The Spectator and I
Alan Watkins
rr he sixth form library provided the Spec]. tator and the Times Literary Supplement. Neither, 30 years ago, was to my taste. The TLS I found unreadable and mostly above my head: it has since improved, and perhaps I have too. The Spectator, which was then edited by Wilson Harris, I found elderly and smug. I acquired a particular aversion to Harold Nicolson, who wrote a column, 'Marginal Comment', much commended by the English mistress for its correct style. I considered him patronising, snobbish and effete. (I use the last word in its correct sense of 'exhausted', though not of course by childbirth. Query to Philip Howard of The Times: Did the Romans employ effetus to mean 'exhausted by giving birth' or exhausted through having had lots of children'? I do not know the answer to this, but I think we should be told.) I later came to admire Nicolson, both as author and as journalist, through reading Some People, but I still think my initial, youthful response to him was honest and — well, yes, I shall say this because no one else will — perceptive.
The weekly my father bought was the Listener. He did so entirely for my benefit. A Welsh schoolmaster, he thought the paper's reprints of Third Programme talks would be helpful to an ambitious lad, anxious to get into Cambridge and, for this purpose, to display more knowledge than he actually possessed. So it proved. But then I grew tired of the Listener and bought the New Statesman instead.
The Spectator really impinged on me in the mid-Fifties. I took to buying it at Cambridge station on Friday afternoons, en route to London to eat a regulation dinner at Lincoln's Inn. I then intended to become a barrister, as I did, in the sense of ingloriously passing the examinations and getting 'called'. By this time the paper had been acquired by Ian Gilmour. It was edited, I think, by lain Hamilton, though it may have been by Walter Taplin. (Certainly Taplin has received insufficient credit for his part in transforming the paper from its Wilson Harris style.) Brian Inglis was to arrive as editor slightly later.
The contributor who made the deepest impression on me was Henry Fairlie, the political columnist. Indeed, reading Fairlie altered the course of my life. One autumnal late afternoon, passing through Whittlesford, fortifying myself with a British Railways tea against the forthcoming rigours of Lincoln's Inn, and perusing Fairlie's contribution, I asked myself: 'Watkins, old lad, when it comes down to it, who would you rather be, Mr Justice Devlin' — then, as later, greatly admired as a judge — 'or Mr Henry Fairlie?' Unhesitatingly I chose Fairlie. I afterwards came to know him, and I regret his long sojourn in America.
It is usually forgotten that the political column as we know it in Britain today is largely the creation of two journalists, Hugh Massingham of the Observer and Henry Fairlie of the Spectator. There had been powerful and influential political writers before, such as J. L. Garvin, A. G. Gardiner, H. N. Brailsford and Massingham's own father, H. W. But my use of 'powerful and influential' precisely illustrates the difference between them and their successors. The earlier political journalists were not party hacks but they saw themselves as part of the political process. They wrote not so much to instruct, edify or entertain (though they frequently did all three) as primarily to serve some political cause, which might or might not be represented by a politician or political party of their day.
This older view of the proper function of political journalism has always, more or less, been maintained by papers of the Left. I remember Michael Foot, driving me one day from Tredegar to London — it was 1967, and I had just become political columnist of the New Stateman, after doing three years on the Spectator — saying that he would never employ a political columnist on any weekly he might edit, because the columnist could become more important than the paper. Tony Benn and his allies hold the same view in more extreme form. They believe in editorial direction not by editors or proprietors but by politicians, trade unionists or general busybodies. They refuse to accept that columnists such as Massingham, Fairlie and Bernard Levin (who, after Fairlie, founded the disrespectful school of political journalism, now finely represented by Frank Johnson) are not subject to proprietorial or editorial direction.
The men who edited the NS when I was there — successively Paul Johnson, Richard Crossman and Anthony Howard — were far from holding such opinions. Indeed, Howard had himself successfully inaugurated the paper's political column in 1961. From him and Johnson alike I received nothing but kindness and a meticulous respect for my own independence. But there was something about the place, something in the air. What was it? I was free, but 1 did not feel so free as I had on the Spectator, even though it had been edited in my time by paid-up Conservatives, first by lain Macleod and then by Nigel Lawson. There was a dirty old mackintosh hanging behind a door at the NS. No one knew who owned, or had owned it. We christened it 'H. G. Wells's aphrodisiac overcoat'. Perhaps it had belonged instead to Kingsley Martin. Perhaps it was sending out waves of inhibition. Or perhaps the reason lay in all those endless conferences, those solemn, tedious discussions about the correct 'line' for the paper to take. Anyway, there it was.
Crossman was a different proposition from Johnson or Howard. To him, it was inconceivable that political journalism should not serve some political purpose, overt or, more frequently, covert. That, after all, was the reason for writing the stuff in the first place. He once praised Peter Jenkins to me, to my disadvantage, on the ground that Jenkins was — the phrase I used earlier is Crossman's — 'part of the political process'. Crossman and I were friends when he was a Minister, in 1964-70: when he was my editor our friendship cooled, though we maintained relations of a sort to the end. Our quarrels came about chiefly not through directions to take a given 'line' but through boundary or jurisdictional disputes. He used to warn me off subjects because he had commissioned a usually boring article on the area in question by one of his Labour chums. Crossman was obsessed with two things: 'imprinting my personality on the paper' and 'making Labour Party policy', a task for which, in truth, he was singularly ill-fitted, lacking, as he did, any interest in detail, and preferring to discourse in large and general notions. At all events, we had rows, I resigned, he took me back on a freelance basis and he bit the dust first.
I deal with Crossman at length not to dance on his grave — I liked and admired him to his death, though I preferred to see him monthly rather than daily — but to illustrate his approach to political journalism. It is an approach that is not the Spectator's, though the paper came perilously close to it in its anti-Market phase under Harry Creighton as proprietor and George Gale as editor.
The Spectator does not have a line but it does have an atmosphere: less liberal (in the modern, bastard sense) than in the Fifties but equally libertarian: a compound of the Daily Telegraph and Private Eye, unpolluted by the nastier atmospheric elements of both publications. It is about the only paper, I think, where a journalist — any journalist, not somebody famous who is liable to make trouble — can have his stuff printed, exactly as he wrote it (subject to misprints) and without fuss. There are, I know, exceptions to this statement: the Spectator does reject or cut articles. But it is broadly true. And the freedom which the Spectator gives its contributors is to be prized and guarded.
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