Unblessed Trinity

Remember when Robin Cook, the late foreign secretary and horse racing enthusiast, headed a venture capital-backed consortium that wanted to buy the Racing Post? It was March 2005 and Cook and co were offering Trinity Mirror £210m. (The title was eventually sold to FL Partners for £170m two years later). Today, £210m would buy almost the whole of Trinity. After a 15% plunge in its share price today, the publisher of the Daily Mirror, 150 regional newspapers and 500 websites is valued at just £230m. OK, Trinity also has debts of £288m, which makes the comparison slightly less striking – but only slightly.