Editorial: The Telegraph newspaper titles must not be allowed to fall to the Abu Dhabi bid

​The government has intervened in an Abu Dhabi-backed takeover of the Daily Telegraph – and so it should.

The Culture Secretary Lucy Frazer has tasked the regulator Ofcom with investigating the sale of the titles to the RedBird IMI investment fund. The Telegraph papers and Spectator magazine were bought by the Barclays family in 2005, who were latterly unable to meet their debt.

NationalWorld, owner of the News Letter, has been a possible bidder in an expected auction of the titles, but we as a newspaper have no role in that. Our view is based on our history as the oldest English language daily newspaper in the world. When you read the early 1730s News Letters you see how open information was allowed to emerge in Britain, Europe and the Americas, albeit with struggles between government inclination towards censorship in the 1700s and the public demand to know what really happens in society. The triumph of transparency, alongside free and fair elections and courts that upheld the rule of law, had by the 1800s honed our unprecedented civilisations.

To this day there is no such openness in China. While the US agonised over, and knew every detail of, the appalling killings of four anti-Vietnam protestors by soldiers in America in 1970, we still do not know how many Chinese students were massacred by the People’s Liberation Army in Tiananmen Square in 1989. The Red Cross estimated 2,000+. That evil day can’t even be marked. Now the Chinese system of total information control is destroying Hong Kong.

The United Arab Emirates is moderate by the repressive standards of Muslim states, but even so it is alarming to think of its leaders having sway over The Telegraph. Promises of an editorial firewall between Abu Dhabi and the papers are inadequate.

The UK has huge cultural influence but also a recent history of naivete about the need to protect its key assets.