“Who loses and who wins? Who’s in, who’s out?” is one of the most marvellous lines in Shakespeare. It is in King Lear, at the calm stage where the King is imagining a life of reconciliation with Cordelia: he suggests, among other things, that they could live in an ivory tower and contemplate, at a distance, the vagaries of politics: “Who loses and who wins? Who’s in, who’s out?” Well, at the Spectator, Fraser Nelson is out, and Michael Gove is in. I want to consider something that is found both in Fraser Nelson’s last article as Editor and Michael Gove’s first article as Editor. It involves a reference to Alexander Chancellor, and it raises an interesting question.
Here is Fraser Nelson, in the October 5th edition, while reflecting on 15 years in the editor’s chair:
When the Spectator succumbs to tribalist temptation, it is most at risk. We were the only weekly to back Brexit (as it wasn’t then called) in the 1975 referendum. At the time, the magazine never shut up about that and it fell into the snare of trying to give “thought leadership to the Right”. Alexander Chancellor saved the magazine by almost entirely reconstructing it. My first act as Editor was to have lunch with him and ask him how he did it. He told me that he saw it as a restoration, not a reinvention, and pointed me to the original Spectator of 1711.
I immersed myself in the Addison and Steele project, to try to understand why reprints of these essays were read in every educated home for generations, doing so much to shape English language and culture. Chancellor’s advice was to make sure the DNA of the 1711 Spectator was applied to everything new we engaged in, and that everyone who joined the Spectator understood what the magazine is and isn’t about.
And here is Michael Gove, in the October 12th edition:
I first joined the party (of Spectator readers that is, not the Conservative party) as a teenager in Aberdeen. Alexander Chancellor was the Editor then, one of an illustrious succession that included Charles Moore, Dominic Lawson and Frank Johnson before Boris [Johnson], Matt[hew d’Ancona] and Fraser [Nelson]. Alexander succeeded as Editor because he knew that while the Spectator was a magazine that covered politics, indeed covered it better than any rival, it was not a political magazine. It should have the best writers on foreign affairs, food, music, new books, culture generally and human frailty everywhere. I never made it to No. 11 but Alexander is the Chancellor I most want to emulate.
What we observe is that Alexander Chancellor is to the Spectator what Margaret Thatcher is to the Conservative party: the exemplary figure whose marble shoe must be kissed in humble reverence. And why? Well, because he tried to be above the fray, tried to avoid taking sides: got on with the business of making a magazine appealing.
The first thing to say about this is that it is, and was, strictly impossible not to take sides: and that the Spectator has always taken a side. Everyone knows that the Spectator is big-C, little c, what begins with C? Considerable characters conservative, C, C, C. One only has to consider that it has had Boris Johnson and now Michael Gove as editors, not Ed Balls or Gordon Brown, who, if they were to go anywhere, would go to the New Statesman. Then there is the fact that James Forsyth went from the Spectator to Sunak’s No. 10. Not Starmer’s. Etc.
But it is formally impossible, too, and here I have to get a bit technical. Gove’s distinction between “a magazine about politics” and a “political magazine” is neat. But I always begin my introductory classes on politics by pointing out that “political science” is a highly ambiguous term: since it alludes to the possibility of an objective science of politics, but it also lets the cat out of the bag by admitting that this science is, er, political: you know, twisted, biased, up to something. Politics is like COVID-19 aerosols: it gets everywhere. It got into ‘the science’ in 2020, for instance. It has saturated the climate movement. There is no way that one can put a mask on and stop inhaling politics, especially if one is anywhere near it; and if one inhales politics one becomes, inevitably, political.
So far, so trivial. But I want to take this a bit further. Consider Nelson’s history. Something was wrong before Chancellor. And consider Gove’s list of Roman Emperors, that starts with Chancellor, as a sort of Charlemagne, ignoring the Byzantine predecessors. Well, let me list a few of the editors from the 1950s to the 1970s: Ian Gilmour, Brian Inglis, Iain Hamilton, Ian McLeod, Nigel Lawson, George Gale and Harry Creighton. Three of those were conservative politicians. But the most interesting member of this list is George Gale. Gale edited the magazine between 1970 and 1973. Wikipedia comments: “Gale’s almost obsessive opposition to the EEC and antagonistic attitude towards Heath began to lose the magazine readers.”
I have an interest in all this because I was taught by Maurice Cowling in the 1990s. In the 1970s he was a crony of Gale, as they had taken the Historical Tripos at Cambridge at around the same time: and while Gale had gone into journalism, Cowling had briefly considered a journalistic career before becoming an academic. Gale appointed Cowling Literary Editor of the Spectator, and I remember Cowling telling me that he tried to turn the books pages around so they weren’t mere belles-lettres, as they had been before and were to be again. Now the point about all this is that George Gale and Maurice Cowling greatly admired Enoch Powell. (All Cambridge men appalled by the Oxford nature of our decline.) So the tribal and political magazine of the early 1970s was a magazine that was trying to undermine Heath and promote Powell.
Undermine Heath and promote Powell. What does that mean? Well, it meant at least three things, one of which was taken up by Keith Joseph and Margaret Thatcher, but two things which were ignored for at least a decade and perhaps even 30 years. The first thing was an enthusiasm for a free market, capitalism, private ownership, etc. That gave us Thatcherism. But Thatcher ignored the other two points of Powell. She ignored his hostility to the EEC (Nelson: “the magazine never shut up about that”), and she ignored his hostility to immigration. Heath was incredibly successful in presiding over a forced consensus on both Europe and immigration: and, for a generation, Powell was treated as an exile.
Well, 50 years on, who was right? Even Johnson and Gove came round in favour of Brexit. And it took Blair’s and Cameron’s capitulations to the cult of immigration (with its attendant DEI genuflecting politics) to stretch the system to the point that it became almost possible to begin saying that Powell might have had a point in the late 1960s. Tiber, much blood, etc. Everyone knows Powell made an immediate political mistake in using this sort of language: it did the opposite of what he intended: instead of acting as a warning of something happening out there, it was taken by everyone to be a warning of something happening in here, in our minds: the beginnings of a heightened sensitivity to the possibility that we might be racist.
So, notwithstanding the fact that the magazine lost readers, it seems to me that the Spectator in the early 1970s did something valiant: it attempted to oppose Heath on almost everything. And it was right to do so. The Conservative party has never recovered from Heath. This is because Thatcher’s reconstruction was only partial: she only realised that she made a mistake about Europe in her dying days as leader. The mistake about immigration is still a taboo subject. Now, admittedly, Chancellor had to increase the readership of the Spectator, and this is clearly something of an imperative nowadays for the editor of a magazine which is prosperous. But there is a grave danger that Nelson’s and Gove’s way of talking, though it makes economic sense for a magazine which wants to appeal as broadly as possible, and keeps a lamp lit on the genial Right of politics, can involve the accommodation – one of Cowling’s bad words, along with “latitudinarianism” – of enemy positions: that one can slide into an unthinking liberalism which, in making concessions to its enemies, à la Cameron or Heath, or indeed Thatcher, abandons sense, truth, wisdom.
During COVID-19, for instance, there are many of us who thought that the Spectator was insufficiently hostile to the politics of the great Heath that was Johnson. Nelson says that the Spectator should not try to give thought leadership to the Right. Well! If not the Spectator, then who? (And, of course, by “Right”, I don’t mean the “Right” of the demonology of the “Left” and “Centre”: I mean the people who happen to be right, as opposed to the many who happen to be wrong, as Heath was wrong in 1973, and as Johnson was wrong in 2020, if not in 2016.)
Alexander Chancellor sounds like a pleasant man, and a good editor. But the Spectator ought to be careful about celebrating the prosperous and complacent Addison and Steele “style” over the necessity of risking defeat for the sake of a good old cause. Some of us want the Spectator to be more Tory, and less Whig: a bit more concerned with truth.
Dr. James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.
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Aren’t these the people who have already decided that social distancing and forced face masking will continue for their victims no matter what?
Chances are that most new students will have had much more independence at home, before they were locked away into substandard bedsits and behaviour-policed by private security guards behind grid fences, all in the name of not posing an inacceptable risk to staff.
social distancing and forced face masking – evil – look at Australia
SPEECHLESS Australia OUT OF CONTROL
Alex Belfield – THE VOICE OF REASON – (I don’t agree with everything Alex say he, but I am willing to forgive him)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIdta7AA2IY
Stand in South Hill Park Bracknell every Sunday from 10am meet fellow anti lockdown freedom lovers, keep yourself sane, make new friends and have a laugh.
(also Wednesdays from 2pm)
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“Aren’t these the people who have already decided that social distancing and forced face masking will continue for their victims no matter what?”
Exactly. As with every other body that is meant to stand up for those it represents, the suggested solution to the ills caused by coronamadness is not to question the madness or push back against it, but to ask for more help in mitigating the disastrous results.
I wish these students all the best in their coming University life, young people have been treated appallingly by this disgraceful government.
If institutions, at some point over the next year, have to go “on-line” for some reason or other ..these same students should demand refunds.
Saint Boris must remember that HE is responsible for the destruction of these young people’s futures, with his cruel and pointless lockdowns. He must also remember that they are the voters of the future, and they will remember how he totally threw them to the bottom of the pile.
But they may realise that Sneer Smarmer would have locked them up even harder and more cruelly.
I wouldn’t blame them for spoiling their ballot papers, big time.
Boomer here. I’ll have much the same thoughts next time I vote ……
It beggars belief that young people are still taking the decision to burden themselves with huge debt for the costs of university fees. Especially so now that the government has made them a target group for ‘vaccine’ coercion. The pressures they will be faced with is immense and any good parent would guide their child away from the debt slavery towards apprenticeship if at all possible.
So let’s force them to wear masks all the time, exclude them from the Student Union unless they have the jabs, and test them to remind them that they might be biohazards, that’ll definitely help.
So my employers HR came knocking asking for everyone to submit their vaccination status. Me being me, I decided to get mine in first.
I’m posting my email here if anyone wants to reuse it when their time comes. On my lunch break so no idea if I will be still employed this afternoon lol
Thanks for your email regards our return to the office.
Could you please explain to me why an individuals vaccinations status is actually important when by looking at the latest data in the PHE Variants of Concern Technical Briefings (number 21) we can see clearly see that vaccinations have neither prevented infection or reduced transmission of the virus? I have no doubt that you and many others will dispute my assertion but it’s all there to see on page 21 of the document for HM Gov below should anyone care to look.
SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern and variants under investigation (publishing.service.gov.uk)
Whilst I don’t doubt that some individuals within the company may sadly relish the opportunities for discrimination that the sharing of such private health related information presents, I for one find the request for this personal information deeply disturbing.
I appreciate that some vaccinated individuals within the company have strong reservations and concerns about their return to office and even returning to public life in general but I fail to see how an individual’s vaccination status is of any relevance given the above.
Is the company going to provide the unvaccinated and those who refuse to disclose with their own desks in an hermetically sealed room of their own perhaps or maybe just adorn them with yellow stars instead? Outside of such or similar measures I can see little or no use for the company knowing an individual’s private medical information.
Regards
Ask them, while they are requesting confidential medical information if they are requesting the HIV status of other staff members and if so why not?
Love it, not sure you’ll still be employed by the end of the day, do you have an HGV license by any chance?
I’m not sure all teenagers have been cooped up for 18 months, possibly those whose parents are sheep (possibly the same teenagers I now see muzzled) , but I’m happy to say we’ve had loads of them meeting up in groups throughout the whole debacle
Every time I see a group of teenagers showing total disregard for social restrictions, I think: good on you.
Not just the young ‘uns.
Last week I traipsed round my own small seaside town. Unprompted, the keepers of three businesses told me that by and large, this year’s tourists have been uncommunicative if not downright rude.
Fear does that to people.
I suspect they are the ones that normally go to the Algarve for tapas.
This year they have been grumpily tramping around tourist towns in the UK.
Teenagers don’t need help. They need to ‘do gooders’ to get out of their life – permanently.
Let us all hope that people remember all of this when the next election comes around and refuse to vote for the current incumbents of the House of Parliament. We have to change the system or we will continue to get “being locked down for almost two years, to something like as much freedom as you’re ever likely to get.” . Is that the “Freedom” you want? Let us not forget that Starmers Opposition was no Opposition at all. Those bastards took our lives and our freedoms, now we take their positions.
“The source said universities would have to address “socialisation issues” as well as academic study. “
I’m sure that the universities are doing all they can to minimize these socialization issues by enforcing such social activities as mask-wearing, antisocial distancing and enforcing inoculation with drugs of unknown effect.
You couldn’t f.ing make it up.
Another one bites the dust:
Rapper who mocked lockdown protesters dies of heart attack after having the Pfizer Covid-19 injection
https://dailyexpose.co.uk/2021/08/24/rapper-who-mocked-lockdown-protesters-dies-of-heart-attack-after-having-the-pfizer-covid-19-injection/
“…some concern students may overindulge after two school years in which socializing was strictly limited.”
Because students never overindulged before.
This is presumably code language for concern that students might do something other than sitting – fully masked, vaccinated and alone – in cupboards while shivering with fear because of The Terrible Virus[tm].
Students need people who taught them only a very few things. But taught them how to think. Good learning starts with how to separate the shaft from the wheat.
Mr Dalton was receive by a University when aged10.
Don’t comply. Ditch the masks. – FIGHT BACK BETTER – Updated information, resources and links: https://www.LCAHub.org/