Woolworths cancels The Spectator

The Spectator has thousands of readers in South Africa, many of whom get their weekly magazine from Woolworths, the country’s upmarket retailer. Not any longer. Woolworths has taken the bizarre decision to stop selling The Spectator. The apparent trigger? Gareth Roberts’s ‘End of the rainbow’ cover story.

The issue featuring that article hit newsstands at the end of May, on the eve of Pride month – just as Woolworths launched its own storewide rainbow campaign. It seems that Roberts’s piece, in which he argues that Pride’s fall can’t come soon enough, prompted a review of Woolworths’s decision to stock The Spectator. The retailer appears to have decided that stocking the magazine is incompatible with its Pride campaign – and it has removed The Spectator from its shelves.

Roberts, who is gay, wrote that: ‘2025 is the year the genderist movement finally started to break apart. It has been a mad, wild ride. I’m sure there’s more to come, but after many false alarms it feels like a corner has finally been turned. The collapsing of Pride under the weight of its own internal contradictions is a sure sign that the jig is up.’

The piece was accompanied by an illustration featuring the ‘intersex-inclusive Pride flag’ – a kaleidoscope of rectangles, triangles and even a circle in thirteen different shades – being painted over. Does Woolworths really think its shoppers can’t cope with encountering such an image on their weekly grocery shop? If so, it’s quite an assumption about the moral values of its customers.

The Spectator asked Woolworths about its recent decision to delist the magazine. It didn’t respond. Whatever the reason for the store’s decision, it’s a shame that some South African readers weren’t offered the chance to pick the issue up and learn how iterations of Pride are collapsing under the weight of their contradictions.

For readers in South Africa, The Spectator is still available in Exclusive Books stores nationwide or you can subscribe from as little as R49