Who is popular today?

UnHerd has quickly become one of the biggest sites for political commentary in the UK, and now the hedge fund founder behind it – who also funds GB News and donates to the Tories – is trying to add the Telegraph to a fast-growing empire. What does he really want?In July 2017, British Conservative commentator Tim Montgomerie announced a new media venture, to widespread derision. UnHerd’s kitsch name and cow logo provoked ridicule and confusion. “Today I’m unveiling the icon that will top [the site] – a cow, who like our target readers, tends to avoid herds and behaves in unmissable ways as a result,” Montgomerie, UnHerd’s founding editor, announced. The aim of UnHerd was more serious than its misconceptions about cows suggested: to rejuvenate capitalism and conservatism through free thinking, and make a positive case for Brexit. Among its early essays were “Conservatives must reboot capitalism”, by Ruth Davidson, then leader of the Conservative party in Scotland, and “Outside of the EU, Britain can be a global champion of free trade”, by Liam Halligan, then a columnist at the Sunday Telegraph, now economics and business editor at GB News. Montgomerie had worked as a speechwriter to two Conservative leaders and launched the influential website ConservativeHome. But UnHerd struggled to be taken seriously. Online, sceptics christened it “the unmissable cow website” and “UnRead”.Today, however, UnHerd is no longer a punchline. The name remains, but the cow has disappeared, and any partisan affiliation is denied. The site has amassed a diverse stable of writers, editors and readers, drifting away from explicit concern for the Conservative party and the future of capitalism, and towards a focus on culture war topics: lockdowns, wokeness, cancel culture and the trans rights movement, as well as more general journalistic fare. Its readership now comfortably exceeds that of the New Statesman, and more than half of its audience are in the US and Canada. Spurred by this success, the man behind its rise put his money into GB News, and now seems to have set his eyes on an even bigger prize: the Telegraph titles and the Spectator. Continue reading...