The 'new Spectator
Peregrine Worsthorne
Throughout most of history it has been 1 the function of the Press to expose evil in high places. Editors have seen their function as that of tearing away the veils of secrecy which cover up public corruption, miscarriages of justice, State acts of lawless oppression and persecution. Many publications still concentrate on such good works, and none more so, for example, than the New Statesman. Scarcely a number fails to include a massive essay in investigative journalism purporting to shock the reader with new evidence of some 'establishment' scandal. Up to a point this is reasonable enough, since all societies have skeletons in their cupboards which need to be hauled out into the light of day.
But in my view the main trouble with contemporary Britain does not lie in evil rulers bent on deceiving their subjects. A far more relevant contemporary threat lies in the capacity of present day rulers to deceive themselves. What needs to be exposed is not so much their guilt as their innocence; not so much their chicanery as their naivete. It is softness in high places, not hardness, that constitutes the principal threat. Of course there are skeletons in cupboards. But these there have always been. New, and much more dangerous, is the unique proliferation in high places of simple souls whose only crime is inexcusable guilelessness.
Never has there been a ruling order so devoid of evil, with so little to hide. Therein lies the horror. As the veils are torn away, the worst conspiracy revealed has to do with a determination to be excessively benign, criminally optimistic. Ecrazez l'infame — how desperately inadequate that classical journalistic function has become. The guilty men today are those who peddle illusions. Too much flatulent idealism, rather than too much brutal cynicism — that has become the British sickness.
Which brings me to what I perceive to be the role of the new Spectator. Alone among the political weeklies it has got its priorities right: the exposure of wrong thinking rather than wrong doing. Whereas the New Statesman concentrates on rubbing the body politic's nose in the dirt, the Spectator prefers to clear the public mind of cant. This is a much more difficult task. Whereas any old Pilger can rake muck, it takes an Auberon Waugh to shatter humbug. Of course our rulers have feet of clay. But much more to the contemporary point is that they also have their heads in the clouds. Distant from Heaven, yes, indeed, that they certainly are, as the New Statesman each week goes to such lengths — column after column — to demonstrate. What concerns the Spectator — and it seems to me a much more relevant concern — is to bring them down to earth.
So much that has gone wrong with Britain since the war has been due to an ostrich-like refusal to face facts, a pervasive proneness to wishful thinking. Can there ever have been a better example of the old adage about the way to Hell being paved with good intentions? The Augean stables, therefore, do not need to be cleansed so much as dirtied. What one senses in the columns of the Spectator is a passionate indignation against the liberal pieties, a crusading zeal for desecrating these Holy Grails from the bland worship of which so many evils flow. For years some of us — dismissed as 'romantic reactionaries' — have been obsessed with the dreadful suspicion that an excess of enlightenment was threatening to produce a new Dark Age. Never in our most sanguine dreams did it seem likely that the best of a new generation of young writers would come to share this perception. But that miracle has come to pass in the shape of the new Spectator.
Its aim is not to influence the week by week political process. No leading articles appear advising the parties about what they ought to do. Positions are not adopted on the great issues of the day. Members of Parliament looking for advice as to what to do or say will look in vain. Nor are economic nostrums discussed. One cannot tell whether the Spectator is for the Alliance or against it, admiring of Mr Benn or hostile, sympathetic to the Dries or the Wets. Unlike the Economist which has a precise view on every subject — or sometimes not so precise — the Spectator is more descriptive than normative; telling it as it is rather than as it ought to be. In no areas is this more valuable than in the writing about black Africa or about race relations here at home.
Whereas most newpapers and journals treat these subjects gingerly, as if they were potentially explosive, standing well away, smothering everything with masses of cotton wool, the Spectator people — Richard West, Patrick Marnham, Xan Smiley et al. — tackle them with a nonchalance that is truly disarming. The same lighthearted approach distinguishes the domestic reporting of Ferdinand Mount. To be serious it is not necessary to be solemn. Indeed, solemnity today is almost a guarantee of frivolity, since no one who takes current affairs seriously today can fail to be amused; fail to sense their marvellous absurdity. Nothing more profound can be said about Shirley Williams, for example, than that she is a big joke. As for CND, how else can it be accurately portrayed except as a fool's paradise?
There is no point in roaring with indignation or whining with outrage about Britain's contemporary ills because most of them do not spring from evil people pursuing foolish ends. Public debate has been corrupted by inanity, polluted with nonsense. Thus the only intellectually respectable form of journalism has been sardonic rather than censorious, more mocking than angry. The play in progress is not Lear or Hamlet but the Comedy of Errors, and the tone of criticism required for the one is quite different from that required for the other. That is why the New Statesman is so boring: it brings a sledgehammer to crack a nut, instead of, well ... a nut cracker. The Spectator brings a rapier to the task of pricking balloons, which is very much more sensible, as well as being much more fun.
Its editor asked me recently to attend a dinner intended to drum up advertising sup port. As the port circulated he was asked by the various agency bosses present to explain what their clients would gain by advertising in his journal's columns. To my infinite relief he emitted what sounded at worst like a giggle and at best like a belly laugh, before being reduced to total silence. Nothing could have more admirably and perfectly illustrated the very quality for which his journal now uniquely stands: a resolute reluctance to disseminate illusions, to deceive, either himself or others, with pompous wishful thinking. Not that the advertising bosses were at all impressed, quite the opposite. One saw their confidence ebbing away as fast as their glasses were re-filled. But then advertising bosses are men of the world, of the very world of make-belief and dissimulation which the Spectator exists, not to destroy — that is a New Statesman word — but to discomfort.
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