In the ever-spiraling drain of the British media landscape, we find ourselves subjected to yet another chapter of billionaires swapping deck chairs on a sinking ship. This time, the Daily Mail & General Trust (DMGT) is attempting to swallow the Telegraph titles for a cool £500 million—a price tag that suggests there is still some residual value in telling octogenarians exactly which foreign entities they should be terrified of this week. Enter Lisa Nandy, the UK’s Culture Secretary, who has emerged from the mahogany shadows of Whitehall to announce she is ‘minded to’ intervene. One can almost hear the collective sigh of a nation that knows exactly how this performative dance ends: with mountains of paperwork, several expensive lunches for regulators, and the eventual, inevitable homogenization of what passes for ‘news’ in this damp corner of the world.

The phrase ‘minded to’ is a classic of the political genre. It is the linguistic equivalent of a wet paper towel; it allows a minister to sound decisive while actually committing to nothing more than a glorified shrug. Nandy is asking Ofcom and the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) to look into whether this deal harms ‘media plurality.’ It is a hilarious concept, really. The idea that having two different outlets spewing the same flavor of reactionary drivel constitutes ‘plurality’ is the kind of intellectual gymnastics that only a career politician could perform without pulling a muscle. Whether the rage-bait is delivered via the Mail’s breathless exclamation marks or the Telegraph’s faux-aristocratic huffing, the destination is the same: a state of permanent, low-level cognitive dissonance for the British public. To suggest that merging these two entities would somehow reduce the variety of thought in the UK is like suggesting that mixing two different brands of white paint will ruin the color palette of a room. It was already monochromatic, Lisa.

Then we have the regulators themselves—Ofcom and the CMA. These are the watchdogs that watch the way a heavily tranquilized golden retriever watches a burglar. They will spend months ‘examining’ the deal, likely concluding that while a monopoly on grumpy columnists is undesirable, it is technically legal under some obscure loophole from the era when people still thought newspapers were a viable way to transmit information. The £500 million deal remains a testament to the fact that while the journalism industry is dying, the business of controlling the narrative remains a blue-chip investment. It is a merger that intends to create a ‘right-leaning publishing powerhouse,’ which is just a polite way of saying a factory for the industrial-scale production of confirmation bias for people who still use landlines.

The irony of the Labour government’s feigned concern is not lost on anyone with a functioning frontal lobe. They pretend to care about ‘plurality’ only because it gives them a momentary sense of leverage over the media barons they spent the last election cycle auditioning for. It’s a performative tug-of-war where both sides are pulling on the same end of the rope. On the other side of the ledger, the Right will inevitably screech about ‘regulatory overreach’ and the ‘death of the free market,’ while simultaneously begging for the very protections that keep their antiquated business models from collapsing into the digital abyss. It is a symbiotic relationship of profound stupidity. The Mail wants the Telegraph because it wants to own the entire spectrum of conservative anxiety, from the pearl-clutching suburbs to the fox-hunting country estates. Nandy wants to look like a guardian of the public interest because the alternative is admitting that the government is essentially a bystander in the face of concentrated capital.

Let us not ignore the absurdity of the ‘public interest’ test. In a world where the average citizen’s attention span is currently being liquidated by short-form video apps and AI-generated slurry, the idea that the ownership of a broadsheet newspaper constitutes a crisis of democracy is almost quaint. It’s like worrying about the quality of the coal being used on a steam train while a hyper-loop is being built next to it. The Telegraph and the Mail are relics, museum pieces of a bygone era where people waited until the morning to be lied to. DMGT’s move to consolidate these assets is less a strategic masterstroke and more a desperate attempt to build a bigger bunker against the encroaching irrelevance of print media.

Ultimately, Nandy’s intervention is a bureaucratic speedbump on the road to a singular, consolidated voice of the British establishment. Whether the deal is waved through or subjected to a series of meaningless ‘commitments’ to editorial independence—a phrase that has never meant less than it does now—the result remains the same. The public will continue to be fed a diet of manufactured outrage by a dwindling number of increasingly wealthy men, while the politicians pretend they are doing something about it by referring the matter to a committee. It is a closed loop of futility, a perfect circle of nonsense that ensures that no matter who owns the paper, the reader remains the loser. If this is the ‘plurality’ we are fighting to save, perhaps it’s time to let the whole thing burn and see if something more intelligent grows from the ashes. But don't hold your breath; the regulators haven't finished their sandwiches yet.