The Spectator
The Spectator is a weekly British news magazine focusing on politics, culture, and current affairs.[1] It was first published in July 1828,[2] making it the oldest surviving weekly magazine in the world.[3] The Spectator is politically conservative, and its principal subject areas are politics and culture. Alongside columns and features on current affairs, the magazine also contains arts pages on books, music, opera, film, and TV reviews. In 2021, it had an average circulation of just under 98,000 as of 2023, excluding Australia.[4]
This article is about the UK political magazine. For Addison and Steele's periodical, see The Spectator (1711).Editor
Politics, culture, conservatism
Weekly
101,404
808
102,212
6 July 1828
United Kingdom
22 Old Queen Street, Westminster, London
English
Editorship of the magazine has often been a step on the ladder to high office in the Conservative Party in the United Kingdom. Past editors include Boris Johnson (1999–2005) and other former cabinet members Ian Gilmour (1954–1959), Iain Macleod (1963–1965), and Nigel Lawson (1966–1970).[5] Since 2009, the magazine's editor has been journalist Fraser Nelson.[6]
In 2020, The Spectator became the longest-lived current affairs magazine in history,[7] and was also the first magazine ever to publish 10,000 issues.[8] Until June 2023, it was owned by Frederick Barclay, who also owned The Daily Telegraph newspaper, via Press Holdings. Telegraph Media Group Limited was put up for sale after its parent company B.UK, a Bermuda-based holding company, went into receivership. Howard and Aidan Barclay were removed as directors.[9]
History[edit]
Robert Stephen Rintoul[edit]
The Spectator's founder, Scottish reformer Robert Stephen Rintoul, former editor of the Dundee Advertiser and the London-based Atlas, launched the paper on 6 July 1828.[2][10] Rintoul consciously revived the title from the celebrated, if short-lived, daily publication by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele.[11][12] As he had long been determined "to edit a perfect newspaper",[13] Rintoul initially insisted on "absolute power"[13] over content, commencing a long-lasting tradition of the paper's editor and proprietor being one and the same person. Although he wrote little himself, "every line and word passed through the alembic of his brain."[14]
The Spectator's political outlook in its first thirty years reflected Rintoul's liberal-radical agenda.[15] Despite its political stance, it was widely regarded and respected for its non-partisanship, in both its political and cultural criticism. Rintoul initially advertised his new title as a "family paper", the euphemistic term for a journal free from strong political rhetoric. However, events soon compelled him to confess that it was no longer possible to be "a mere Spectator". Two years into its existence, The Spectator came out strongly for wide-reaching parliamentary reform: it produced supplements detailing vested interests in the Commons and Lords, coined the well-known phrase "The Bill, the whole Bill and nothing but the Bill", and helped drive through the Great Reform Act of 1832. Virulently anti-Tory in its politics, The Spectator strongly objected to the appointment of the Duke of Wellington as prime minister, condemning him as "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."[16]
The paper spent its first century at premises on Wellington Street (now Lancaster Place). Despite its robust criticism of the Conservative Party leader Robert Peel for several years, The Spectator rallied behind him when he split the Tory party by successfully repealing the Corn Laws. Rintoul's fundamental principles were freedom of the individual, freedom of the press and freedom of trade, of religious tolerance and freedom from blind political adherence. The magazine was vocal in its opposition to the First Opium War (1839–1842), commenting that "all the alleged aims of the expedition against China are vague, illimitable, and incapable of explanation, save only that of making the Chinese pay the opium-smugglers."[17] The magazine further wrote: "There does not appear to be much glory gained in a contest so unequal that hundreds are killed on one side and none on the other. What honour is there in going to shoot men, certain that they cannot hurt you? The cause of the war, be it remembered, is as disreputable as the strength of the parties is unequal. The war is undertaken in support of a co-partnery of opium-smugglers, in which the Anglo-Indian Government may be considered as the principal partner."[18]
In 1853, The Spectator's lead book reviewer George Brimley published an anonymous and unfavourable notice of Charles Dickens's Bleak House, typical of the paper's enduring contempt for him as a "popular" writer "amusing the idle hours of the greatest number of readers; not, we may hope, without improvement to their hearts, but certainly without profoundly affecting their intellects or deeply stirring their emotions."[19] Rintoul died in April 1858, having sold the magazine two months earlier. The circulation had already been falling, under particular pressure from its new rival, The Saturday Review. Its new owner, the 27-year-old John Addyes Scott, kept the purchase quiet, but Rintoul's death made explicit the change of guard. His tenure was unremarkable, and subscribers continued to fall.[20] By the end of the year, Scott sought his escape, selling the title for £4,200 in December 1858 (equivalent to £533,901 in 2023) to two British-based Americans, James McHenry and Benjamin Moran. While McHenry was a businessman, Moran was an assistant secretary to the American ambassador, George M. Dallas; they saw their purchase as a means to influence British opinion on American affairs.[21]
The editor was Thornton Leigh Hunt, a friend of Moran who had also worked for Rintoul. Hunt was also nominally the purchaser, having been given the necessary monies in an attempt by McHenry and Moran to disguise the American ownership. Circulation declined with this loss of independence and inspirational leadership, as the views of James Buchanan, then President of the United States, came to the fore. Within weeks, as the last pre-American ownership issue appears to have been that of 25 December 1858. the editorial line followed Buchanan's pronouncements in being "neither pro-slavery nor pro-abolitionist. To unsympathetic observers Buchanan's policy seemed to apportion blame for the impasse on the slavery question equally on pro-slavery and abolitionist factions – and rather than work out a solution, simply to argue that a solution would take time. The Spectator now would publicly support that 'policy'".[22] This set it at odds with most of the British press, but gained it the sympathy of expatriate Americans in the country. Richard Fulton notes that from then until 1861, "the Spectator's commentary on American affairs read like a Buchanan administration propaganda sheet." and that this represented a volte-face.[22] Under Hunt's tenure, The Spectator may even have been steered by financial support from the court of Napoleon III.[23]
Meredith Townsend, Richard Holt Hutton, and John St Loe Strachey[edit]
The need to promote the Buchanan position in Britain had been reduced as British papers such as The Times and The Saturday Review turned in his favour, fearing the potential effects of a split in the Union. As Abraham Lincoln was set to succeed the vacillating Buchanan after the 1860 United States presidential election, the owners decided to stop pumping money into a loss-making publication: as Moran confided to his diary, "it don't pay, never did since Hunt became its owner."[24] On 19 January 1861, The Spectator was sold to a journalist, Meredith Townsend, for the marked-down sum of £2,000. Though not yet thirty, Townsend had spent the previous decade as an editor in India, and was prepared to restore to the paper an independent voice in a fast-changing world. From the outset, Townsend took up an anti-Buchanan, anti-slavery position, arguing that his unwillingness to act decisively had been a weakness and a contributor to the problems apparent in the US.[22] He soon went into partnership with Richard Holt Hutton, the editor of The Economist, whose primary interests were literature and theology. Hutton's close friend William Gladstone later called him "the first critic of the nineteenth century".[15] Townsend's writing in The Spectator confirmed him as one of the finest journalists of his day, and he has since been called "the greatest leader writer ever to appear in the English Press."[15]
The two men remained co-proprietors and joint editors for 25 years, taking a strong stand on some of the most controversial issues of their day. They supported the Union against the Confederacy in the American Civil War, an unpopular position which, at the time, did serious damage to the paper's circulation, reduced to some 1,000 readers. The issue of 25 January 1862, published in the wake of the Trent Affair, argued that "The Southern Bid" for active support in return for an Abolition promise, "demands careful examination".[25] In time, the paper regained readers when the victory of the North validated its principled stance.[15] They also launched an all-out assault on Benjamin Disraeli, accusing him in a series of leaders of jettisoning ethics for politics by ignoring the atrocities committed against Bulgarian civilians by the Ottoman Empire in the 1870s.[26]
In 1886, The Spectator parted company with William Ewart Gladstone when he declared his support for Irish Home Rule. Committed to defending the Union ahead of the Liberal Party line, Townsend and Hutton aligned themselves with the Liberal Unionist wing. As a result, H. H. Asquith (the future Prime Minister), who had served as a leader-writer for ten years, left his post. Townsend was succeeded by a young journalist named John St Loe Strachey, who would remain associated with the paper for the next 40 years. When Hutton died in 1897, Strachey became co-owner with Townsend; by the end of the year Strachey was made sole editor and proprietor. As chief leader-writer, general manager, literary critic and all things beside, Strachey embodied the spirit of The Spectator until the 1920s. Among his various schems were the establishment of a Spectator Experimental Company, to show that new soldiers could be trained up to excellence in six months, the running of a Cheap Cottage Exhibition, which laid the foundations for Letchworth Garden City, and the impassioned defence of Free Trade against Joseph Chamberlain's protectionist 'Tariff Reform' programme.
Within two years he had doubled the paper's circulation, which peaked at 23,000. In the early decades of the twentieth century it was heralded as "the most influential of all the London weeklies".[27] The First World War put the paper and its editor under great strain: after the conflict it seemed to be behind the times, and circulation began to fall away. Even the introduction of signed articles, overturning the paper's fixed policy of anonymity for its first century, did little to help. After years of illness, Strachey decided at the end of 1924 to sell his controlling interest in the paper to his recently appointed business manager, Sir Evelyn Wrench. Although he gained a second wind as a novelist, Strachey died two years later in 1928.
1925–1975[edit]
Evelyn Wrench and Wilson Harris[edit]
For his first year as proprietor, John Evelyn Wrench appointed John (Jack) Atkins his editor, who had worked on the paper for the last two decades, acting as editor during Strachey's recurrent bouts of illness. But the relationship did not work: as Atkins lamented to his long-standing friend, Winston Churchill, Wrench "continually wants to interfere and he is very ignorant".[28] Wrench duly took over the editorship in 1926, successfully channeling the enthusiasm of Strachey. His global connections helped secure interviews with Henry Ford, Mahatma Gandhi and Benito Mussolini. Perhaps his most remembered achievement as editor of The Spectator was the campaign to ease unemployment in the mining town of Aberdare, one of the worst hit by the crisis of 1928, when joblessness reached 40% in South Wales. Within three months, the paper's appeal for the town's relief raised over £12,000 (equivalent to £913,252 in 2023).[27] A statuette of an Aberdare miner, presented in gratitude to The Spectator, still sits in the editor's office, bearing the inscription: "From the Townsfolk of Aberdare in Grateful Recognition: 'The Greatest of These is Love'".[29]
Wrench retired as editor in 1932 (he remained the magazine's proprietor), appointing the political editor Wilson Harris his successor. Under Harris The Spectator became increasingly outspoken on developing international politics in the 1930s, in particular on the rise of fascism. Beneath a reader's letter referring to the Nazi Party as "peaceful, orderly and kindly", Harris printed the following reply:
1975–2005[edit]
Henry Keswick and Alexander Chancellor[edit]
In 1975, Creighton sold The Spectator to Henry Keswick, again for £75,000 (Creighton sold the 99 Gower Street premises separately, so the magazine moved to 56 Doughty Street).[41] Keswick was chairman of the Jardine Matheson multinational corporation. He was drawn to the paper partly because he harboured political aspirations (the paper's perk as a useful stepping stone to Westminster was, by now, well established), but also because his father had been a friend of Peter Fleming, its well-known columnist (under the name "Strix"). Keswick gave the job of editor to "the only journalist he knew",[35] Alexander Chancellor, an old family friend and his mother's godson, with whom he had been at Eton and Cambridge. Before then, Chancellor had worked at Reuters news agency and had been a scriptwriter and reporter for ITN. In spite of his relative inexperience, he was to become known as "one of the best editors in the history of The Spectator".[35]
Chancellor's editorship of the paper relied principally on a return to earlier values. He adopted a new format and a more traditional weekly style, with the front page displaying five cover lines above the leader. Most significantly, he recognised the need "to bring together a number of talented writers and, with the minimal of editorial interference, let them write".[35] To this end he persuaded Auberon Waugh (who had been sacked by Nigel Lawson) to return from the New Statesman, and enticed Richard West and Jeffrey Bernard from the same magazine. Another columnist recruited by Chancellor was Taki Theodoracopulos whose column ‘High Life’ was then printed beside Bernard's ‘Low Life’. Taki's column, frequently criticised for its content by the press,[42] remains in the paper. In September 1978, a 96-page issue was released to mark The Spectator's 150th anniversary. William Rees-Mogg congratulated the paper in a Times's leading article, praising it in particular for its important part in "the movement away from collectivism".[43]
Shiva Naipaul prize[edit]
The Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize for outstanding travel writing offers £2,000 every year.[91] The first winner was Hilary Mantel in 1987.[92][93]
Political ideology and policy positions[edit]
The Spectator is politically conservative.[94][95][96][97] Historically, the magazine was liberal in outlook, and over the course of its first century supported the Radical wing of the Whigs, the Liberal Party, and the Liberal Unionists who eventually merged with the Conservatives. In 1957, the magazine was nicknamed "the Bugger's Bugle" by The Sunday Express following a sustained campaign to decriminalise homosexuality.[98] Ahead of the 2019 United Kingdom general election, the leading article in the magazine argued that illegal migrants living in the UK should be offered British citizenship.[99] As with its sister publication The Daily Telegraph, The Spectator is generally Atlanticist and Eurosceptic in outlook,[94] favouring close ties with the United States rather than with the European Union, and tends to be supportive of Israel.[100]
Cultural influence[edit]
The magazine has popularised or coined the phrases "The Establishment" (1955), "nanny state" (1965), "young fogey" (1984),[101] and "virtue signalling" (2015).[102]