DIARY
CHARLES MOORE Last week, The Spectator competed against the New Statesman in the final of a Radio Four quiz programme called The Year in Question. This will be broadcast next Wednesday, so I shall not reveal the result, but the year on which we had to answer was 1984. I should have known rather more than I did about it, because the year in question was important in my life. It was the year in which I became editor of The Spectator. This week, almost exactly six years later, I am leaving, so I hope you will excuse my self-indulgence in writing about the job.
`Don't change a thing,' was the most frequent advice given me when I became editor, and I was disposed to agree, be- cause I greatly admired the paper that my predecessor, Alexander Chancellor, had created. It was nevertheless very bad advice. Change is inevitable, and so trying not to change is hopeless. It is no more sensible to say, 'Don't change the paper,' than to say, 'Don't change your socks.'
It took me more than a year to pluck up the courage to change the magazine's design and to introduce colour covers. When I did so, I was vilified by almost everyone whose taste I respected, yet these changes, perhaps more than anything else, produced a dramatic improvement in The Spectator's fortunes. Most readers now believe, I hope, that the present design has come down from time immemorial. It is not truly conservative to oppose alteration: it is the great conservative trick — the creativity of conservatism — to maintain a tradition, and, if there isn't much of a tradition to maintain, to make one up. People are very ready to believe in this tradition, often in defiance of the facts. In recent weeks, I have enjoyed receiving several letters complaining that various articles 'would never have appeared in Charles Moore's day' from readers think- ing that, because I had announced my resignation, I had already left.
The changes in the world of the weekly magazines have been remarkable. During my six years as editor here, the New Statesman, Punch and the Listener have each had three editors, and have all slipped behind The Spectator in circulation. Our circulation has doubled, but is still less than 40,000. The life of a weekly is precarious, and ours would be much more so if we had not had a smooth transition of sympathetic proprietors. I was appointed by Mr Algy Cluff, who is still chairman of the board. He arranged a successful sale to the Aus- tralian Fairfax Group who looked after us well, until the youngest member of the family decided to borrow a vast sum of money a few weeks before the crash of 1987. Fairfax then agreed to the transfer for which we asked — to Mr Conrad Black and the Telegraph Group, the present owners. Throughout this period, the prop- rietorial patience has often been tried, but has never utterly failed, and the magazine's editorial independence has been respected.
Endowed with that independence, how have I exercised it? What have I been trying to do? I do not really want to reply to these questions, partly because I am not sure of the answers and partly because it is risky to attempt to explain oneself. When I took over, I wrote: I could state boldly that The Spectator is intellectual, or libertarian, or vegetarian, or whatever, or it is nothing, but then I fear that it would very quickly become nothing. Do I not hope that it will be 'influential'? Of course, but not in the way that Mr Edward du Cann is influential, nor even in the more attractive sense in which Keynes or Milton Friedman is influential; only in the sense that anything of any merit has influence — that it makes people think or laugh (which can be related activities). If it can influence rather more of them to put their hands into their pockets once a week and draw out 75p, I shall be content.
Now, despite 'the battle against inflation', the sum is £1.40 (although I should point out that there are a third more editorial pages than there were then); otherwise what I said still applies.
Any editor of The Spectator trying to exercise a more direct influence quickly comes up against the inherent weakness of his position. He lacks the power of money. If you edit, say, the Daily Mail, you can make people write what you want them to write because you are paying them £500 for a thousand words, and if they get uppity, 'Do you ever do voice-overs?' you can just kick them out and get some- one else to write it. The editor of The Spectator, by comparison, is a beggar.
Curiously, this does not mean that he cannot be a chooser. He simply has to adopt completely different methods. In- stead of hiring a writer as one might hire a cleaning contractor, he has to interest himself in the writer, to find out what the writer wants to say and is good at saying, and persuade him or her to go ahead and say it. An appropriate metaphor might be that of a gardener, coming into a garden which has long been loved and cared for. The gardener cannot invent the plants, though he should bring in some new ones, and if he is too rough with them they will die. He must be sure that when he grubs something up it really is a weed, and not a rare flower, and he will get the best out of his plants only by watering them and manuring them and pruning them and, as the Prince of Wales is known to favour, talking to them.
It is dangerous to prolong metaphors, so I shall say only that to me The Spectator has been an enchanted garden, and that I have been proud to recruit new readers to share the pleasure of it. Without the readers, the flowers would blush unseen and waste their sweetness on the desert air, and soon people would forget to cultivate them any longer.
I should like to end with thanks, first to those who cannot read them. In the past six years, some contributors have died whom no amount of tradition-inventing can re- place. I think particularly of Shiva Naipaul, T. E. Utley, Dhiren Bhagat and Sam White (as well as great names from earlier periods like David Watt, Iain Hamilton and Henry Fairlie). I also think of Stan Gebler-Davis who swore blind to me that he was about to die but is as right as ever he was, if not as rain, and of Jeffrey Bernard, still Unwell but still with us, and of Jock Bruce-Gardyne, battling so bravely against cancer. I think of all the contribu- tors — writers and cartoonists — whose remarkable individualities somehow com- pose a harmonious collectivity. I soon shall be joining their number, since my succes- sor, Dominic Lawson, has asked me to write a column for the paper, which will start in the autumn.
Less known to readers, but no less important to the magazine, are its staff, both editorial and business. I thank them all and single out for mention those who have done time as my secretary, in due course moving on to less arduous duties on other parts of the paper — Jenny Naipaul, Lucy Perceval, Julia Mount, Kate Ehrman and Ginda Utley. As Alexander Chancel- lor wrote when he made way for me, 'With such nice people around, including the new editor, how can the paper fail to succeed?'
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