After a botched relaunch resulted in the forced departure of Standard editor Dylan Jones late last year, eyebrows were raised when Anna van Praagh was named acting editor with a brief of saving what used to be London’s daily newspaper.
Office gossip claims that van Praagh had been earmarked for the chop when Jones departed but pleaded successfully for her job and ended up being put in charge of a decidedly listing ship.
But there is concern that rather than knuckling down to the task at hand, the former Mail and Telegraph features hack may fancy building up her profile as yet another edgy right wing pundit. Since taking over from Jones she has constantly railed on social media against Keir Starmer and Labour – an interesting choice in a city which elected 59 Labour MPs to its 75 seats last year and which has voted three times for Sadiq Khan as mayor.
Last week – in a hastily deleted tweet – van Praagh weighed in on accusations that Elon Musk’s claims of a ‘cover-up’ over the grooming gangs scandal was in the X owner’s “political interests” and he was fuelling a “hate campaign against Jess Phillips”.
She wrote: “Maybe Elon Musk hadn’t even heard of Jess Phillips, but the cover-up of this scandal, rather than being ‘noble’ is a thing of national shame and horrific to witness from even across the other side of the world.”
Here was the acting editor of a supposedly influential media brand happily spreading conspiracy theories. A 2022 report into safeguarding measures in Oldham between 2011 and 2014 found that children were failed by local agencies, but that there was no cover-up.
Later the same day she posted: “It feels like a revolution is taking place in Britain. Orthodoxies are being broken down and there is an utter distrust of politicians and government. I think this will be a very notable year.”
If Anna van Praagh is still running the Standard by the end of it, it will be a notable 2025 indeed!
