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Thursday 4 December 2008

Goodbye to the young master

Farewell to a noble figure in Spectator history

Ian Gilmour, the former Spectator editor, who died last week

It was a blow for Gilmour, costing him, in damages and legal fees, around £185,000 in today’s money. The previous year, The Spectator had lost substantial revenue from sales and advertising by standing out against Eden over Suez. It went on to criticise the government under Macmillan for its continued pretence that Suez was a noble venture and even advised its readers not to vote Conservative at the 1959 election. (The editorial decision was taken by Brian Inglis, who had been appointed editor a few months earlier, but with Gilmour’s agreement.)

The lively, left-of-centre stance of Gilmour’s Spectator had attracted a number of outstanding journalists to its pages: Henry Fairlie, who famously identified and took on the ‘Establishment’, and Bernard Levin, who wrote his coruscating Westminster commentary under the pseudonym of Taper, also Randolph Churchill and William Douglas-Home. Inglis brought in several more — Alan Brien, Katharine Whitehorn — and under his editorship The Spectator achieved record sales and profitability. Some would remember the Inglis years as the golden age of the magazine, but Gilmour came to regret his choice of editor, not because Inglis was anti-Conservative but because he was anti-politics. There was plenty of slightly anarchic fun in The Spectator, and it was gaining a more eclectic readership. But it was, as Gilmour wrote to Inglis, ‘completely divorced from the political life of the country’. For some time it did not even have a political correspondent.

So Inglis went, Iain Hamilton, Gilmour’s former deputy editor, came and went, sacked in unhappy circumstances in favour of Iain Macleod. He was replaced as editor by Nigel Lawson, with whom Gilmour never got on, a year before the magazine was sold. In later years Gilmour would reflect that he should have sold it when he gave up being editor in 1959.

The 1960s were not satisfactory years for him at The Spectator — after 1962 there was always the difficulty of his being also an MP. He went on to write distinguished books on his Conservative philosophy, and to hold office under Heath and Thatcher. He may be remembered principally for his sustained opposition to Thatcherism in his later years. But in the annals of The Spectator he is counted as one of its finest radical editors and among the foremost libertarians of the mid-20th century.

More articles from: Simon Courtauld | this section

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