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.