On Thursday, Andrew Neil, the colorful and voluble veteran U.K. broadcaster and chairman of The Spectator, went on BBC2 Newsnight and declared that he would quit the conservative weekly in protest if former CNN chief Jeff Zucker and Emirati vice president Sheikh Mansour acquired his magazine and The Telegraph, the influential Tory broadsheet. “They’re a government,” Neil said of the Emiratis who are effectively bankrolling the deal for Zucker, “and the idea that a government should own newspapers and magazines in Britain, I think, is absurd.” Neil continued: “But they’re not just a government, they’re an undemocratic government. They’re a dictatorship.”