The Guardian’s tabloid switch is failing

As previously mentioned in my Spectator Notes, the Guardian has not adapted well to tabloid form. I feel particularly sad about its Review section on Saturdays, which were the fullest books pages in Fleet Street and well understood how to be broadly left-wing without becoming doctrinaire and therefore unliterary. Now tabloid, the Review has boiled itself down to a repetitive essence in which almost every cover is about women’s rights — abortion in Ireland, Meghan Markle being ‘divorced, a woman of colour and a feminist’, and ‘Why feminist fiction needs to break free’ (to take three recent examples). You have to be very woke indeed not to fall asleep.

This is an extract from Charles Moore’s Spectator Notes, which appears in this week’s magazine, out now