Read the Mirror for the news, and the Telegraph to see if it’s true, my newspaperman father would advise… and those were the two mastheads I grew up with as a kid.

But that’s more than half a century ago. Before Robert Maxwell took the red-top, relieved himself from the roof of its Holborn headquarters, plundered its pension funds, and slipped from the bows of his superyacht (named for his now-disgraced daughter Ghislaine).

Before the bold, black flexo-printed Mail developed its digital delight of long headlines; and before a new generation of Rothermeres appeared, to move into the Metro market and covet the Barclays’ Tele.

And now it’s within reach, some suggesting regulators should grant them access to this last broadsheet, without making the process too onerous. Though you’d wonder whether that’s necessary; what price they’d be willing to pay for it…

Certainly divesting the i Paper and Metro has been canvassed.

So we’re into DMGT’s “period of exclusivity” with RedBird IMI, the half-billion English pounds (GBP£500 million, or A$1.015 billion) being a fair sum, but you’d guess the Rothermere family might part with the Mail itself to grasp such a prize, if they had to.

What’s clear is how close to a raw nerve all this comes. Talk in the House of Lords touched on whether the sale should be supervised by “an independent body… such as the Cabinet office” (now there’s a contradiction in terms). It would be a dangerous precedent, especially now there’s potentially no foreign money involved and probably no need of an FSI (foreign state influence) ruling. Two words on the government “taking control” of the precious enigma that is the Daily Telegraph: Please don’t.

Peter Coleman