Diary – 5 July 2018

Happy 190th birthday, dear Spectator. And in what fine health you are, at such an advanced age. This was hardly inevitable when I joined the magazine, as deputy editor, in 1987. It was just about to mark its 160th year of unbroken losses, a corporate world record which I don’t see being matched by any other business. It was around the second year of my editorship that it began to make a profit. The then chief executive, Luis Dominguez, declared to an amazed board that this unprecedented achievement should be revealed to the world, in the form of a press release. To his evident consternation, I urged them not to agree to this. I argued that we paid remarkably low rates for articles from some of the best writers in the land and that if they discovered we were profitable, they might demand something closer to the vastly higher fees they claimed elsewhere — which would puncture our belatedly buoyant business model. My most un-journalistic argument for the suppression of the facts (and writers’ incomes) met with conclusive approval from the two mighty industrialists on the board, Sir Pat Sheehy, the chairman of British American Tobacco, and Lord (John) King, chairman of British Airways. I felt a mixture of satisfaction and shame.

The greatest pleasure for Spectator editors — or at least this one — is in developing new writers and columns. Among those I was happiest to introduce were Anne Applebaum, Jenny McCartney and Mary Killen. The author of The Spectator’s indispensable Dear Mary social advice column has now achieved global significance via a television programme called Gogglebox. This, I could never have imagined.

Most popular

Rod Liddle

Sack the judges

I suppose the most well-known of those (then) new columnists is Boris Johnson. In mid-1994 he was at a bit of a loose end, as he had left his berth as Brussels correspondent of the Daily Telegraph, and had not yet been reassigned by his boss, Max Hastings.