Join us in the great Intelligence2 debate

The Spectator’s new partnership with the debating forum

Civilised debate is the essence of The Spectator: it is what animated ‘the little Committee of Politicks’ that Joseph Addison encountered in the St James’s Coffee-house and described in the magazine in March 1711. Three centuries on, it is the desire for a cheerful rhetorical punch-up, in print or in person, that still excites us most at 22 Old Queen Street.

Rod Liddle, Jeremy Clarke, Deborah Ross, Taki, Fraser Nelson: these are only some of the verbal pugilists who form the ‘little Committee’ in our own happy, cacophonous republic of letters.

So it is with the greatest pleasure that we are launching in this issue The Spectator’s new alliance with that much younger but already glorious organisation Intelligence2, the brainchild of two media entrepreneurs, John Gordon and Jeremy O’Grady.

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Arthur Roffey

Douglas Murray has been blacklisted in Berlin

If you don’t know about it already — and the chances are that you do — Intelligence2 is one of the intellectual phenomena of the age. Founded in 2002, it stages debates that address the most stimulating, provocative and topical issues of our times, events that fill the capacious Royal Geographical Society in London with ease.

There is plenty of philosophical fudge around these days: ‘round table discussions’, consensus politics and vapid chat shows. But Intelligence2 relishes its adversarial character and celebrates the gladiatorial force of the human intellect: the participants want to win the argument, and the votes of the audience. In the course of a debate, the advantage see-saws from one side to the other, and back again, as facts are marshalled, Ciceronian rhetoric deployed and wit turned to the combatants’ advantage.

And the quality of its speakers has been consistently awesome: in the past few months alone, such luminaries as Bernard-Henri Levy, Stephen Bayley, Howard Jacobson, Charles Murray and Lord Woolf.