Sands runs out of time at the Telegraph

The sacking of the Sunday Telegraph’s editor after only nine months is good and bad news, says peregrine worsthorne

In one sense the sacking of Sarah Sands from the editorship of the Sunday Telegraph is good news. For in the nine months she was there she did much to ruin the paper, transforming it from a serious newspaper aimed at educated readers to a populist rag primarily aimed at young women.

Having worked on the paper since its inception in 1961, finally as editor, its new format and contents had begun to enrage me every Sunday and only yesterday I arranged to cancel my subscription. But will it get any better under a new editor?

This seems to be very unlikely since the Barclay brothers, the present owners of the Telegraph Group, which includes the Spectator, clearly have no idea what they want to do with these once prestigious titles,

To have the Telegraph titles lurching around like untethered lorries in the hold of a cross-channel ferry is a national disgrace

apart from hoping in some way or other to get back some of the fortune they paid to acquire them from the now disgraced Conrad Black.

It is a pitiful story. The Telegraph titles used to be part of the ballast that kept the British ship of state - in particular the Conservative Party - on a steady course, and to have all these titles lurching around like untethered lorries in the hold of a cross-channel ferry is a national disgrace.

With all the new technological challenges facing the print medium, it is nothing less than tragic that so large and powerful a group of newspapers, which were once the conscience of the Tory party, should now be, to all intentions and purposes, hors de combat - not unlike Tessa Jowell, the Culture Secretary, who is meant to be their protector.