Is Britain clever enough to support more Spectator readers?
ROD LIDDLE
Not so very long ago, The Spectator's circulation was both appropriate and sustainable. It consisted of senior male members of the House of Windsor, a handful of foreign office diplomats and permanent secretaries, three or four British domiciled right-wing foreign despots, the leader of the Conservative party and a few of the more sentient members of the upper House. In raw, numerical terms the circulation was undoubtedly small — something in the region of 27 in fact — but it was important and exclusive. It had cachet. Those people who read the magazine did not need crucial philosophical or geopolitical concepts explained to them at length, nor a handy cutout-'n'-keep glossary of difficult words at the back of the book. They simply understood. And the writers understood them. But this situation could not survive the onslaught of the modern world with its devotion to commerce and, heaven help us all, inclusiveness. Today's Spectator is different. It's true that the writing has not changed very much — last week two Spectator writers insisted that you purchase, as a Christmas book choice, a series of volumes retailing at 0,000. Excellent. Another contributor, picking his book of the year for 2004, chose a tome about church furniture which was last published in 1960. Terrific! The more inaccessible and ominous to the general public, in terms of expense or subject matter, the better.
But if the writing has rather gloriously remained the same, there is evidence that the circulation has not. We may have recently lost the leader of the Conservative party as a regular reader, but elsewhere the magazine has, regrettably, expanded. We are no longer read by only 27 people. At the last count, the circulation stood at 65,000, which is a deeply worrying phenomenon on two levels.
Firstly, with such a wholly unwieldy circulation, it is almost impossible to keep tabs on the sorts of people who read The Spectator. It is entirely possible — indeed, statistically it is even likely — that among those 65,000 readers are individuals who also purchase national lottery tickets, or believe that Melanie Phillips is an 'intellectual'. Or wear brown shoes when up in town. Or jog.
Obviously, it is just as important that The Spectator should be seen to be read by the right sort of people as it is for the right sort of people to be writing for it. We should not sell our birthright for a mess of potage. Although it is undoubtedly gratifying, in a superficial sense, to have new readers, it is both unedifying and inappropriate to witness individuals queuing at the check-out in WH Smith clutching both The Spectator and, say, the Economist. And then asking the assistant for one of those half-priced Cadbury's Fuse bars. Or a packet of Rizlas. We can live without that sort of reader, thank you.
Worse still is this little conundrum. Commerce is a relentless business. In having achieved a circulation of 65,000 there will be an expectation that this figure can be exceeded and therefore perhaps even pressure upon those who work here to subtly — or not so subtly — adapt our writing and subject matter in order to penetrate a new market. There is something horribly crude about the notion of 'penetrating' a 'new market', don't you think?
But in any case, this is, I would suggest, an impossibility. There is no new market. And furthermore such a strategy would in the end prove counterproductive. That figure of 65,000 already contains several thousand people who buy The Spectator by mistake, believing it to be one of the profusion of TV listings magazines, or one of those new softporn publications for women. Again, some people will buy the mag because they like the cut of our jib. But there are many who buy it because they feel it an affirmative and aspirational thing to do; it is the apogee of conspicuous consumption. According to the latest social study (by Mike Savage) an estimated 3 per cent of the population of Britain consider themselves 'upper class' or 'aristocracy'. That's nearly two million people: clearly, the overwhelming majority of them are either lying or deluded. But this new elasticity between the classes, this notion that because you own a 1997 Porsche Carrera you are somehow elevated in your social standing and social worth, is a deeply regrettable feature of our times and perhaps one reason why The Spectator's circulation is so high. Buying The Spectator, you see, should not confer upon one the right to read it.
So there are all those readers we can do without, too. And my guess is that the market for The Spectator, unless the magazine were to change not merely its editorial content but its very raison d'etre, is pretty much saturated right now. There is nobody left whom we wish to have reading The Spectator nor who would have the intellectual capacity to read it. It is perhaps true that when the circulation was hovering around the 27 mark, we were ever so slightly punching below our weight, if only from the very best of motives. But we have now achieved the astonishing feat of being read by (or at least bought by) 0.1 per cent of the British public. Clearly not all of those people are suitable and equally clearly it is difficult to see how this figure could be expanded. The 65,000 already contains within it almost all senior civil servants and diplomats, front-bench politicians, the professors — emeritus and otherwise — of recognisable subjects at our four or five top universities, most high-court judges, six eminent writers, four captains of industry who would disavow the alleged inherent value in being `self-made', two Fleet Street broadsheet editors and the Bishop of Bath and Wells. There is nobody left whom we want to read the magazine or, if we are being kind, would gain any pleasure from the reading of it. What we need to do instead is start to shave a little that figure of 65,000; begin to persuade a few readers — either directly or through the strategic insertion of deeply impenetrable texts, perhaps about the situation in Chad, or concerning early 20thcentury church furniture — that actually, contrary to their hopes, The Spectator is not really for them. How many readers should we aim to lose? My guess is no more than 25,000 and perhaps as few as 15,000: nothing too drastic. Times have changed and The Spectator should, if not move with them, then certainly lag along behind a little sulkily.
The government's decision to introduce a compulsory national identity card scheme will undoubtedly help us in our task. But that won't be with us for ten years yet. In the meantime we need merely resolve and a sense of purpose.
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