Gove takes the helm of The Spectator

The former Conservative cabinet minister is not the first person to mix politics and editing the Speccie; or the second, or third, or fourth...

On Wednesay it was announced to some surprise that Michael Gove, having stepped down from the House of Commons after 19 years at July’s general election, would replace Fraser Nelson as editor of The Spectator. Initially the announcement was made pending approval from the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments (ACOBA), but that clearance came later in the day, and Gove will begin his new role on 4 October. Nelson, having served as editor for just over 15 years, will become an associate editor and continue to contribute to the magazine.

As a matter of full disclosure, I would of course remind readers that, while I am a free lance, I contribute regularly to The Spectator (and have recently been honoured with my own caricature, which I suppose means they think I have some future). I like Fraser Nelson and am hugely admiring of his tenure as editor, during which time the magazine’s value has risen from £20 million to £100 million, US and Australian editions have been launched and its circulation has passed the 100,000 mark. I also regard Michael Gove as an unusually intelligent and inquiring politician, an excellent debater and a fine writer, and look forward to watching (and working on the fringes of) his editorship over the next months and years. More than that, there is little I can say at this point.

In historical terms, however, Gove is the sixth future or former Member of Parliament to occupy the editor’s chair at The Spectator, so, ever in thrall to history, I thought it might be entertaining and perhaps even instructive to look at those journalist/politicians who have gone before him.

Henry Wilson Harris (1932-53)

Harris, a graduate of St John’s College, Cambridge, was a writer and educationalist who worked for the League of Nations Union after the First World War, including editing its journal Headway. He was diplomatic editor of The Daily News then political editor of The Spectator before succeeding Sir Evelyn Wrench as editor in 1932, just shy of his 50th birthday. Harris was a Quaker, a Liberal and a pacifist, and these attitudes informed his approach to politics and the stance of the magazine: a staunch supporter of the League of Nations, he was vehemently opposed to Adolf Hitler’s militarism and authoritarianism. In May 1933, shortly after the Nazis’ rise to power, the magazine carried an article by H.A.L. Fisher entitled “Is Liberalism Dead?”, in which the historian and former Liberal cabinet minister identified “the revival of the War Spirit in Germany” as the great challenge to liberalism, arguing that there was “nothing more infectious than military madness”.

Under Harris’s direction in the 1930s, The Spectator strongly supported the League of Nations and promoted solid relations with the United States and the Commonwealth, while taking a very hostile line towards Communism and opposing war. Harris and the magazine were sympathetic to some renegotiation of the Treaty of Versailles and remained committed supporters of appeasement until Kristallnacht in November 1938, which, Harris wrote, “obliterated the word appeasement”. While he denounced Nazism, his predecessor, Wrench, who also owned a controlling stake in the business and chaired its board, was an enthusiastic Germanophile.

At the general election of July 1945, Harris was elected as one of the Members of Parliament for Cambridge University, only narrowly beating author J.B. Priestley. He was a genuinely independent MP, serving with former president of Corpus Christi College Kenneth Pickthorn, a Conservative, and revelled in his new role but was not especially active. He spoke with diligence and authority on foreign affairs, for example in July 1949, as well as on education, journalism and broadcasting, and was convinced of the value of at least a leavening of independent MPs, not subject to the strictures of party discipline. That was a feature of the House of Commons in decline, however, partly with the creeping professionalisation of politics; under the provisions of the Representation of the People Act 1948, the university constituencies, by then numbering seven and returning 12 Members of Parliament, were abolished as of the 1950 general election.

Unlike some MPs for university seats, Harris did not seek another constituency after 1950. He concentrated on his role as editor of The Spectator, continuing until 1953. He died in January 1955 and received a warm tribute in the magazine by R.A. Scott-James, former assistant editor (1933-35, 1939-45) and distinguished literary critic (and maternal grandfather of Sir Max Hastings).

Ian Gilmour (1954-59)

A year after Harris’s retirement, Sir Evelyn Wrench and his co-owner Sir Angus Watson, both in their 70s, sold the magazine (then “somnolent”, according to Edward Pearce) to an aristocratic young barrister, Ian Gilmour. In his late 20s and a tenant of 4 Paper Buildings, the chambers headed by Kenneth Diplock QC but soon to come under Quintin Hogg QC, Gilmour had served in the Grenadier Guards during and after the Second World War. His father, Sir John Gilmour, was a wealthy stockbroker with substantial estates in Scotland and shares in Meux’s Brewery, and Gilmour preferred the prospect of journalism to law. On acquiring a controlling stake in The Spectator—although Wrench would remain chairman of the board until his death in 1966—Gilmour decided to take the editor’s chair himself, displacing the short-serving Walter Taplin.

Gilmour’s influence was profound and extensive. He was young, inclined towards liberalism, enthusiastically pro-European, interested in and sympathetic towards the Arab world and, although a Conservative, unconvinced by the incumbent government led by the ageing and declining Sir Winston Churchill. He was no more attracted by Sir Anthony Eden (1955-57) or Harold Macmillan (1959-63), and saw much that was congenial in the Labour leader who succeeded Clement Attlee in 1955, the relatively young and technocratic Hugh Gaitskell.

His editorship coincided with a turbulent period in British, and particularly Conservative, politics. After the hanging of Ruth Ellis for murder in July 1955, Gilmour wrote a stinging editorial in which he savaged the home secretary, Gwilym Lloyd George, as “weak”, “at the mercy of [his] advisers” and “not very intelligent” and argued that capital punishment was “absolutely indefensible”. His distaste was evident in his judgement that, for Britain, “hanging has become a national sport”.

Gilmour found himself in opposition to the government again over the ill-fated military intervention in Egypt in 1956 following President Nasser’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal. He openly accused Eden of lying about Britain’s involvement and fiercely contested what he saw as a confrontation with Arab nationalism. There were other principled disagreements with government policy too: Gilmour and The Spectator regarded the Lord Chamberlain’s censorship of theatre as increasingly outdated and ridiculous, and vigorously championed the recommendations of the Wolfenden Committee in 1957 in favour of decriminalising homosexuality. So passionate was this support that John Gordon, the Presbyterial editor-in-chief of The Sunday Express, dubbed the magazine “The Buggers’ Bugle”.

In 1959, Gilmour stepped down as editor to seek a parliamentary candidacy (in the Conservative interest, despite his many disputes with the party). In November 1962, he was elected for Central Norfolk at a by-election following the sudden death of Group Captain Richard Collard, who had, like his predecessor Brigadier Sir Frank Medlicott, stood under the “National Liberal” banner. The National Liberals were a product of the split in the Liberal Party over free trade in 1931 but had functionally merged with the Conservatives at a constituency level in 1947 and would formally be absorbed in 1968. Gilmour maintained the banner of his predecessors, which seemed somehow appropriate for his social instincts; having once represented a party which had come into being to support protectionism against free trade would be a faint echo of his approach to Margaret Thatcher’s economic policy when he sat uneasily in her shadow cabinet and then in her first government.

Gilmour was keen to have the best writers at The Spectator, and rekindled its traditional rivalry with The New Statesman to show that incisive, thought-provoking and witty copy was not the preserve of the left. Contributors under his editorship included Kingsley Amis, John Betjeman, Henry Fairlie (who coined the phrase “the Establishment” in a 1955 column), Peter Fleming (elder brother of Ian, who wrote as “Strix”), Philip Larkin, Bernard Levin (political correspondent and, under the pseudonym “Taper”, father of the modern parliamentary sketch), Hugh Trevor-Roper and Kenneth Tynan. He had re-established the magazine as a lively and vital part of the journalistic landscape.

A formidable political career awaited Gilmour. He was a defence minister under Edward Heath, serving briefly as secretary of state from January to March 1974, then served briefly as chairman of the Conservative Research Department. Utterly out of sympathy with Margaret Thatcher, of whom he was loftily dismissive, he nevertheless remained in her shadow cabinet, first as shadow home secretary (1975-76) then shadow defence secretary (1976-79). When the Conservatives returned to office in 1979, he became Lord Privy Seal and spokesman in the House of Commons for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office under Lord Carrington, but it was not a happy period. Although he was close to Carrington, a fellow Etonian with whom he had served in the Grenadier Guards, he loathed Thatcher and took few pains to conceal how little he thought of her policies and intellectual grasp. The prime minister dropped him from the cabinet in September 1981, though he remained an MP until 1992. Thatcher recalled acidly in her memoirs, “he was to show me the same loyalty from the back-benches as he had in government”.

Iain Macleod (1963-65)

Sir Alec Douglas-Home unexpectedly and controversially became prime minister in October 1963 when Harold Macmillan, believing himself to be much more ill than in fact he was, relinquished the premiership and used all his might to stop his de facto deputy, Rab Butler, from succeeding him. Two cabinet ministers refused to serve under Home, not because of any personal antipathy—it would hardly have been possible with Alec Home—and only partly out of support for Butler but, to a considerable degree, because of their disapproval of the way the succession had been rigged. Enoch Powell resigned as minister of health and Iain Macleod relinquished his three offices of chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, leader of the House of Commons and chairman of the Conservative Party. Powell was 51 and Macleod 49, and, although both were Cambridge graduates, they were regarded as part of the modern, liberal, less hierarchical element in the Conservative Party.

Late in 1963, Gilmour, who still owned a controlling stake in The Spectator, displaced the editor, 43-year-old Scottish author and poet Iain Hamilton, who had only held the position for a year. He had appointed Hamilton because he felt the magazine was losing its political edge but was not satisfied and took the bold step of replacing him with Iain Macleod, who was suddenly available. Hamilton sued the magazine and was awarded damages the following year. The appointment caused huge disruption internally, and many board members and journalists protested to The Times on 2 November at the “shabby treatment meted out by the proprietor to Mr Iain Hamilton” and the decision to replace him with a serving Member of Parliament:

We believe strongly that The Spectator, with its long and honourable history of independent opinion, should not be tossed about at the whim of the proprietor or lose its independence by identification with a narrow political faction.

The issue was not Macleod himself. A brilliant and incisive debater, as well as an international-level bridge player, he had only achieved a lower second-class degree in history at Gonville and Caius College but that reflected his enthusiasm for bridge and relative indifference to his studies. He had been one of the bright stars of the Conservative Research Department after 1945 and was regarded as a strong candidate for the party leadership in the future. As colonial secretary from 1959 to 1961, he had driven a swift pace of decolonisation, earning the enmity of the right wing (the Marquess of Salisbury would later disparagingly describe him as “too clever by half”).

On 17 January 1964, Macleod published a review of Randolph Churchill’s instant-history account of the previous year’s events, The Fight for the Tory Leadership: A Contemporary Chronicle. The article nodded towards the formality of a book review but was in fact Macleod’s own account of the same events, in which he had been a key participant, and it was explosive. It set out in clear and damning detail the way in which Butler, “although incomparably the best qualified of the contenders”, had been frustrated in his justified ambition to be prime minister. Macleod was critical of many senior colleagues including Lord Dilhorne, the Lord Chancellor; the chief whip in the House of Lords, Earl St Aldwyn; Lord Poole, Macleod’s own co-chairman of the party; and John Morrison, chairman of the 1922 Committee. At one point he noted acidly, “eight of the nine men mentioned in the last sentence went to Eton”.

The reason Macleod’s article would go down in history came in an otherwise-mild observation that the manoeuvrings to deny Butler were so secretive that neither he nor his friend, chancellor Reginald Maudling, was aware of them.

It is some measure of the tightness of the magic circle on this occasion that neither the Chancellor of the Exchequer nor the Leader of the House of Commons had any inkling of what was happening.

That was the dynamite, the phrase “magic circle”. A playful reference to the professional organisation for magicians, it perfectly encapsulated what Macleod had so disliked about the events of October 1963 and why they had made the government seem so out of touch: the secrecy, the assumption of privilege and the hint of deception and prestidigitation. It was no coincidence that it would be the last time the Conservative Party would simply allow a leader to “emerge”, and within two years a formal system of election by the parliamentary party had been introduced.

The article made Macleod unpopular with many of his colleagues. He was censured by his local association in Enfield West but survived a vote of no confidence, and some fellow Conservative MPs snubbed him in the House of Commons. Peregrine Worsthorne, the flamboyant, oddly fey, high Tory deputy editor of The Sunday Telegraph, had sniped at Macleod in 1961 that “he actually seems to be enjoying the job of presiding over the dissolution of the British Empire”, and returned to the lists. He accused Macleod of being a social climber who had embraced membership of White’s Club but was now attacking the class he had so eagerly sought to join. That, at least, probably caused little loss of sleep.

It would later be said that the controversy over the “Magic Circle” article seriously damaged Macleod’s chances of becoming leader of the Conservative Party. Perhaps. His obituary in The Times noted that “he was not forgiven”, and certainly Alec Home, in sorrow more than anger, felt the row contributed to the party’s narrow election defeat in October 1964. However intense the fury of some of his colleagues in January, however, when Home drew up a shadow cabinet in the wake of the election, he recalled Macleod, giving him oversight of the party’s opposition to Labour’s plans to renationalise the steel industry.

Iain Macleod is one of the Conservative Party’s great lost leaders. When Home stepped down in July 1965, he chose not to contest the position but backed the eventual winner Edward Heath, who rewarded him by making him shadow chancellor. It was a role which suited Macleod’s quick mind and parliamentary prowess—Margaret Thatcher, who served as his deputy in 1966/67, regarded him very highly—and he became chancellor of the Exchequer when the Conservatives returned to power in June 1970. On 20 July, however, after exactly a month in office, he suffered a fatal heart attack at 11 Downing Street.

Nigel Lawson (1966-70)

Macleod had remained editor until 31 December 1965, although he had returned to front-line politics as shadow chancellor in the summer. To replace him, Ian Gilmour turned to the 33-year-old former City editor of The Sunday Telegraph, Nigel Lawson. After five years at The Financial Times and his City brief, Lawson had been recruited by Conservative Central Office to write speeches for Harold Macmillan, staying on under Sir Alec Douglas-Home and assisting him during the 1964 general election. When the government was defeated, Lawson was offered the role of director of the Conservative Research Department in succession to the legendary Sir Michael Fraser, but chose to return to Fleet Street and became a columnist for The Financial Times again.

Lawson was ferociously bright, winning a mathematics scholarship to Christ Church, Oxford, and graduating with a first in philosophy, politics and economics. While he could be charming in private, he was intellectually fearless and forthright: his assessment during National Service in the Royal Navy had noted that “Lawson could be more self-assertive”, causing his son Dominic (also a Spectator editor, 1990-95) to remark at his funeral, “Well, he certainly took that on board”. Norman Lamont recalled a conversation in the 1960s about devaluation during which Lawson had said to him, “Let me put it to you in a way that makes it clearer”. He was also, as his Indian summer climate change scepticism was to demonstrate, impatient of anything resembling a consensus.

Ideologically, Lawson was always a difficult to figure to place. In the 1980s he would be in the vanguard of free-market economics, a doughty champion of privatisation, in favour of low taxation and the mastermind of the revolutionary deregulation of the City of London known as “Big Bang”. While he pressed Margaret Thatcher to join the European Exchange Rate Mechanism when he was chancellor, in 2011 he called for an “orderly” dismantling of the Eurozone and by 2013 came out in favour of the United Kingdom leaving the European Union.

Under his editorship, The Spectator cleaved to a relatively liberal stance. Notably Lawson was consistently critical of the United States’ pursuit of its war in Vietnam; in a signed editorial on 8 July 1966, only six months into his role, he was unambiguous in calling for President Johnson’s administration to cut its losses:

The risks involved in an American withdrawal from Vietnam are less than the risks in escalating a bloody and brutal war.

The conflict would not end for another nine years. In 1967, he wrote an article entitled “An Alternative Economic Policy”, in which he archly noted how little difference there seemed to be between the Labour government and the Conservative opposition on many economic matters, then, strikingly resonant today, focused on the low productivity rate of the United Kingdom as the source of its lack of prosperity.

In sum, I believe that it should be a central core of Conservative economic philosophy that the role of the state is not primarily to provide an engine for expansion—that is inherent in man himself—but rather to remove the obstacles to faster growth.

To achieve this, Lawson advocated the abolition of fixed exchange rates, then known popularly by advocated as “setting the pound free”.

There is, therefore, a clear and distinctive Conservative economic policy for the asking. It is a policy, moreover, which, however radical in conception, is consistent with the general emphasis on freedom in Tory economic thinking and which provides the only escape from a Morton’s fork of two equally intolerable alternatives.

During his editorship, Lawson also contributed to a volume published by the Conservative Political Centre entitled Conservatism Today: Four Personal Points of View. Along with Robert Blake, Peregrine Worsthorne and David Howell, he contributed a chapter “The need for a National Policy”. It was not wholly proto-Thatcherite: he endorsed the notion that the state should intervene in the economy to maintain full employment at least in the short term. Lawson did, however, assert that consumer choice rather than government policy should determine the shape of the economy, and he repeated his argument that a floating pound would encourage economic growth.

In 1968, Lawson had been selected as Conservative candidate for the semi-marginal Berkshire constituency of Eton and Slough, then held by the young Labour MP Joan Lestor, who became a junior education minister in October 1969 (having been rejected by the prime minister, Harold Wilson, a year before as “too impossible”). Her majority in the generous Labour victory of 1966 had only been 4,663, suggesting that Lawson had a chance to unseat her if the Conservatives won nationally, but when they did so in June 1970, he was only able to cut her advantage to 2,667, a Liberal candidate intruding for the first time since 1950.

The campaign was marred by his removal as editor of The Spectator. In 1967, Ian Gilmour, was growing weary of ownership of a magazine which was now losing £20,000 a year and asked financier Jim Slater to find him a buyer. Scottish machine tool entrepreneur Harry Creighton was politically and socially ambitious, and Slater, who had done business with him before, arranged a deal for him to buy The Spectator for £75,000. Lawson had tried and failed to construct a rival bid, and there was interest from freewheeling Labour MP and former journalist Woodrow Wyatt and cosmopolitan publisher George Weidenfeld, but Gilmour was eager for a rapid sale and Creighton was on hand.

The new owner and his editor found their relationship difficult, Lawson defending his editorial independence while Creighton pressed for greater financial coverage as a route to more lucrative advertising. Circulation had fallen from 36,000 in 1966 to 25,000 by 1970 but Creighton’s real casus belli was his lack of control as proprietor. Not long before, Auberon Waugh, irritated by an article George Gale had written on celibacy and the Catholic Church, had found himself at the printers and had changed Gale’s byline to “Lunchtime O’Booze”, the habitual Private Eye title for a generic but bibulous journalist. Waugh then sued Creighton for wrongful dismissal (and went on to win his suit).

Despite the obvious precedents, Creighton used Lawson’s parliamentary candidacy in 1970 to dismiss him as editor. He offered the role to both John Thompson, formerly deputy editor under Iain Macleod, and Bernard Levin, then at The Daily Mail, but both refused and Waugh’s adversary Gale was appointed. But Lawson would have moved on soon enough anyway: he was elected MP for Blaby in Leicestershire in February 1974 and held the seat for 18 years, and found the advent of Thatcher exactly the opposite of Gilmour’s experience. In 1979, he became financial secretary to the Treasury, then passed Gilmour on the way out of cabinet when he was promoted to energy secretary in September 1981, before replacing Sir Geoffrey Howe as chancellor of the Exchequer in 1983 and holding the position for more than six years.

Boris Johnson (1999-2005)

Characteristically, Boris Johnson’s tenure as editor of The Spectator was founded on a lie. In July 1999, Conrad Black, who had bought control of the Telegraph Group in 1986 and The Spectator in 1988, offered to appoint Johnson, then 35 and a columnist for The Daily Telegraph, on the condition that he give up his political ambitions (he had contested the hopeless seat of Clwyd South for the Conservatives in May 1997). Johnson, placing as much store by his pledge as any other he had made, consented and took the job.

His journalistic career had been mixed before then. Graduating with an upper-second in classics from Balliol College, Oxford, in 1987, furious that he had not been awarded a first, he became a graduate trainee at The Times but was sacked within months when he fabricated a quotation for an article on the discovery of Edward II’s palace, attributing it to his godfather, historian Colin Lucas. But fortune quickly smiled, as it often has, and Max Hastings offered him a place in the leader-writing team at The Daily Telegraph.

Johnson made his name as the Brussels correspondent for The Daily Telegraph from 1989 to 1994. He was a rare Eurosceptic in a city of integrationist consensus, and his lively, irreverent style appealed to a readership already wary of “Eurocrats” and “Brussels red tape”. Johnson recognised the potency of this constituency, and if currying its favour meant occasionally straying beyond the bounds of strict fact in pursuit of a good story, he was relaxed about making that compromise and embracing so-called “euromyths”. His tone resonated with and gave strength to a strand of right-wing Euroscepticism which was gaining in power in the Conservative Party, as well as to the nascent UK Independence Party, as Alan Sked’s Anti-Federalist League rebranded itself in 1993.

Returning from Brussels, Johnson wanted to try his hand as a war correspondent, but Hastings instead appointed him assistant editor and chief political columnist. His bravura articles, breezy, distinctive and unapologetically provocative, boosted his fame but entrenched doubts about his judgement and character. He was also given a regular column in The Spectator, and in April 1998 made his first appearance on the BBC’s Have I Got News For You. Although he had a reputation for carelessness and late submission of copy, his profile was sufficient for Black to make him editor of The Spectator, though some felt the force of the observation that it was like “entrusting a Ming vase to the hands of an ape”.

Johnson has always been impossible to classify in ideological terms, perhaps because he cleaves to no consistent philosophy except cast-iron self-interest. In 2003, he explained to Vincent Graff of The Independent on Sunday that his approach would “be roughly speaking in favour of getting rid of Saddam, sticking up for Israel, free-market economics, expanding choice”. He added:

The Spectator is not necessarily a Thatcherite Conservative or a neo-Conservative magazine, even though in our editorial coverage we tend to follow roughly the conclusions of those lines of arguments.

There were important qualifications to that stance, however. Johnson stressed that the magazine had always believed that “reasonable people, good people, are perfectly capable of holding conflicting opinions about very difficult subjects”, and he “allowed good writers to get things off their chest in what comes across in a screamingly left-wing way to some people”. Occasional contributors like Michael White, R.W. Johnson and Leo McKinstry were not obviously of the traditional right; at the same time, Greek commentator Taki Theodoracopulos, author of the “High Life” column since 1977, was frequently provocative and controversial. In January 2003, he wrote an article entitled “Thoughts on Thuggery” which referred to defending Slobodan Milošević, described Enoch Powell’s 1968 “Rivers of Blood” speech as “prophetic as well as true” and casually noted that Iraqi-born socialite Rena Sindi “loves publicity about as much as I love the Wehrmacht”. The main thrust of the column was this:

Britain is being mugged by black hoodlums, people are being cut down in the streets a la Mogadishu in the early Nineties… only a moron would not surmise that what politically correct newspapers refer to as ‘disaffected young people’ are black thugs, sons of black thugs and grandsons of black thugs, in it for the money.

Peter Herbert, vice-chair of the Metropolitan Police Authority and president of the Society of Black Lawyers, raised the tone of the article at the MPA’s next meeting and subsequently received racist emails and death threats, mostly from the United States. As a result, Johnson as editor was investigated by Scotland Yard to determine whether the column had incited racial hatred, though he said publicly that it was “a terrible thing” which “should never have gone in”. In the end there was no prosecution, though Taki would continue to cause anxiety to editors until his column was discontinued last year.

Johnson’s editorship saw The Spectator go from making a loss to profitability, and circulation rose to 60,000. There was no doubt it was in robust health, if frequently making headlines for journalistic and non-journalistic reasons: it was dubbed the “Sextator” because of the many sexual liaisons involving members of staff, including Johnson himself. His promise to disavow political ambitions had of course been broken early on. In 2000, he had been selected as Conservative parliamentary candidate for Henley in succession to the retiring Michael Heseltine, and he became a Member of Parliament in June 2001, then vice-chairman of the Conservative Party in November 2003. Michael Howard promoted him to shadow arts minister in May 2004 but sacked him later that year after it transpired Johnson had lied to him about an affair with Spectator colleague Petronella Wyatt.

When David Cameron, Johnson’s Eton and Oxford contemporary, became leader of the opposition at the end of 2005, he invited him to serve as shadow higher education minister. Johnson decided to leave The Spectator and dedicate himself to his political career full-time (his attendance and industry had been criticised in his first years as an MP). His public life was still largely ahead of him, of course: he was mayor of London from 2008 to 2016 and foreign secretary from 2016 to 2018 before achieving his ultimate goal and becoming prime minister in 2019 after the resignation of Theresa May.

And now…

Michael Gove comes to The Spectator after a long career in cabinet rather than in anticipation of one. He turned 57 last month, having stepped down from the House of Commons (although his old seat of Surrey Heath was snatched by the Liberal Democrats), and has given no indication that he regards front-line politics as unfinished business. He is in a different category from Gilmour, Lawson, Johnson and, to a degree, Macleod, therefore, in that this is not a stepping stone to advancement. (It is also worth remembering that when Labour left office in 1970, Richard Crossman, who had been social services secretary, quit Harold Wilson’s front bench to become editor of The New Statesman.) In truth, journalism and politics have never enjoyed a very clear boundary. Perhaps they shouldn’t, or perhaps they can’t. Nihil sub sole novum, as St Jerome’s rendering of the Book of Ecclesiastes had it.