“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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