The Spectator editor’s office comes with a battered antique leather chair and distressed sofa so old that I can remember sitting on it when I worked there in the mid-90s.
Re-upholstering at the magazine is rare. Tradition and a sense of continuity as an eclectic intellectual “house journal of Conservatism” matter more than corporate sleekness – even if the new owner, Paul Marshall, is an iconoclastic, deep-pocketed hedge funder, who could afford to updo the shabby chic of The Spectator’s Old Queen Street HQ as a rounding error in his accounts.
A recent editorial and ownership re-upholstering has just taken place at the publication co-founded in 1711 by the essayist and general coffee house chatterer Joseph Addison to “enliven morality with wit, and to temper wit with morality”.
It feeds into a changing nexus of influence on the right of centre. The outgone Surrey Heath MP and serial minister Michael Gove was made editor recently, restoring the habit of appointing active politicians in the mode of Boris Johnson (1999-2005), Nigel Lawson (1966-1970) and bon viveur Tories, Ian Gilmour and Iain Macleod, in the 50s and 60s.
As well as Gove, the “Speccie” was home to the younger Kemi Badenoch as an early digital director for a year from 2015, which left mixed memories – but also showed her nose for the power of the magazine on her CV.
Editors of The Spectator always have differing sets of house favourites and those left out in the cold. That........