After years of losses and at an estimated £100m personal investment, Sir John Madejski finally threw in the towel in one of the most expensive games of last man standing the industry has ever seen.

While print’s most famous benefactor had seemingly been willing to pour good money after bad for years in pursuit of what can only be described as "jam tomorrow" at Goodhead Group subsidiary BGP, 2012 was the year his patience ran out.

The beneficiary? Polestar of course, no stranger to mega-losses and itself the subject of a similar pre-pack deal the previous year when it was sold to Sun Capital. After months of speculation and weeks of negotiation, the deal was concluded on 28 November, with Polestar acquiring BGP and Stones the Printers in a complex pre-pack, the full details of which have yet to emerge.

Now that the UK’s Big Three has been cut by one the question remains: will sanity prevail? Or will cut-throat last man standing print pricing continue to be the order of the day until the Big Two is reduced to a single candidate? As Christopher Lambert used to say in the Highlander movies, "There can be only one".