The British Press

John Lloyd in Saturday's Financial Times magazine (online to subscribers only I'm afraid) writes on the state of the British press and believes that the Guardian is now the paper of the British establishment. He may have a point (actually one could argue this is the case under Labour governments) but it raises the question, what newspaper can one read nowadays and stay sane?
Lloyd rightly points to the degeneration of the Times under Murdoch; it's vulgar and sensationalist. I read the Times, in the unsupported belief that the crossword at least is better than those in rival titles. But even if it ever was the newspaper of record, it certainly isn't now. When my father died in 1997, I placed an announcement in the births, marriages and deaths columns, but I think the days are long gone when that was an effective way of telling people in one's circle of such events.
I was brought up on the Guardian, which my parents read and stuck with it for most of the 1970s and the early 1980s; I switched to the Independent when it started, because I'm a neophiliac, but in the early 1990s grew fed up with it, not least with the sixth-form essay tone of its leaders, which in those days must have been written by Andrew Marr. These days I read the Times during the week, the Independent and Financial Times on a Saturday and the Observer on a Sunday. I think the best English language newspaper I've ever read is the Irish Times, though I quite liked both the Washington Post and New York Times when visiting the USA last year. I can have as much of the world's press as I want, more or less, through the web and RSS feeds but I still need something on wood pulp, preferably in broadsheet format.
In the final analysis, I should start my own. In a democracy, any billionaire can.