The Spectator’s Notes | 10 March 2007

When I employed him at the Daily Telegraph, I found John Kampfner, now the editor of the New Statesman, a pleasant and able man. But his recent conduct towards one of his writers deserves a passage in the annals of editorial eccentricity. Nick Cohen, who is a leftwing columnist in the New Statesman, has written a brilliant book called What’s Left (4th Estate). Its essential argument is that large parts of the Left are so disoriented by the death of traditional socialism and so crazed with hatred of Bush and Blair that they ignore the fascism of the Islamists and the sufferings of their comrades on the Left — feminists, gay rights activists, trade unionists, secularists — at their hands. Kampfner accepted an invitation from Radio 4’s Start the Week to appear on the pretext of something else and pan his columnist’s book. Not content with this, he then reviewed it himself in his own publication in whatever are the opposite of glowing terms (glowering terms?).