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Introducing the 180th anniversary issue

Friday, 9th May 2008

Matthew d'Ancona introduces the commemorative 180th anniversary issue of The Spectator. The magazine is available from news-stands now, priced £4.95

As darts legend Sid Waddell so rightly said: 'One hundred and eighty, divided by three, is one dart at a time.' One hundred and eighty is also a ripe old age for a magazine. Could The Spectator's founding fathers possibly have dreamt in 1828 that, 180 years on, their creation would be the busy, buzzing, mischievous success it is today?

What, indeed, would these greybeards have made of the magazine's modern legends: Taki, Jeremy Clarke, Deborah Ross, Michael Heath and Toby Young? Would they have got on with Rod Liddle? Would they have fancied Tamzin Lightwater (some people do, even though she is a cartoon)?

We shall never know. What we do know is that The Spectator celebrates this anniversary in good health so rude that it verges on obnoxious. We have passed the dizzying heights of 75,000 weekly sales; our website gets more than 1.4 million hits a month and its Coffee House blog has become required reading in the political world; we have a magnificent new home in Westminster; and we mark this particular birthday as Current Affairs Magazine of the Year.

In the next few months, we shall start to make the entire Spectator archive - yes, every single issue since 1828 - available in digital form. Until then, we offer this chestful of journalistic treasures and doubloons, lovingly selected by Martin Vander Weyer from the Aladdin's cave of the magazine's past.

The variety is glorious: indeed, that is, and always has been, the point. But there are common threads that course through these pages, through the decades, through wars, and governments, and social revolutions, threads that define The Spectator past and present.

It is a magazine to which writers have always vouchsafed their strongest feelings and opinions: Nancy Mitford on being 'teased and tortured by strangers', F.R. Leavis denying that he took seminars in his dressing gown, George Orwell on bayonets, Jennifer Paterson on the sexual allure of eating hare.

The Spectator has long been a home of the cussed and contrarian. In 1865, we did not think twice about taking a pop at Our Mutual Friend which we considered 'self conscious, affected, malicious, extravagant and vulgar'. True, The Spectator's judgement that Nineteen Eighty-Four 'as a novel... must be classed a failure' has not found many takers. But, as awkward squads go, we have been more consistent than most. George Gale was no more impressed by Picasso's Spanish Civil War work in 1973 than Anthony Blunt had been in 1937.

Consistent, too, in our passions. The Style and Travel section in today's Spectator builds on the most venerable preoccupations of the magazine. Read Graham Greene on a boat trip to Tabasco in 1938; or our musings in May 1881 on 'the pleasure that women derive from their clothes', when we asked: 'Why do pale-faced brown-haired women wear the deep-read and orange hues which can "go" only with the olive and pomegranate tints, and the blue-black hair of the south?' Why, indeed? Answers on a postcard to Old Queen Street, please.

And then there is Jeffrey Bernard on waking up in a pair of women's knickers; Bernard Levin's majestic defence of Lady Chatterley's Lover; Boris Johnson on China. All magnificent players in the glorious rep company that is The Spectator, a revel that has been performing to packed houses for 180 years, and promises to run and run.

Like a Tardis in reverse, The Spectator is small on the inside and big on the outside. And this anniversary is also the occasion of a birth, as we welcome the new monthly Spectator Business to the family. The commercial guys call it 'brand extension'; in the engine room, we prefer more restrained language, like 'world domination'.

The best is yet to come. Floreat Spectator.

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