Why The Spectator is wrong to call for amnesty for illegal migrants

The Spectator is a magazine for conservatives written by liberals. From that tension comes an editorial persuasion — there is no line — that can seem winsome, beguiling, even perverse. Optimistic but never idealist, sceptical of the big but not the new, The Spectator combines a radical’s grasp of the possible with a reactionary’s sense of the inevitable. It is instinctually Whiggish but plagued by spasms of Toryism, looking forward through the rear-view mirror of life. If National Review is in the business of standing athwart history yelling ‘stop’, the The Spectator has more often been found sprinting ahead of history yelling ‘hurry up’.

In the 1860s, it came close to bankruptcy for lining up behind Lincoln in the American Civil War while the sainted Guardian was for the southern slave-owners. It advocated a Jewish return to Eretz Yisrael 15 years before Theodor Herzl was born and was branded ‘The Bugger’s Bugle’ when it called