The Spectator
The Spectator is the oldest continuously published magazine in the history of the English language (apparently). It was first published in 1828 and has since helped to launch the political careers of many a Conservative politician. The magazine has employed such famous faces as former Chancellor Nigel Lawson and Mayor of London Boris Johnson so that should give you a bit of an idea about what the magazine is like.
History[edit | edit source]
Early Years[edit | edit source]
The Spectator was founded by Dundonian Robert Stephen Rintoul in 1828. He was a bit of a megalomaniac and wanted "absolute power" over the publication's content. This started a long-lasting tradition of the magazine’s editor and owner being the same person. Under Rintoul's editorship, The Spectator came out in favour of the 1832 Great Reform Act with the magazine coining what later became a very popular phrase for proponents of the Bill "The Bill, the whole Bill and nothing but the Bill". The Spectator came out against the appointment of the Duke of Wellington as Prime Minister, calling him "a Field Marshal whose political career proves him to be utterly destitute of political principle – whose military career affords ample evidence of his stern and remorseless temperament".
The magazine also came out against the Opium Wars and published scathing reviews of Charles Dickens' work, claiming that Bleak House might be all well and good for making people feel but it was too "popular" to make them think. This sort of attitude has stuck with the publication.
After the death of the original owner, The Spectator got passed around a bit and falling readership numbers and declining revenue saw the magazine spiral further into obscurity. When it was eventually picked up in 1861, the paper came out in favour of the North, federalism and anti-slavery for the American Civil War and went on to ruthlessly attack Benjamin Disraeli for being Benjamin Disraeli[1]. During this wonderful time in the magazine's history, H. H. Asquith, the future Prime Minister, was lead writer.
But the paper really took off in the lead up the first World War (under new ownership) where it became "the most influential of all the London weeklies".
Early 20th Century[edit | edit source]
In the 1930s The Spectator came out against fascism, sometimes printing letters from readers who backed the Nazis purely to write long, snarky replies about how wrong they were. The magazine was generally in favour of Chamberlain's policy of appeasement, believing that it was the path most likely to result in extended peace. For most of the rest of the first half of the century, the paper went quiet and began loosing readership.
A Move Leftwards?[edit | edit source]
In the 1950s the paper was sold again, this time to a barrister called Ian Gilmour[2] who once again decided that because he owned the publication he should also get to be editor. He moved the magazine into a pro-Europe, anti-Macmillan, pro-Hugh Gaitskell position. Under his leadership, The Spectator came out against capital punishment, criticised the government repeatedly over the Suez Canal Crisis and supported the proposals of the Wolfenden Committee in 1957, condemning the "utterly irrational and illogical" old laws on homosexuality: "Not only is the law unjust in conception, it is almost inevitably unjust in practice" it published.
Unfortunately, that same year, Jenny Nicholson (a frequent contributor to The Spectator) wrote an article about the Italian Socialist Party congress in Venice, which mentioned three Labour Party politicians (Aneurin Bevan, Richard Crossman and Morgan Phillips) "who puzzled the Italians by filling themselves like tanks with whisky and coffee". All three sued for libel, the case went to trial and The Spectator was forced to make a large payment in damages and costs, a sum well over the equivalent of £150,000 today.
The magazine then got into a bit of hot water when Gilmour asked Iain Macleod, a politician who had recently resigned his Cabinet job in objection to the controversial appointment of Sir Alec Douglas-Home as Prime Minister, to be editor. This in and of itself pissed a lot of people off, but when Macleod used his first article to "reveal all" about the night that Home became Prime Minister, the shit really hit the fan. The Spectator fell out of favour with the Conservative Party for a long time.
Back to the Right[edit | edit source]
In order to try and get back in the Tory's good books, The Spectator appointed Nigel Lawson - Alec Douglas-Home’s personal assistant during the 1964 general election and former editor of The Telegraph - as editor. He was known as "The Great Procrastinator" because he would put off doing anything relating to the magazine until the last minute. Under Lawson the paper came out against the Vietnam War. By the time Gimour had entered parliament he found owning The Spectator to be no more fun and quite a hindrance to his political career, so he sold the paper to Harry Creighton who gleefully sacked Lawson in favour of George Gale.
The two took the publication drastically to the right - they dedicated 5 years to trash-talking the European Economic Community and pro-EEC Prime Minister Edward Heath. The paper was overjoyed when Margaret Thatcher became took over as leader of the party. Funnily enough, this did not generally sit well with the readership of The Spectator and circulation fell to about 17,000 in the mid-1970s.
1980s[edit | edit source]
After nearly causing the paper to fold, Creighton sold The Spectator. The new owner, Henry Keswick, and editor, Alexander Chancellor, began working on making the magazine popular again. They returned the paper to a weekly format, stole a few journalists from New Statesman and gave it a face lift.
In 1978, a 96-page issue was released to mark The Spectator’s 150th anniversary. William Rees-Mogg[3] congratulated the paper in a Times's leading article, praising it in particular for its important part in "the movement away from collectivism".
A new change of owner and editor in 1984 saw the paper back, although not uncritically, Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister. They also decided to expand the range of articles in paper, hiring Nigel Lawson's daughter Nigella Lawson to write a food column. A sale in 1985 saw the new owners pay off the large debts The Spectator has accrued during it's renovation and the magazine was put up for sale again in 1988. Several candidates, including Rupert Murdoch, attempted to buy the magazine. The then editor of the paper wrote to Murdoch, saying:
"Most of our contributors and many of our readers would be horrified at the idea of your buying The Spectator. They believe you are autocratic and that you have a bad effect on journalism of quality – they cite The Times as the chief example."
In the end, The Spectator was bought by the same people who owned The Telegraph.
Another Lawson[edit | edit source]
Nigel Lawson's son, Dominic Lawson, took over editorship of the paper in 1990. He almost immediately caused controversy by forcing the resignation of a Cabinet minister, Nicholas Ridley. In an interview with Ridley, the Cabinet Minister appeared to compare the then German Chancellor, Helmut Kohl to Adolf Hitler. As soon as the interview was published, Ridley resigned.
It wasn't long before the paper was in trouble again, this time for claiming that "the Jews ran Hollywood". Lawson thought the fact that he was Jewish would make the article inoffensive. He was wrong. People got incredibly pissed off with both the article and Lawson for thinking it was a good idea to publish it[4] and jeopardising the magazine's credibility. There was a backlash within The Spectator to the criticism levelled at it, which caused yet more anti-Semitic articles to surface.
Lawson eventually stepped down from the magazine in 1995 to go and run The Telegraph instead.
New Labour, New Spectator & Boris[edit | edit source]
With New Labour becoming popular, the paper decided that politics wasn't all it was cracked up to be. They started interviewing people like The Spice Girls and claiming it was real journalism by saying that the interview allowed the pop group to air their "Euro-sceptic and generally anti-labour" views.
Boris Johnson became editor of The Spectator in 1999. He described his editorial position as "always be roughly speaking in favour of getting rid of Saddam, sticking up for Israel, free-market economics, expanding choice" and that the magazine was "not necessarily a Thatcherite Conservative or a neo-conservative magazine, even though in our editorial coverage we tend to follow roughly the conclusions of those lines of arguments".
Since Boris's leadership, The Spectator has taken against public displays of grief. Boris once has to apologise to the whole of Liverpool after an article claiming the city's grief at the death of a local man at the hands of an extremist group in Iraq was manufactured.
Boris's time as editor saw the magazine suffer a lot of sex scandals, Boris himself being the cause of a few of them. This lead to the magazine being given the nickname The Sextator. Despite (or perhaps because of) this, The Spectator circulation reached an all time high under Boris, with readers totaling about 70,000. Boris left the magazine in 2005 in part due to his return to the Shadow Cabinet under newly elected leader David Cameron.
And Now[edit | edit source]
Since 2009 The Spectator has been edited by Fraser Nelson. He oversaw a slight redesign of the magazine and has taken a more practical approach to being sued. Fraser also oversaw the release of The Spectator archive, where 1.5 million pages of article from the magazine's 180 years history are viewable.
The new editor hasn't exactly stopped the controversial articles, though. During the Labour Party leadership election in 2015, the magazine put out an article titled "Have Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall got the looks for a leadership contest?". In it, the journalist went on to look in detail at Liz Kendall's and Yvette Cooper's appearance concluding that "no leader - especially, despite the age of equality, a woman - can look grotesque on television and win a general election". The article was denounced by lots of journalists, politicians and just about everyone else.
Importance in Fandom[edit | edit source]
The Spectator is well known in fandom for its award ceremonies and its parties. These often lead to many pictures of some of fandom's favourite politicians getting very drunk and doing slightly silly things, and bringing together politicians who would not normally be seen together, for example if they are members of different parties.
The Spectator also serves as a counterbalance to New Statesman.
References[edit | edit source]
- ↑ This is not particularly surprising as one of the two new owners was very good friend with William Gladstone
- ↑ who would later become an MP
- ↑ Jacob Rees-Mogg's father
- ↑ the article had previously been offered to The Telegraph who had turned it down
