“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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Gove is the master snake oil salesman. A political back stabber and at the very beating heart of every wound inflicted on our great nation by the Con-servatives over the last 14 years.
I gave up on the Spectator years ago when it embraced greenism and covidism.
I’m sure it will be a blow to their hopes but I won’t be back …
I have just about stuck with them for Liddle, Murray, Shriver etc. However I think the baggage Gove brings is too much. I’m out.
Never bothered with the Spectator. Never read it. Gave up on Fake News lamestreaming back in 2005 or before. Used to read the Ecommunist and WSJ – globalist rags, couldn’t stand vomiting so much, so had to stop. I doubt the Govidians running the Spectator are any better. All of them are a waste of space.
Goves’s a slimey git, RIP the spectator!
Powell was right.
Gove is a despicable covidian.
The Conservative party has never recovered from Heath.
But Heath was not the cause of the Conservative Party’s problems – he was a symptom. The cause is that our civilisation is decadent, our dominant class (the state bourgeoisie) is degenerate, and our ruling group (Rushi Soonoff, 2TK, etc, etc, etc) is gripped by a death with – hence the insane addiction to the Great Replacement. Only if we get rid of our current rulers in some kind of national revolution can we prevent the social collapse that they will impose on us.
Well, perhaps what you say is correct but for me the traitor Heath will always remain the traitor. A cold fish who thought that by joining with a continent that was entirely unlike us we should somehow be able to repair what was wrong in our own country.
A thousand deaths are not enough for the traitor Heath.
England joined “with the continent which was entirely unlikely to it” for the most recent time in in 1903 and the ultimate outcome was a wholesale destruction of the traditional order of that continent, millions of dead people and handing over all of Europe eastward of the so-called Oder-Neiße line as birthday present to the great beneficiary of mankind known as Josef Stalin which lead to about 45 years of Bolshevist/ Communist rule there.
You’re more than welcome to stick with minding your own business in future while Europe eventually reconstructs itself instead of playing some idiotic “We are are victim of ourselves!” card. Such as (a set of more recent examples) first pressing for quick eastward expansion of the EEC and then complaining about it having happened or (I still remember that one) first forcing Germany into the European currency Irrsinnsprojekt as condition for allowing its so-called reunification and then complaining about the Euro being a German, that is “Nazi” project for German domination of Europe.
I gave up subscribing to The Spectator about 5 years ago.
Now the treacherous snake Gove is Editor, I won’t even consider re-subscribing.
I used to give the £5 per month to The Spectator. I stopped when I heard Fraser Nelson talking all Covidian. I don’t remember what it was he said, but I do remember thinking “I no longer want to support this magazine, so I dont want to give them any more money”. It gave me pleasure to cancel that standing order.
On a not entirely unrelated point, I need some timber today to replace a couple of floorboards. I shall take quiet satisfaction from driving past Wickes to the slightly more expensive DIY shop further down the road.
Good. I have exactly the same principles, which my wife just absolutely cannot understand, (which in itself is an indictment of where we have got to).
Amazon is a prime example – just NO, NO and furthermore, NO.
Never subscribed, but if someone like James Delingpole became editor I might consider it!
Neil Oliver and John Redwood might also be good, but its a very narrow field, so many disappointed when it mattered, if not over Brexit then over the Covid scam, and/or the Climate lie.
I wonder whether Gove will give his good pal James Delingpole a broader remit.
’Down the Rabbit Hole with Delingpole’ would make for an interesting column.
Splendid suggestion trouble is it won’t happen sadly.
I am a subscriber to the Spectator.
I think it’s a good magazine. Sure, I don’t agree with everything that I read but that’s OK. We blame the left for living in their echo chamber so we should be careful not to live in ours.
I must admit the appointment of Gove surprises me: this is a guy who was in favour of vaccine passports and mandates. Plus, as many others have noticed, there is something slimy about the guy. But we’ll see.
Ultimately, if I don’t like the magazine, well, it only takes a few clicks to unsubscribe. I wish I could do the same with our Labour government!
Editors are indeed important. But even more so are the owners. Why the author does not mention the owners of the Spectator over the last fifty years, the last one being (since September) Sir Paul Marshall, who also owns GBNews and UnHerd. Strange.
The Media appear unable to understand that STEM subjects, up to A’ levels, and even a Natural Science, mid-1970’s, degree, is apolitical. There might be tweeks, like Newton’s and Einstein’s views on Space and Time, but both sets of experts agreed on the boundaries. Until further evidence arrives, they are the tools of the trade, for further investigations., and wealth creation.
A balanced discussion about the Climate Emergency is impossible while there’s a BBC ban on ‘Climate Deniers’. And it happens in many other disciplines too. Yet, discussions about what is woman are acceptable, as long as there is no conclusion!
When you know about what happens during solar storms and understand Maxwell’s Equations enough to think it worth investigating, and wonder why it isn’t discussed in the Media, it’s easy to see why we are in the state we are in.
And while Arts and Humanities graduates dominate every sector, it will continue. The reason there are so few STEM graduates with good presentation skills is that they rarely have the opportunity to maintain their sanity, integrity and income, if they ventured into the Media / Political Bubble.
I also subscribe and rather agree with MajorMajor. There seems to be an increasing tendency to write off newspapers and magazines unless you agree with pretty much every opinion expressed in them. I think that’s unfortunate. I’ve never met a person I agreed with about everything, nor do I expect I ever will; and I am even less likely to find a publication I entirely agree with.
I think that the Spectator’s heart has been in the right place under Fraser Nelson on many, though not of course, all issues. It is a well written and stimulating publication. I will wait to see what Gove does with it.
I’ve been a Spectator subscriber for a couple of years. Whilst I didn’t always agree with every opinion on there, and some of Fraser Nelson’s recent comments made me wonder what he’d been drinking, it was always a worthwhile read.
However, Gove is a red line for me. Subscription has been cancelled and I won’t go back whilst he’s there.
When they appointed Gove as Editor I stopped my subscription to the Spectator.
One has to have standards…
I gave up reading the Spectator when Nelson and his crew refused to call out the scamdemic for what it was – a complete fraud. Where were they when we needed them? Absolutely f… nowhere.
I have had several letters published by The Spectator over the years but (IMHO) my best one – which mentioned that the damage from Covid “vaccines” dwarfed the Thalidomide toll – was ignored. Similarly, credit to Fraser Nelson for keeping faith with Toby Young when the Twitter mob descended on him, but I don’t recall him writing anything in The Spectator which criticised the vaccines.
My Spectator addiction began in Creighton’s time. Then, as now, it has excellent contributors. But context is all. Then, as for many years after, to oppose our membership of the EEC was to be put beyond the pale. The Spectator had to bang its drum because almost every other paper endlessly banged the other drum.
Fifty years on, my only break from Spectator reading was in Chancellor’s time as editor. It had just given up under what Nelson described as a lazy editor.
It eventually came back, not as an echo chamber but as an intellectual stimulant. If you met most of the contributors in the pub, you would probably stay for a silly afternoon.
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The current edition of The Spectator contains a review of Boris Johnson’s memoir by… Michael Gove – hardly an unbiased observer. I was thinking of resubscribing, but my loathing of Gove rules it out,