For an object lesson in how journalism has triumphed over party politics, see the two British political weeklies. The New Statesman and The Spectator were lauded once as twin and opposing pillars of the robust temple of British democracy. The New Statesman, child of the 20th century, has had models as diverse as Marx, Tawney and Chomsky; The Spectator, a 19th-century creation, cast back to Burke and was moved, postwar, by Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman. Now both have embraced Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
I owe the Rousseau insight to a Spectator columnist. In his just-published book, Our Culture, What’s Left of It, Theodore Dalrymple observes that “only the behaviour of the authorities is subject to public criticism; that of the people themselves, never. This is a modern version of Rousseau’s doctrine: if it weren’t for the authorities, the people would be good.” Feeling and sentiment, Rousseau believed, was all. In that sense, the sage of Geneva, as well as ministering to the New Statesman and The Spectator as their intellectual referee, is also the new muse of the British popular press, and of its late goddess, Diana the Hunted Huntress.
During most of the eight years of New Labour government, The Spectator has been edited by Boris Johnson, Conservative MP for Henley. Johnson is a fluently witty writer and The Spectator in his time has done well: it’s pushing towards 70,000, its highest circulation ever. But the price is whimsy: it had, for example, backed the invasion of Iraq - but then acquired as regular contributors journalists such as Andrew Gilligan and Rod Liddle, commentators most identified with the line that the invasion was a disaster, and that the government lied to get Britain into the war.
The New Statesman has, for most of the New Labour period, been ferociously hostile to Tony Blair. From 1998, Peter Wilby’s New Statesman rapidly became quite different to that of his predecessor, Ian Hargreaves (on which, and for three years after, I was a columnist): it despised the New Labour project, and was happy to portray Blair, in a cover story by the Professor of Russian History at Oxford, Robert Service, as equivalent to Joseph Stalin, with no apparent sense of the absurdity of the proposition.
For both magazines, the default position is that the government is a bunch of self-serving creeps: what can such a sorry lot do worth analysing? On June 13, the New Statesman ran an article by Richard Gott on the G8 meeting at Gleneagles next month solely through the prism of the demonstrators who would protest there. It made no mention of the G8 agenda, which is set to include agreement on aid to Africa, and will grapple with the crucial transatlantic differences on the environment. For the New Statesman, such things are now beneath contempt, existing merely as a venue for demonstration.
The New Statesman was and The Spectator is regarded with some scepticism by their owners: the New Statesman’s Geoffrey Robinson, former paymaster-general and close friend of Chancellor Gordon Brown, recently sacked Wilby and installed the political editor, John Kampfner. The former deputy editor, Cristina Odone, wrote in The Observer that Robinson had done so in preparation for a Brown premiership: Wilby attacked all power, she said; Kampfner would bow to the Brownite realities. Wilby doesn’t know if that was the reason: Robinson’s reason for sacking him was that he had been in the post for seven years. Kampfner says he has no deal with the Brownites to toe their line. To be sure, the Gott article was hardly calculated to win the respect of a chancellor for whom the relief of poverty is a wholly sincere mission.
Johnson remains Spectator editor, and on performance should be secure. But the journalist Andrew Neil, who stands in place of the magazine’s owners, the Barclay brothers, is also a political player, and a TV personality. He acknowledges, though does not approve of, Johnson’s ability to inspire affection in the fashionable classes across the political divide, but is reported (by Peter Oborne, The Spectator’s political editor, in the Evening Standard) as thinking little of the magazine’s political lightness of being. Neil mixes the familiar relentlessness of the lower-class Scot on the journalistic make (I know the feeling) with an intellectual aggression that has nothing of Johnson’s public face of charming romanticism - though those who know him say Johnson is a man as determined and ruthless as Neil. Neil wants The Spectator to make a difference as well as a profit, and doesn’t think it does.
The Spectator has tried to accommodate him. Johnson forbade Stephen Glover, who wrote a column on the media, from writing about The Daily Telegraph, also owned by the Barclay brothers; Glover resigned. On June 10, the magazine ran a round-table, moderated by Neil, in which differing Tory MPs debated the future. It was, however, a curiously light-headed affair, ending with an insouciant agreement to Neil’s comment that “your party hasn’t got a domestic or a foreign policy!”
Nor, of course, has either The Spectator or the New Statesman - heirs now of Rousseau, they cannot - for to embrace a programme or a policy, or even an action, consistently is to have to defend the unpopular. Modern British political journalism does not do that. Only the authorities can be wrong. Even the weekly political magazines, whose reason for being had been political principle, have joined the party of the never-wrong. Political parties, what’s left of them, can never win - especially when they’ve won.
