Mischief and mayhem

Henry Fairlie was the journalistic idol of my youth. I met him, I think, first in 1955 when he had just started writing his Political Commentary in The Spectator — and it was on the mischievous appeal of those early columns that we had invited him to come and address the Oxford University Labour Club. Certainly at the time he represented a total breath of fresh air in the then somewhat musty world of political journalism.

In the Observer the part-time novelist Hugh Massingham may have blazed a new narrative trail, with his ability weekly to follow E.M. Forster’s advice and tell a story; but it was Fairlie, with his buccaneering streak and instinct for irreverence, who completed the revolution in the coverage of British politics. At Ian Gilmour’s invitation he joined The Spectator — where for the first few months he wrote under the pseudonym of ‘Trimmer’ — in November 1954. By June 1956 — after some dispute over a running credit for wine bills — he had gone to the lusher pastures, in terms of both salary and expenses, of the Daily Mail. But by then his name was made, and the modern political column had been born.

He had not, of course, burst out of nowhere. For the four years immediately preceding his appointment to The Spectator he had been the chief political leader writer on the Times. But he chafed against the anonymity involved in that role (broken only when he engaged in a fierce correspondence with Dick Crossman in the letter columns of the New Statesman) and was only too delighted to enter the Vanity Fair world of weekly political journalism where, with his boyish charm, he found himself immediately at home.