In the spring of 1975, my brief and inglorious career in publishing came to an end when there was a mass sacking at Cassell & Co, and I was one of those more deserving of the tin-tack among the many who found small brown envelopes on their desks. But it had a happy outcome for me, and this half century has a personal resonance: after kicking my heels for a few months, I made my first appearance in these pages, and found that I had become a journalist. I already knew Anthony Howard, then editor of the New Statesman, and, taking pity on me, he asked me to write something for him.
My first published piece was on metrication, not a word of which I remembered when present colleagues at this paper kindly sent it to me. That was followed by a series on the economics of different sports, and I might have continued at the NS had Henry Keswick not bought the Spectator, then on its last legs, and appointed as editor Alexander Chancellor. Chancellor offered me a job, and the next six years were the most enjoyable of my working life as we all turned the magazine into something worth reading, even if it didn’t make money.
Although I’m obviously parti pris, I think I was lucky to have joined the weeklies at a good time for them; in fact what might have been for various cultural and social reasons a golden age. Beyond the NS and the Spectator, there were the Times Literary Supplement, generally known as the Lit Supp and nowadays as the TLS, and the Listener, a unique magazine: apart from its admirable book reviews, its content consisted entirely of transcripts of BBC programmes, until it sadly folded in 1991. And there was New Society, which had been launched in 1962 and also folded, in 1988, to be absorbed by the New Statesman (and its name is now happily revived in these pages). This is an old tradition, one journal absorbing another. For many years we were called the New Statesman and Nation, having taken over in 1931 the radical journal of that name controlled by John Maynard Keynes. The Nation had already taken over the Athenaeum, a literary journal, and for a time our masthead not only bore the cumbersomely cannibalistic title but also included “Athenaeum: the Weekend Review”.
Although I ended up at the Spectator, the weekly I’d grown up with was the New Statesman. My parents were good progressives and, along with the Guardian (which I’m old enough to remember as the Manchester Guardian), we took the NS and also the Economist. The latter was an entirely different kind of publication then from now. It was the most austere of the weeklies, with no illustrations but only serious editorials, reports and essays, long before it achieved commercial success by reinventing itself as a mid-Atlantic news magazine.
These journals had long enjoyed an influence and importance quite out of proportion to their circulation, and that was certainly true of the NS. By 1945 the Daily Mirror had won the circulation war by becoming the first authentic voice of the working class, and it’s sometimes held that the Mirror helped Labour win the general election that year. But the NS, with a fraction of the Mirror’s sales, carried more weight with the government which took power, whose ministers didn’t turn to the Mirror for intellectual stimulation and advice.
From Indian independence in 1947 and the creation of the National Health Service the following year, the Attlee government was echoing the tenor of the NS. And this paper’s continuing hostility to imperialism and colonialism might be said to have been gratified by the decolonisation of the 1950s, albeit under Tory governments. By the early 1960s, Labour morale was low after three successive electoral defeats, and the NS made room for the awkward debates about where Labour should go and what it should become, although the Tory government was also criticised in terms of social policy by the Spectator.
Under the Tory-libertarian ownership of Ian Gilmour, the Spectator championed the abolition of the death penalty and the decriminalisation of homosexuality, not to mention the Palestinian cause well before anyone on the left took it up, a contrast indeed to that paper today. But then a characteristic of these papers was that, even when they had clear political affiliations, their readership was ecumenical. Thinking Labour people read the Spectator, and literate Tories read the NS for its outstanding books and arts pages.
Indeed what distinguished the NS as much as anything was the balance between the front and back half, or what Evelyn Waugh called “the Hyde of atheism and economics” preceding “the Jekyll of clever reviews and ingenious competitions”. Not that Waugh always loved the book reviews. Hugh Trevor-Roper was for years a regular NS reviewer, and it was “Twice Martyred”, his review of a book about the Elizabethan Jesuits, which began a lengthy and bitter – if, to the detached observer, comical – feud with Waugh. But then the Weekend Competition of parodies and pastiches was always enjoyable and memorable, to the point that I can recall some a lifetime later. One comp asked for famous lines from literature to be given a twist, and one winning entry – “When lovely woman stoops to folly/She finds it’s really rather jolly” – brings to mind some lovely women one has known.
Another mark of the weeklies’ importance was the merry-go-round between journalism and politics. In 1963, when he was a rising Labour politician and author, Roy Jenkins nearly became editor of the Economist. That same year Iain Macleod was a prominent member of Harold Macmillan’s cabinet, and Harold Wilson, who had just become Labour leader of the opposition, said privately that Macleod was the Tory he most feared. When Macmillan resigned and jobbed in the Earl of Home as his successor that October, Macleod declined to serve under Alec Douglas-Home (as he had become), and was made editor of the Spectator by Gilmour.
In January 1964 he published perhaps the most famous thing ever to appear in that magazine or many others. Innocuously titled “The Tory Leadership” it told the true story of Douglas-Home’s elevation the previous October, describing it (plausibly enough) as a conspiracy of Old Etonians. When the Tories won the election in 1970 Macleod was made chancellor, but all too briefly before his sudden death. His successor as editor was Nigel Lawson, who would later be Margaret Thatcher’s chancellor. Thirty years later Boris Johnson edited the Spectator before – at a dark time in our island story – becoming prime minister. And so the merry-go-round continues to turn: today the Spectator is edited by Michael Gove, a former cabinet minister.
In 1961, after the 30-year-long editorship of Kingsley Martin, John Freeman became editor of the NS. That strange and elusive figure, who was “everything by starts, and nothing long”, had been a soldier, a Labour MP and a junior minister, and was talked of as a possible future prime minister before he left parliament to become a television interviewer. He didn’t stay long at the NS, and was given the ambassadorship in Washington by Harold Wilson. But the timing was unfortunate: Wilson supposed that Hubert Humphrey would win the 1968 presidential election, and was taken aback when Richard Nixon won, although not as much as Nixon himself was when he learned the new British ambassador had written in the NS six years previously that he was “a man of no principle whatsoever except a willingness to sacrifice everything in the cause of Dick Nixon”. It was a mark, albeit an unfortunate one, of the NS’s intimate relationship with Labour that it could have an unforeseen impact on diplomatic relations.
If Freeman’s career was varied to an extreme, his successor’s was also unlikely. Paul Johnson was editor of the NS from 1964 to 1970, despite Leonard Woolf’s opposition to his appointment (Woolf, one of the NS directors and a doctrinaire atheist, didn’t think a Roman Catholic should edit the paper). In fact Johnson proved an excellent editor, remembered with gratitude by writers who worked for him long after his later drastic turn to the right. It was under him that the NS achieved its highest ever circulation. But in his case the relationship with Labour was coloured by a certain folie de grandeur.
In 1969 the Wilson government was shaken by the “In Place of Strife” episode, now forgotten except by a few of us political nerds. That was the name of a White Paper from the employment secretary, Barbara Castle, proposing reform of the trade unions at a time when strikes (official and still more unofficial) were suffocating the prospect of economic growth. Castle had stood on the left of the party, but that didn’t help when opposition from unions and Labour MPs soon killed her proposals. Before that, Alan Watkins, then the NS political columnist and later one of my greatest friends, recalled Johnson declaring at the weekly meeting, “Harold, Barbara and I are going to see this through.”
However much the NS acted as a friendly critic of the Wilson government, it may be that they were both undone by its failures. For a lot of the last century the dominant strain in Labour was Fabian managerialism, the belief that “the gentleman in Whitehall really does know what is best”. The Wilson government arrived in 1964 confident that its National Plan and its Department for Economic Affairs would deliver annual growth rates of 3-4 per cent and catch up with better-performing European countries. Instead, in 1966, there was yet another frantic attempt to defend the pound by way of a pay freeze, higher taxes and cuts in public spending (this might have a familiar ring today). Watkins used to say that those “July measures” marked a decisive end of glad confident morning for the managerial left.
In 1970 Johnson left, to be succeeded by a former cabinet minister in the form of Richard Crossman, although his editorship wasn’t a success, and the NS team was delighted when Anthony Howard became editor in 1972. His editorship saw a decline in circulation which was undeserved because, in my admittedly prejudiced view, he produced an excellent magazine. It offered friendly criticism of the Labour government of 1974-79, but that government was so troubled before it collapsed that there wasn’t much help to be offered.
My happier memory is of a merry band of NS writers: Watkins; John Morgan and his wife, Mary; Richard West, who wrote offbeat pieces roaming the country and further abroad; and the very gifted Francis Hope, until he was killed in a plane crash outside Paris in 1974. Neal Ascherson was another, and might at one point have become editor, while his first wife Corinna Adam also wrote for the paper. Then those older hands were joined by a gang of likely lads not so long out of Oxford: Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, James Fenton and Christopher Hitchens. “My lost boys,” Howard would later call them. They all became famous writers, although a good time for the weeklies didn’t necessarily mean a golden age for our culture in general. In the 1980s the self-conscious cultural elite wasted too much of its energies in fruitless rage at Thatcher.
If the NS seemed increasingly in a political muddle, then so did Labour and the left as they headed towards the collapse of 1979 and Margaret Thatcher’s command of the coming decade. Perry Anderson of the New Left Review has called the Spectator the dominant journal of the Thatcherite period, and it was a slack tide for the NS, with a rapid turnover of editors. Its relationship with Tony Blair and New Labour was friendly at first, although clouded by the Iraq War, which it rightly opposed. Today the magazine stands ready to offer constructive criticism and advice to a government which needs all the help it can get.
Even now, in an utterly different media landscape from the one I grew up with or first worked in, the weeklies have an important role to play. And the gold standard was defined in a tribute paid by the American writer Dwight Macdonald in 1956. Macdonald is a hero of mine, impossible to categorise but one of the great political and cultural writers of his age. Born in New York in 1906, he was recruited fresh from Yale to work for Fortune, the expensive glossy magazine launched by Henry Luce to celebrate the “saga” of American business. He spent an improbable six years there, but at least learned how to write. He also learned his politics, and in short order turned from soft liberal to fellow-traveller, from passionate anti-Stalinist and active Trotskyist to anarchist-pacifist. In the 1950s he moved away from political engagement to write longer cultural essays for the New Yorker, and to spend two years in London working for Encounter (which meant indirectly for the CIA, but that’s another story), where he wrote an essay called “Amateur Journalism”.
He was almost excessively Anglophile – “In London one meets stockbrokers who go to concerts and politicians who have read Proust,” he said almost awe-struck – in a way that reflected the contempt American intellectuals tend to have for the business classes. And in London he made one happy discovery: the English weekly papers, which had no equivalent in America, and which were the subject of that essay. There were what he called “seven weekly papers which are worth reading regularly; and not only worth reading (in the sense one feels one ought to) but interesting to read”: he included the Observer and Sunday Times in his tally because of their excellent books and arts pages, along with the TLS,the Spectator, the Listener, the Economist (which also had very good book reviews) and the NS.
At the time, he was formulating a personal cultural thesis, distinguishing high culture, “masscult”, and in between them “midcult”, “a peculiar hybrid bred from the latter’s unnatural intercourse with the former”, and which we know as middlebrow. Macdonald was an interesting hybrid himself, a political radical and a cultural elitist. As he said, “The past cultures I admire – Periclean Greece, the city states of the Italian Renaissance, Elizabethan England, are examples – have mostly been produced by communities, and remarkably small ones at that,” and his admiration for such cultures was combined with contempt for the worst of mass culture – a notable example being the Fleet Street press.
“The London mass-circulation newspapers come as something of a shock to an American, accustomed to the relatively high standards in typography, layout and content of the New York Daily News.” You needed to go to London “to see just how bad a popular press could be”, he said (he didn’t live to see Murdoch’s Sun), and he connected “the excellence of some of the press in London” with “the degradation of the rest”.
“The English weeklies are not exactly highbrow,” Macdonald wrote – “the circulations are too large, their writing too relaxed, the spirit too clearly that of a confident and sizeable social group rather than an embattled minority – but they are not in the least middlebrow, either. I think they may best be described as ‘amateur’.” That word has acquired a pejorative character, suggesting incompetence and ineffectiveness, but what he meant was the weeklies were written by people who weren’t academic specialists or newspaper hacks, but who gave the impression of writing for pleasure on subjects they knew about and cared about.
And today? What Macdonald didn’t foresee was how far the former quality press, let alone the broader culture, would go downmarket, erasing his crucial distinction. The weeklies are still invaluable, although whether his “confident and sizeable social group” still exists as he saw it seven decades ago, I’m not so sure. The educated, or at least graduate, class is far bigger today, though more diffuse, and yet at the same time the increasing professionalisation of politics has if anything narrowed the interests and knowledge of the political class. Is there anyone on either front bench today who has read Proust?
If raising the standards of the front benches is a perennial goal, the weeklies should beware an obsessive interest in politics. At their best they’ve always been a palace of varieties, with room for the sesquipedalian or offbeat. Long may they continue to surprise, as well as inform and entertain.
[Further reading: The first and last New Journalist]
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This article appears in the 12 Dec 2025 issue of the New Statesman, All Alone: Christmas Special 2025
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