The way we were

‘The Spectator, having quite recently been a very bad magazine, is at present a very good one.’ Those gratifying words began a full-dress leading article in the Times on 22 September 1978, headed ‘On the Side of Liberty’. Its occasion was this magazine’s sesquicentenary, which we celebrated with a grand ball at the Lyceum Theatre, and much else besides. Although I can’t possibly be objective, I think that the praise was deserved. The revival of The Spectator 40 years ago was wonderful: it assured what had been the very insecure future of the paper, and it was the time of my life.

Founded in 1828 by the Dundonian Robert Rintoul to promote the cause of Reform, by the late 19th century The Spectator had become Liberal Unionist under the almost 40-year editorship of John St Loe Strachey, ‘pompous, pretentious and futile’ in Lloyd George’s derisive words. Then, in another long reign from 1932 to 1953, Wilson Harris made The Spectator what A.J.P. Taylor called a voice of ‘enlightened Conservatives’. By the time I discovered it as a schoolboy in the early 1960s, The Spectator was enjoying a purple patch, thanks to Ian Gilmour, who had bought the magazine and edited it himself for some years, promoting his own brand of liberal Toryism while assembling some excellent writers. But he sold The Spectator to a shady businessman in 1967, and over the next eight years it went fast downhill, low in tone, hysterically Europhobic, shedding three-quarters of its circulation and by no means sure to survive.

Then came the miraculous rebirth, credit for which, as the Times rightly said, went to ‘Mr Alexander Chancellor, its still new editor, and Mr Henry Keswick, its still new proprietor’. Sir Henry, as he now is, bought The Spectator in the summer of 1975, and installed Alexander, possibly because he was the only journalist he knew, even though Alexander had worked for Reuters and as a television reporter, but never for a paper, daily or weekly.