Rupert Murdoch’s protracted battle to be allowed to merge The Times and the Sunday Times may have been won, more than 40 years after he bought the UK national mastheads. But will it actually happen?

The two had been brought together in 1967 when Canadian Roy Thomson – later Lord Thomson of Fleet – bought “the old lady of Printing House Square” from the Astor family and merged it with the Sunday Times, which he had owned since 1959.

Murdoch’s News International had agreed to keep them separate as “strictly independent” news outlets when he acquired the then broadsheets in 1981, but he had been hopeful of merging them under new laws introduced in 2019 as part of a rush of “taking out the trash” legislation.

But the “final approval to share resources” – opposed by unions and others – still came with an undertaking to run the titles independently with their own newsrooms and their own editors. Then culture secretary Jeremy Wright agreed to pooling of resources if the papers changed governing structures and reported on them annually.

Now Wight’s successor, culture secretary Nadine Dorries has accepted the Office of Communication’s argument that Murdoch “had little incentive to exercise greater editorial control as such a move would likely undermine the trust of the papers’ readers and thus cost him money”, and announced that no objections had been received after she floated the idea in November.

The Guardian reported that current editors John Witherow and Emma Tucker had since emailed staff saying that editorial independence – “which is enshrined in the editors’ contracts” – would continue. The Times and Sunday Times would remain separate with “no plans to merge the titles”.

Ofcom said the “separation principle is less relevant now – and will be even less relevant in the future – than it was when the sole method of consumption was via print”.

The UK’s competition and markets authority had claimed scrapping the undertakings would have a “significantly positive impact” on News UK’s financial position and ability to adapt to the changing media market.

Dorries meanwhile, said that because of the “material change of circumstances” in the news industry since 1981, and since “the impact on media plurality of releasing the undertakings is likely to be limited and that, on balance, releasing the undertakings was unlikely to operate against the public interest needs for free expression of opinion and accuracy of news”.

Pictured: This historic 1981 photograph of Rupert Murdoch, flanked by then editors Harold Evans (Sunday Times) and William Rees-Mogg (The Times) was nominated photographer Sally Soames as her “best shot”.