The secrets of The Spectator’s success

Although I once edited this paper, and have written for it for almost 40 years, I did not know that it is the oldest magazine in the world. I learn this from 10,000 Not Out, David Butterfield’s short but scholarly new history of the paper from its foundation in 1828 to today. I wonder why it has survived. Here, more or less at random, are aspects emerging from the past 10,000 issues.

• The paper began with ‘News of the Week’ and continues — in much crisper form — with ‘Portrait of the Week’ to this day. From time to time, this has been dropped, but the paper has mysteriously suffered as a result. The same applies to the leading article. Neither feature is among the best-read of the paper, yet both somehow guarantee it: news and comment first; book reviews after. The formula worked at once, and works still.

• Jokes have always been allowed. In the high-Victorian years of the joint editorship of Meredith Townsend and Richard Hole Hutton (1861-97), the tone was often serious, but Butterfield unearths their parody of academic philological study in which the text of ‘Hey Diddle Diddle the cat and the fiddle’ is discovered as an ancient inscription with all the words run as one: ‘In old writing of this sort, where there is no distinction of words, the first point naturally is to ascertain if any particular combination of letters occurs more than once… Here the letters THE occurring some seven times, gave the desired key to the whole. No one could doubt that they represented a common, and yet an important word.’ In 1967 the editor, Nigel Lawson, appointed Auberon Waugh as political columnist and put up a notice: ‘LIBEL. Mr Christopher Fildes and Mr Auberon Waugh have today joined the staff. As from today, The Spectator is no longer insured against libel.’