The Scoop
A group of North American financiers led by a low-profile, British-born conservative publisher have emerged as a serious bidder for the UK publication The Telegraph, according to two people with knowledge of the bid.
Dovid Efune, publisher of the New York Sun, made his pitch Wednesday to RedBird IMI, the Abu Dhabi-backed fund that has been forced by the British government to unload the publication over concerns over foreign influence in the domestic press.
The operatic sale of a publication that is a central pillar of the Conservative Party has been widely covered in the British press, with two bidders widely reported: Paul Marshall, the knighted financier and funder of the populist right-wing broadcaster GB News, who just purchased the Spectator from RedBird IMI and is working with the American tycoon Ken Griffin; and a regional UK publisher, David Montgomery’s National World, which publishes the Scotsman and the Yorkshire Post.
The Spectator and Telegraph, both storied British media assets, came on the block last year after the Barclay family failed to pay its debts. RedBird IMI paid £600 million to acquire both. One person working on the deal said the sellers are heartened by the bids and hope to do better than breaking even, having unloaded the Spectator for £100 million. “They just wanted to get shot of us for the highest price,” longtime Spectator Chairman Andrew Neil wrote on X this week.
Efune and his banker, James Lindsay of the boutique dealmaker Liontree, presented the bid in London today. Their financial backers include US investment funds Oaktree; the family office of hedge-fund manager and philanthropist Michael Leffell; and the investment arm of the Canadian developer Beedie, one person familiar with the bid said. Hudson Bay Capital, which recently backed Steven Mnuchin’s rescue of a failing New York bank, also discussed investing.
Efune, who has been described as British-born, has roots in the American Jewish press. He was hired in 2008 as the editor-in-chief of the Algemeiner Journal, a Yiddish-language weekly that had fallen out of circulation, and which he revived in English and led until 2021, the year he purchased the New York Sun from its founding editor, Seth Lipsky.
Ben’s view
The Sun, which Lipsky revived in 2002 (and hired me for my first job in New York) was launched as a conservative broadsheet alternative to the New York Times. It leavened right-wing American politics — with an emphasis on low taxes, a strict reading of the Constitution, and unbending support for Israel — with scoopy local news reporting and highbrow culture coverage. It went out of print in 2008 but stayed online until Efune’s purchase.
Efune, who didn’t respond to text messages, promised that the Sun would continue “its focus on constitutionalism, equality under the law, and American values.”
His own public commentary has been focused on Israel, whose “enemies are now facing a harsh reminder of just how formidable Israel at its best can be,” he wrote recently on X. He’s also been supportive of Donald Trump.
A Trump victory “would make a huge difference,” Efune said in a recent interview. “Donald Trump’s administration would be very supportive of Israel’s efforts now to reestablish security on its borders and [a] Kamala Harris administration would wildly meddle, to say the least.”
An obvious question will be how much those views would shape the Telegraph, whose attraction as a vehicle for political power has always enhanced its value as one of many British titles attempting to build a viable online business. The Telegraph is a central arbiter of tensions inside the Conservative Party, which is torn like many right-wing Western parties between its Establishment and populist wings, a divide Efune’s Sun has also sought to straddle.