Twenty-Two Per Cent Of Our Income Comes From Someone We Cannot Name.

In February 1987 a solicitor's firm delivered a sum of money to the trust that owns this newspaper, with a typed letter attached. In October 1994 it did so again. The firm has since been wound up and its successor practice says it holds no file.

We do not know who sent it. We have tried for thirty-nine years.

What it pays for

Twenty-two per cent of what this newspaper spends. Roughly, and we have published the exact figure at Ownership & Funding every year since 1996: the document room, the Freedom of Information litigation, the public editor's contract, and about a third of the reporting staff.

The endowment is irrevocable. It cannot be withdrawn by anyone, including us. It carries no conditions we are aware of.

That last clause is doing a great deal of work and we know it.

The letters

We publish both in full as PX-1844. The relevant passage of the 1994 letter reads:

I have no instruction to give you and would not give one if I had. I ask only that you continue to be uninteresting to the people who find you interesting.

If it is of any use to you, the three subjects on which I have ever wished a newspaper would take more trouble are Antarctic logistics, the reorganisation of 1947, and the ringing of the moon.

We have never determined whether that final sentence is a preference, an instruction, or a joke. We have read it aloud in this room perhaps two hundred times.

The three votes

The board has voted on returning the endowment in 1996, in 2011, and in March of this year. It has voted to keep it each time, and the margin has narrowed each time. This year it was three to two.

The case for keeping it, which is the board's position and therefore this newspaper's:

The money cannot be withdrawn, so it cannot be used as leverage. A donor with no lever has no editorial power, whatever their wishes. Returning it would end the document room, the litigation fund, and eleven jobs, and would transfer the difference to the only other bodies willing to fund a newspaper of this size — which are, without exception, organisations we cover.

We would rather have one conflict we can describe in full than four we would have to describe in part.

The dissent, printed at the dissenters' insistence

Two members of the board disagree, and our standing practice is that a divided board publishes its division rather than a consensus that does not exist.

Their argument, in their own words, agreed with them line by line:

The majority says a donor with no lever has no power. That is true only of the lever the majority has thought of. Twenty-two per cent of a budget shapes a newspaper before anyone picks anything up. It shapes what is affordable to investigate, which shapes what is investigated, which shapes what this newspaper is for.

And there are three subjects in that letter. We have published sixty-one stories touching them. We disclose it on every one, and disclosure is not a solution; it is a receipt.

The honest position is that we do not know whether we have been shaped, because a newspaper cannot audit the stories it did not think to commission. We should give the money back and be smaller and be sure.

We think they are wrong. We are not confident that they are wrong, and we would be uneasy about a board on which nobody said it.

What we do instead

Every story touching Antarctic logistics, the 1947 reorganisation of the American intelligence apparatus, or lunar seismology carries a disclosure line at its foot. There are sixty-one of them in the archive, and the number is on the newsroom metrics page.

We publish the letters. We publish the percentage. We publish this editorial, which will be linked from every one of those sixty-one stories for as long as they exist.

And we will vote again in 2031, and if the margin narrows once more, the answer will change.

Why say any of this

Because a reader who discovers in five years that a fifth of our money comes from a stranger will not be reassured to learn we had a policy about it. They will want to know whether we told them.

We are telling them. It is on the front page, on a Thursday, above a story about a gold quota missed four thousand years ago, which is exactly the sort of juxtaposition that makes a newspaper look ridiculous and exactly the reason to run it there.