Before the year ends, I’d like to tell the story of Karol Sikora and attempts to have him removed from a Spectator-sponsored discussion on the NHS at the last Tory conference. It offers an insight not just into how we work at 22 Old Queen Street but the dynamics of sponsored discussions.
The Tory conference has become the Edinburgh Festival of political discussion: a place where ministers, activists, advisers, corporates and journalists converge to discuss pretty much everything. When I became editor in 2009, The Spectator had no presence at the conference; now we host about a dozen discussions and a party. Our ground rules: to do interesting debates on important issues, with a variety of voices – the debate is enjoyable but robust. We don’t do sanitised or dull, and pride ourselves on events with long queues.
The sponsor of the discussion had a condition: no Sikora
Sometimes, what the sponsor wants is too niche for a general audience or not really a debating issue: in which case, it’s not really a Spectator discussion. One of our debates this year asked ‘How to fix Britain’s cancer crisis?’ The lineup was Elliot Colburn MP, vice chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Cancer, Dr Katharine Halliday, president of the Royal College of Radiologists, Dr Owen Jackson from Cancer Research UK and Professor Karol Sikora, perhaps Britain’s best-known oncologist. It was also sponsored.
But the sponsor had a condition: no Sikora. Why? We tried to be open-minded and work out the sponsor’s concerns. Fair enough if we had got a loudmouth doctor with no cancer experience, or a bad communicator. But Sikora’s credentials are impeccable. He’s eloquent, has 40 years’ experience, and was the director of the World Health Organisation’s Cancer Programme. But the sponsor said he was too controversial, too political. Again, odd: he has lambasted both Labour and Tories in the past so he’s hardly parti pris.
But he has been a big critic of the NHS, and it soon became clear to me that this was the issue. The sponsor was an NHS supplier and leery about platforming an outspoken heavy-hitter likely to deliver a few home truths about NHS failings. I can see the logic: which NHS supplier can afford to annoy the NHS, a behemoth and number one purchaser of health services in the country? So we ended up with a choice: keep Sikora, or keep the £25,000 of sponsorship.
We could easily have dropped him. So sorry, professor, we have overbooked. Come back another time! All we’d have to do is go down to three panellists (plus the sponsor) or find another, bland oncologist. No one would ever know. But not for a second did we consider cancelling Sikora. The Spectator is about promoting wide and vibrant debate or it’s about nothing. How could we have a debate about Britain’s awful cancer rate without discussing the elephant in the room of NHS structure? I’d argue that the woeful cancer record is in part caused by a refusal to discuss such questions.
This little drama made it clearer to me why we’re in this mess. It’s not just corporates: Labour and Tories both dislike criticising the NHS. It’s so massive that to criticise any small part of it can be seen to attack all of it – and in Britain we deify it, clap for it, regard it (as Nigel Lawson famously said) as a religion. This makes debate difficult. People like Sikora are seen to be beyond the pale if they have ever argued that NHS structure impedes cancer care. Imagine what effect this could have on junior doctors, or others wanting to debate important issues.
Sikora’s argument is quite nuanced. ‘There’s nothing wrong with the NHS doctors, nurses or technology, they are fantastic,’ he said afterwards. ‘It’s the management and the whole structure that is wrong. Not always at a local level, but NHS England is filled with highly-paid people that essentially do nothing and cause problems in the system. Anybody can recognise that we don’t need more money for the healthcare system, we need better management.’
I suspect that this is the disallowed opinion: that reform, not more money, is needed. Many may disagree. But if we cannot let respected oncologists make this point at a conference for the governing party, what’s the point of debate? Why are people even at Tory conference? The role of journalism is to promote debate, not curtail it. What we were being asked to do – censor a dissenting expert – would have been a breach of our values. So we went ahead with the debate without a sponsor.
In this way, Sikora became the most expensive speaker in The Spectator’s history, insofar as it cost us £25,000 to keep him. Not that dumping him ever crossed our mind. I should add that our colleagues in the advertising department are our great allies in this regard: I never faced any pressure to disinvite him. Such decisions are, in the end, made by our executive chairman, Andrew Neil, who took approximately 0.1 seconds to agree that Sikora should stay and the sponsor should be cancelled. What’s the point in making money, he said, if we cannot protect our principles?
But The Spectator is unusual. We ban advertisers (ask the Co-op). We returned the furlough money to the taxpayer as soon as it became clear that we didn’t need it: at the time, according to the Treasury, we were the first company in the UK to offer to do so. (They didn’t even have a mechanism for furlough return, so at one stage we were considering dumping bags of money on the Treasury’s doorstep.)
I should also add, here, that I understand and respect the sponsor’s logic. The NHS is a near-monopoly: many of its suppliers are understandably fearful of getting on its wrong side. That’s why most healthcare companies shy away from controversy and robust debate. There’s no big takeaway from our story, but I found it an interesting insight into how such debates are conducted. Or, I should say, not conducted. And why more open debate will be needed if we’re ever going to have the proper wide-ranging debate that cancer patients (and those who treat them) deserve.
Why The Spectator didn’t cancel Karol Sikora
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31.12.2023
Before the year ends, I’d like to tell the story of Karol Sikora and attempts to have him removed from a Spectator-sponsored discussion on the NHS at the last Tory conference. It offers an insight not just into how we work at 22 Old Queen Street but the dynamics of sponsored discussions.
The Tory conference has become the Edinburgh Festival of political discussion: a place where ministers, activists, advisers, corporates and journalists converge to discuss pretty much everything. When I became editor in 2009, The Spectator had no presence at the conference; now we host about a dozen discussions and a party. Our ground rules: to do interesting debates on important issues, with a variety of voices – the debate is enjoyable but robust. We don’t do sanitised or dull, and pride ourselves on events with long queues.
The sponsor of the discussion had a condition: no Sikora
Sometimes, what the sponsor wants is too niche for a general audience or not really a debating issue: in which case, it’s not really a Spectator discussion. One of our debates this year asked ‘How to fix Britain’s cancer crisis?’ The lineup was Elliot Colburn MP, vice chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Cancer, Dr Katharine Halliday, president of the Royal College of Radiologists, Dr Owen Jackson from Cancer Research UK and Professor Karol Sikora, perhaps Britain’s best-known oncologist. It was also sponsored.
But the sponsor had a condition: no Sikora. Why? We tried to be open-minded and work out the........
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