The Media Column: 'Readers may be taken aback by the Telegraph staff's fondness for unions'

The results, when they finally emerged, would have impressed Nicolae Ceausescu. Conrad Black, on the other hand, was filled with contempt. Collared a few days later at a media correspondents' lunch by an impertinent hack, the Telegraph proprietor growled: "If they think they are going to get a single extra brass farthing out of me..."

But the people - the Telegraph employees - have spoken. In a postal ballot forced through by the National Union of Journalists (NUJ), 91 per cent of those who voted said that they wanted the union to be officially recognised. As a result, the NUJ will now have a seat at the table for discussions on pay, health and safety and "quality of life" issues for Telegraph employees.

When the results were announced, in an electronic message to staff, cheers were heard in three departments at the newspaper. In case Telegraph management is reading this, it may be best not to identify the miscreants. For it was a rough and sometimes spiteful battle. The Telegraph's managing director, Jeremy Deedes, is said to have refused to sit in the same room as the NUJ, and he and his team did not soften their stance even as defeat loomed. "The company resisted right to the last, and tried to pull every trick in the book to prevent it," says a source. Sticking to the letter of the law, Deedes and his team apparently refused at first even to divulge a list of employees' names and addresses to the NUJ - after insisting on a postal ballot. (The union would have preferred to give workers the option to vote either at home or in the office.) The management then complained when union officials at the paper attempted to send internal e-mails to members of staff.

Predictably, the union is jubilant. Its general secretary, Jeremy Dear, hails the result, after an 18-month struggle, as "one of the most significant recognition agreements the NUJ has won for years". Of the national newspapers, the result leaves only News International and Associated Newspapers without recognition deals.

Readers of The Daily Telegraph, The Sunday Telegraph, the papers' website and The Spectator (all of which are covered by the vote) may be a little taken aback by the notion that the people who put together their publications should be so fond of the trade unions - especially in a week when Lord Black was revealed to have donated £10,000 to Conservative Party funds, a move that will surely have made more sense to the Torygraph heartland. But 30 years ago, the Telegraph had a notoriously left-wing chapel, with no discernible influence on the paper's politics.

That newspaper folk do not necessarily share the political views of their title always surprises people outside the industry. But given that there are, in effect, only eight employers in the national-newspaper marketplace, it would take a very pure - and probably very jobless - hack to insist that he worked only for a paper that voted the way he did. "I'd say that there were quite a few Tories in the City office, a fair few in Politics and a lot in management," says a Telegraph source. "But among the grunts? There aren't very many at all."

If there is anything that unites journalists, another hack explains, it is a lack of respect for authority. "And, yes, I suppose that is hardly the first qualification for membership of the Tory party."

"But", another scribe explains, "we are not a bunch of lefties either. This vote was as much to do with the way the management messed around with the canteen as with anything else." Last year's pay-freeze did not help either; nor did the staff's feeling that they had not been consulted about the introduction of a new computer system.

So we can all sleep safely in our beds. The Telegraph will not be leading a call for the nationalisation of the high-street banks. Wolfie Smith will not be lured out of retirement to address banner-waving sub-editors. But the future may promise a better class of steak-and-kidney pie at lunchtime.

Maybe the suits at the Telegraph should relax. The NUJ may not be such an ogre anyway. Last week, the union called on its 3,000 members at the BBC to take part in industrial action in support of Adli Hawwari and Abdul-Hadi Jiad, two World Service producers who have been dismissed - allegedly unfairly - by the corporation. The union called for a boycott of Greg Dyke's "Big Conversation", a glittery, first-of-its-kind internal televised address from the director general to his 20,000 employees across the world. So, while the BBC was keen to force its staff to take the morning off to watch television, the union was trying to keep workers chained to their desks.

Would someone please wake me up when things start making sense again?

v.graff@independent.co.uk