When I started this, I decided I needed at least one broadsheet. I already had plans for Sunday, so The Sunday Times was out, and I'd decided that only general purpose newspapers qualified for this, so the Financial Times was out. That left me with just one option, The Daily Telegraph (also known as the 'Torygraph' in some circles).
The banner headline today is "This baby will be 23 before we are out of this mess" (with a large picture of a baby called Loralie Hope Arnold below) with a sub-headline of "Britain’s debt will not be under control until 2032" (yes, more economics, and I don't even like economics). The story is about the huge amount of debt Britain is in, and just how long we've been digging this hole for ourselves. The story is not exactly sympathetic to Labour (as if it could be) but also seems to make it clear that the Conservatives aren't exactly sure what they plan to do about the economy.
Continuing on the economy, there is a lot of complaining about the new 50p top tax rate. One headline says 25,000 will leave Britain to avoid it, another says New Labour is losing the support of business leaders that got them into power, and a third that says taxes will be trebled for some who create wealth along with a story of one man who is to be affected. I'd have more sympathy if this wasn't exactly what I predicted they would do. There's also stories about how cutting spending will impact education, how motorists will be hit by higher taxes, and how the government's plan to get grandparents to retire early to take care of their grandchildren won't work. After five days of this though, I'm tired of it all, so time to move on.
There is a short article on page 2 that caught my eye, about St. George's Crosses being deemed unsafe and removed, which I think I remember seeing in the Daily Mail last year. Another articles tells of an Australian Miss Universe contestant with a body mass index of 15.1 (to put that in perspective, I hover around 18.5 and look like a stick insect, anything below 18.5 is considered 'underweight', and a BMI of 17.5 or below is part of the diagnosis for anorexia nervosa). I also noted two somewhat related stories, one telling of how Britain cannot send further troops to Afghanistan because we simply cannot afford it, and another about how the Taliban are now beginning to advance on Pakistan's capital (which sounds decidedly alarmist to these ears).
The Comment & Debate section is pretty much what I'd actually been expecting out of the Daily Mail earlier this week. One opinion piece is a straight attack on Gordon Brown, fawning over both Tony Blair and David Cameron, generally thinking Cameron will make a fantastic Prime Minister and that Blair's only mistake was giving the serially incompetent Brown any power in government. The letters also seem agreed that the only way out of recession is to cut off the "welfare state as current constituted, with its vast army of unproductive bureaucrats". One letter that seems to ignore the obvious is a complaint about being saddled with a bill now despite not being able to remember the party, which seems to have been written by a man completely ignorant of the continuous economic growth from 1997-2007, he may say that was simply an unsustainable bubble, but how else do you define a 'party' in economic terms? I'd also refer him to the Thatcherite 80s and the early 90s recession if he needs some context...
More interesting than the Labour-bashing though is a story on Barack Obama. There's a passing reference to Mahmoud Ahmedinejad's "hateful anti-Israeli rhetoric", which gives a nice contrast to The Independent's view of the same speech yesterday, and further exposes the folly of thinking there is a single entity called the 'Western media'. The rest of the article appears to be more attempts to end Barack Obama's honeymoon period by declaring it to be over again, and criticising him for causing a domestic scandal over his reluctance to prosecute over torture of detainees (which I agree was a bad decision) while also making some not-so-thinly veiled accusations that his current foreign policy is appeasement under a new name (which is where I part ways with this correspondent).
Finally, the features section contains something that doesn't seem very patriotic to be talking about: Where to emigrate to now that Britain's economy is apparently in the shitter. Yes, let's all just bugger off to Canada or New Zealand and let old Blighty collapse into a third-world nation. Really, it just feels like propaganda to me, linked to the earlier story of 25,000 leaving Britain due to the new 50p top tax rate. The insinuation being that Labour's 'reckless and irresponsible policies' will drive all of the best people out of Britain, and we'll be left with no one to rebuild the country. Unless the Tories win of course, in which case these people will stay, despite the fact that not even the Tories plan to repeal the dreaded 50p top tax rate for a good few years yet.
The paper itself is a broadsheet, so the pages are much larger than any I've seen before in this experiment. There are 40 broadsheet pages in the main paper + 8 more broadsheet pages for the 'Business' section today + 52 tabloid-sized pages for the 'Sport' section. The price was 90p.
All in all, I think the Telegraph was enlightening. I thought the Daily Mail would be my political adversary among the newspapers, but it seems I've moved on now, and the Mail no longer presents an inviting target to me. The Daily Telegraph is larger and more intellectual, giving my debating instincts something to get their teeth into. This could be the beginning of a new era for me.