The Spectator

The Spectator was established in 1828, and is the oldest continuously published magazine in the English language. The Spectator’s taste for controversy, however, remains undiminished. There is no party line to which The Spectator’s writers are bound - originality of thought and elegance of expression are the sole editorial constraints.

The trial issue contains a “Thought Crime Special” with articles from Melanie Phillips, “I think, therefore I’m guilty”; Christopher Booker writes about “Scientists in hiding; the demonisation of academics who question the consensus”; Alan Rusbridger explores “How to stifle the press” and how England’s libel laws make it easy.

UK politics come under scrutiny from James Forsyth, Brendan O’Neill ponders if teenagers could ever be “Drunk and orderly”; while Tom Hollander writes his diary and James Delingpole says eat local organic food if you like, but don’t kid yourself that it’s ‘green’. 

The Spectator’s regular arts coverage includes books, theatre, opera, cinema and exhibitions.

Charles Moore and Sophia Falkner: the purge of the hereditaries. ‘The House of Lords is very old,’ Charles Moore reminds us, ‘but not quite continuous.’ In 1649, the Cromwellian Commons abolished it, declaring it ‘useless and dangerous to the people of England’. Even though he lacks ‘a New Model Army’ to enforce the chamber’s full abolition, Keir Starmer is removing the hereditary peers. For the gain of creating more room, reducing the Conservatives’ numerical advantage and improving ‘the sex and ethnic balance’, 86 hard-working and dutiful peers ‘lacking worldly ambition or partisan passions’ will be lost. More than four-fifths have a private sector or professional background providing, Moore suggests, the sort of ‘lived experience’ unknown in the corridors of power. What comes next? Labour drops hints of constitutional reform but they ‘could be laying the ground for the sort of power struggle which this country last saw in the 1640s’. Without the hereditaries, the Lords really will become ‘useless and dangerous to the people of England’. Meanwhile, Sophia Falkner warns that Labour’s purge is ripping the heart out of the Lords – and looks at the biggest characters we shall lose.

 

Tim Shipman: the reign of Rayner. Last weekend, Tim Shipman reveals, ‘Angela Rayner declined an invitation to a hen do where the entertainment included axe-throwing’. Though she saw ‘a family member instead’, close allies admit Rayner worries about her publicity. ‘For much of Labour’s first year in power,’ Shipman writes, ‘Rayner kept her head down.’ Downing Street have realised that ‘the more under the radar she flies’, the ‘more seriously’ they should take her. Her quietly impressive legislative record has proved her worth as a cabinet minister. Rayner believes her ability to connect with people comes from having been ‘a teenage mum’. She was spotted on the Commons terrace teasing Nigel Farage over FaceTime before the Runcorn by-election. ‘At least she’s real,’ he says, when ‘none of the rest of them are’. Having once called herself ‘John Prescott in a skirt’, she now apes her predecessor in having a dedicated Office of the Deputy Prime Minister. But she is more Gordon Brown than Prescott – ‘Starmer’s heir apparent’.

 

John Whittingdale and Dominic Lawson: Norman Tebbit transformed the country for the better. Following the Brighton bombing, Norman Tebbit was keen to continue to work as a cabinet minister while supporting his paralysed wife, Margaret, doing ‘all he could to balance his loyalty to his wife with his loyalty to his other Margaret, the Prime Minister’. His ‘willingness to take the fight to the enemy’ made Tebbit ‘the engine’ of her government. He ‘revelled’ in being depicted as a leather-jacketed bovver boy by Spitting Image. Had he stood to succeed Margaret Thatcher, ‘he would have been a frontrunner’, but he chose to step back and continue to look after his wife. He was also a great friend of The Spectator, on whose board he served. As Dominic Lawson relates, when the magazine published a leader critical of his ‘cricket test’, he treated it as a tribute to our editorial independence – ‘an act of admirable principle’ and ‘a measure of the man’.

 

Jacob Rees-Mogg: my social season. Usually Jacob Rees-Mogg models himself ‘on one of the more retiring of the Desert Fathers’ and rarely ventures out. But this summer he has been busy. From the Spectator summer party to the papal nunciature – via Wimbledon and the Henley Regatta – he has been a fixture of the social scene. ‘The Conservative party may be short of votes,’ he admits, ‘but Conservatism is brimming over with ideas’ – even if Nigel Farage ‘demurred’ at his suggestion that ‘we need to reunite the right’. In ‘eight years at educational establishments on the Thames’ he ‘never went on the river’. But he ‘greatly enjoyed’ his first Henley visit – ‘the happy sensation of being transported, in my case forward, to the Victorian era’. Although this magazine puts on 'a fine party’, Rees-Mogg writes, he is ‘not good at mingling’ and tends to stand in a corner fiddling with his cufflinks.

 

Fergus Butler-Gallie: how not to choose the next Archbishop. ‘It will be a miracle,’ writes the Revd Fergus Butler-Gallie, ‘if we know the name of the new Primate of All England by the autumn.’ Justin Welby announced his resignation as Archbishop of Canterbury last November; it took until May this year ‘even to assemble’ the committee to discuss his potential successors. For Butler-Gallie, the process doesn’t have to be swift – it only must be holy. But there is ‘nothing innately holy in long-winded consultation and bloviating statements of intent’. The Church loves to say that lessons have been learned, but this is only doubling down on Welby’s ‘disastrous’ managerialism. ‘At the exact moment when a drastic change in culture is needed,’ he laments, ‘the same culture seems to have shaped the entire process for selecting its leader.’ The next Archbishop may yet call the English back to God. But that Archbishop will have been selected because ‘they tick the boxes of a committee’.