenda” slot, and what happens to Pearson’s column. Also, where Planet Normal resurfaces, after Halligan said it would continue “on another platform.” We’ll watch to see if the Essentials appear in British staff contracts, and how the company responds if a gender-critical Telegraph piece draws objections from inside Axel Springer, as Die Welt‘s did in 2022.
For now, the Telegraph belongs to a company whose chief executive said in 2021 that dissenters “should not work for Axel Springer,” and one of whose LGBTQ+ network founders personally counts the departure of “old-conservative” colleagues in Germany as “a bit of a success.”
