Another voice
The magic number
Auberon Waugh
It is not often that I receive instructions from the editor of this magazine about my subject for the week. In fact, I think it is the first time this has happened. Those who imagine a concerted press campaign against them can have no conception how disorganised the press really is. Mr Heath is the latest in a long line, coming immediately after Mr Benn and poor Sir James Goldsmith, to announce that there is an organised campaign in the press or, more generally, in the 'media' to discredit his leadership of the Conservative Party in the past and frustrate his attempts to lead it now. He sees these attacks as being 'orchestrated' — curious choice of word — by Conservative Central Office. Mr Benn, perhaps, can be excused his persecution mania on the grounds that he is mad and in no position to spot any logical connection between urging the destruction of our society on the one hand and being opposed in his aims on the other. Similarly Sir James Goldsmith's experience of journalism may not have opened his eyes to the fact that few journalists are quite as easy to 'enthuse' as his own, Mr Anthony Shrimsley, was.
But this week I am not being enthused or orchestrated into an attack on Mr Benn, Mr Heath, Sir James Goldsmith or even the resilient Mr Anthony (`Toady') Shrimsley, former editor of Now!, who, I see, has been hired by his brother, the adaptable Mr Bernard 'Slimy' Shrimsley, former editor of the News of the World, to join him on the new Sunday Mail, excitingly called The Mail on Sunday. Perhaps, before settling down to the tune which has been called, I will be allowed to play a little bassoon voluntary in praise of Lord Rothermere for launching this doomed venture in the first place. There is a certain nobility in backing any obvious loser, but to put up two jockeys like the brothers Shrimsley shows a dedication of spirit which approaches the sublime. Those of us who followed what happened to the News of the World's circulation, under Bernard, and Now! 's circulation, under dear little red-faced Tony, can see that Lord Rothermere is taking his role very seriously indeed. In combination, they should be absolutely terrific. And Tony has had experience of launching an entirely new publication!!!
But today I feel strangely enthused to draw attention to the fact that this is the 8,000th edition of Spectator. At any rate, that is what its editor, Mr Alexander Chancellor, has told me to write about. ln his favour, he gave no guidance about what I should say on this subject. Eight thousand is not a particularly significant number sub specie aeternitatis, of course, but then which numbers are? One observes that it is the product of only two primary numbers, five and two, the first being cubed, the second raised to the power of six. From factorising it thus, one can soon remark that it is the sum of two fairly important squares, 80 and 40. Its greatest cabbalistic significance — ancient numerologists were not much interested in high numbers and tended to avoid decimals — probably lies in the fact that it produces five squares of 40. Forty has always been thought a highly important number and 40 days as a suitable period for fasting and repentance recur constantly, from Moses on the Mount to Jesus in the Wilderness. In Islamic mythology, where the number 40 is represented by the letter m, it is thought to signify the 'shawl of humanity' by which God (Ahad) is separated from Ahmed (Muhammad).
Mathematically, as I say, the number 8,000 is more remarkable for the number of dyadic squares it contains than for any property of its own synthesis; nor, according to Cruden, is it once mentioned in the Bible, even in a compound function. Growing desperate, I observe that if you subtract from it the squares of 85, of 10 and of 3, you are left with 666 which is, of course, the number of the Beast. On the other hand, I can't see any good reason for subtracting squares from it in this way, nor do I think that Spectator, as it has evolved, bears much relation to the Beast of the Apocalypse. What Mr Chancellor wanted, I feel, was to be patted on the back and told how well he and Spectator are doing.
So they are, in a sense, except for the ageold problem that practically nobody wishes to buy it. This year is the 15th of my association with the magazine — I reckon I have contributed to over 600 of the 8,000 editions we celebrate — and in the course of that time I remember countless earnest conferences, with hundreds of ingenious suggestions on how to persuade more people to buy the magazine. My own sad conclusion is that they do not want to. It is simply not a product with any mass appeal.
Nor, it would seem, is the Gr4nada version of Brideshead Revisited. Hot on Richard Ingrams's sniffy review of a few weeks ago came the news — to which the new proletarian Times exultantly devoted seven column inches on its front page — that Brideshead has not made the ITV top ten ratings, even for its first instalment on 12 October. So it would seem that bare bottoms are not the answer to the Spectator's problems, as may have been suggested from time to time. Quite apart from anything else, if we had too many bare bottoms we might lose the services of our distinguished television critic; on the understanding that Mr lngrams almost certainly won't get this far in the article, I even dare to suggest that he missed the point of the bare bottoms in Brideshead when he wrote: 'I was sorry to see too that the "gay" element in the story had been gratuitously pointed up . . . there was a quite unnecessary shot of naked bums on the Castle Howard roof.'
It seems to me that in his anxiety over the spread of homosexuality, Mr Ingrams has lost sight of the fact that long before bare bottoms were thought disturbing, or 'gay', or even pretty they were universally recognised as funny. I am almost sure that the Brideshead bottoms were meant to be funny. Anyway, I laughed, and if I were editor of the Spectator I would make Ingrams write out 50 times: `Bare bottoms need not be disturbing. They can be very funny indeed.' But perhaps Chancellor lacks the Power just yet.
Private Eye demonstrates the Spectator's problem in reverse. Pretty well the same people write for both publications, so there can be no question of jealousy. But it is inescapable that as Private Eye gets worse — its gossip and news pages less plausible, less funny, and more obsessed with homosexuality — its circulation goes from strength to strength until it now sells ten copies to Spectator's every one. My own conclusion is that there is only a very limited number of people worth addressing in Britain. In order to arrive at some estimate, we might examine the recent circulation figures for Spectator.
When Chancellor became editor in 1975, the magazine had had a very bad spell and its circulation was sinking fast. It continued to sink for the first two years of his editorship so that from its most recent peak of 48,000 in 1961 it had sunk to 12,000 average sales in 1977. Since then he has put on about half as many again. Whether the fact of the circulation's continued decline for those two years means that Chancellor, in his own small way, was Shrimsleying — in this case, of course, driving oafish readers away by his unashamed excellence — or whether the demoralised readership he inherited simply did not notice that there had been any change, I choose to disregard that residue of 12,000 readers at the bottom of the barrel. If they were prepared to read the Spectator from the middle of 1973 to 1975 they would be prepared to read anything.
Let us examine the 6,000 buyers who have arrived since: intelligent, educated, humane, humorous people — are they really all that is left? My own guess is that we have caught only three quarters of them, and there are still 2,000 left to be caught. When Mr Chancellor has that mystical figure of 8,000 new buyers under his belt in addition to having published his 8,000th number he will have the world at his feet. He will also be in possession of a power more unassailable than anything claimed by Mr Heath, Mr Benn or Sir James Goldsmith, of addressing the only people in England whose agreement or good opinion is worth seeking in the language and accents which only they understand.
Previous page
