Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 2 February 2017

The distinctive laugh, the kindness, the absurdist anecdotes and the wonderful writing which showed his light touch

As he left the editorship of The Spectator in March 1984, Alexander Chancellor wrote in this space: ‘When I joined the paper as editor in 1975, people were in the habit of asking me what my “policy” was going to be… How desperately uneasy this question made me. If there was a lavatory in the vicinity, I would lock myself inside it. I was sure I ought to have a “policy”… but I most certainly hadn’t got one.’ As his assistant editor, I witnessed the dismay on the faces of proprietors, advertisers and various big shots at Alexander’s answers to this sort of question. He would say, ‘Well, we should publish some good articles, I suppose,’ and then give his distinctive laugh, which sounded like a schoolboy imitating a machine-gun.

Alexander felt genuinely insecure at not being able to come up with a ‘policy’: it was to do with his lack of intellectual self-confidence. But I gradually realised that this failure to satisfy the boss class was also something that he was proud of. He was sacked from editing The Spectator, Time and Tide and the Sunday Telegraph magazine, and from his columns in the New Yorker, the Daily Express, the Daily Telegraph and the Guardian. (He strongly believed he was about to be sacked from his last post, the editorship of the Oldie, although there was no evidence for this.) Given his talent, this record is remarkable. It was a reflection of his resistance to control. He was often lazy and chaotic. Sometimes he was simply absent and sometimes — because he was never full of his own opinions — he simply couldn’t think of anything to write about. His copy was horrendously late, worse than anyone except Boris Johnson. Alexander was rarely downright rude to his bosses, and he was a man of immense charm, but I think they sensed — and resented — that he would never implement their ideas.

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