Twenty-first century Britain is apt to seem like a country that has lost contact with its native traditions. Yet some British traditions refuse to die. One of them is the Victorian tradition of serious periodical journalism — as epitomized by the venerable politicocultural weeklies, the Spectator and the New Statesman, and by the uncompromisingly highbrow fortnightly, the London Review of Books. In the media age, such papers can hardly pretend to the centrality they once enjoyed. Nevertheless, despite the proliferation of celebrity-fixated lifestyle magazines, they still find their way onto the newsstands. And from time to time they can still make a noise.
Curiously enough, it is the Spectator, established in 1828 and the oldest paper of its kind, which has prov ed most at home in today’s hectic media world. Long an ornament of the British establishment, this quintessentially Tory organ has also been renowned for its impudence and mischief making, and it has often excelled at stirring up controversy. Many remember the sensation the paper caused when it ran a remarkably frank interview with the late Tory minister, Nicholas Ridley. Giving his opinion about the long-serving German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, Ridley insinuated that Nazism was an inherent German characteristic. The outrageously tactless minister was obliged to resign, and the then editor of the Spectator, Dominic Lawson, was able to congratulate himself that his paper remained what it had always purported to be: A power in the land.
Thanks to its perhaps excessively media-friendly present editor, Boris Johnson, the Spectator is much in the news again. An Old Etonian known to television viewers for his unruly blond hair and sharp wit, Johnson was for some time operating as both editor of the Spectator and Conservative shadow minister for culture. Unfortunately, his animal energy and mania for self-advertisement have begun to seem like liabilities. The other week, he sanctioned an editorial written by a Spectator colleague that hugely offended the people of Liverpool. Castigating them for being mawkishly sentimental over the execution of the Liverpool-born hostage,
Kenneth Bigley, the editorial also claimed that Liverpudlians were forever parading themselves as victims. Anxious to appeal to the widest possible section of the British electorate, the Tory leader, Michael Howard, was horrified by the article and ordered his shadow culture minister to apologize to Liverpudlians in person for publishing it. The embarrassed Johnson duly made his way to Liverpool — though scarcely had he made a public show of contrition when he fell foul of the Tory leader once more. For allegedly being less than truthful when questioned about his private life, Howard stripped him of his shadow office.
Johnson may have been unwise to apologize at all for an article that, however provocative, was stating a considered point of view. His problem was that, having accepted a prominent political position, he found himself with conflicting, not to say irreconcilable, loyalties. What his expression of regret succeeded in doing was to compromise the Spectator’s editorial independence.
For the fact is that the license to publish inflammatory copy has always been the very raison d’etre of weekly journalism. The unhappy upshot of it all is that the new owners of the Spectator, the cautious bankers, the Barclay brothers, have decided to appoint the abrasive former editor of the Sunday Times, Andrew Neil, to oversee Johnson’s work, leaving him looking like an errant schoolboy who must report regularly to the headmaster.
Johnson’s subordination to an outsider with a reputation for authoritarianism hardly looks like a recipe for lively journalism. Still, with sales of 60,000 a week, the Spectator may continue to flourish regardless of whether he remains its editor. The paper’s latter-day popularity owes something to a success-formula that crystallized in the 1980s when Britain was governed by the business-venerating Tory Party of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. With its inveterate disdain for liberal pieties and smirking attitude toward the whole notion of human improvement, the paper has chimed well with an era during which left-wing idealism has been consigned to oblivion. It may be, too, that its patrician panache has made a special appeal to the nouveaux riches of recent times. Exposing themselves to its cavalier mix of Tory politics, stylish writing and ads for exclusive wine merchants, upwardly mobile readers of the Spectator can fancy that they have joined the aristocracy.
That the Spectator should now be so much more successful than its old rival, the New Statesman is a strange reversal of fortunes. Throughout the middle decades of the twentieth century, it was the New Statesman, with a worldwide readership of some 90,000, which dominated the whole field of serious magazine journalism.
Nowadays, the New Statesman is a shadow of the paper it once was, and with a circulation of 25,000 recently suffered the indignity of selling fewer copies than the more right-wing British current affairs monthly, Prospect, which began publication a mere ten years ago. In many ways, it is the historic shift to the right that explains its travails: There is simply much less of a market for the paper’s brand of high-minded, progressive politics than there once was. At the same time, the New Statesman has long since forfeited to the Spectator its old claim to sheer readability, to being an infallible but never quite predictable source of entertainment.
Not that, even in its diminished state, the paper is devoid of redeeming qualities. One of the few British publications to have consistently challenged the British government’s servility toward the US, the New Statesman publishes a regular column by the distinguished left-wing journalist, John Pilger. And in its long-standing US correspondent, Andrew Stephen, it boasts one of the most authoritative contemporary commentators on the American political scene.
It was with the ambition of sustaining the New Statesman tradition of leftist intellectual journalism that its sometime literary editor Karl Miller launched the London Review of Books in 1979. Now celebrating its 25th anniversary, the LRB — which has also been a platform for trenchant anti-US polemicizing — has become something of an institution.
With its expansive essays on politics and literature, this hypercerebral journal has followed the pattern of the New York Review of Books as an attempt to revive the format of the great Reviews of Victorian Britain. In contrast to the Spectator and the New Statesman, the London Review has not much more than a token presence on newsstands, relying in the main on subscriptions. All the same, its career has afforded an impressive demonstration that there is still a public for a challenging highbrow paper of the left.
How long old-style periodical journalism can survive in the face of headlong cultural change is an interesting question. In an age of omnipresent commercialized pap, many are bound to feel grateful that it shows no sign of subsiding yet.
