The columnist's art and me: charting history and fostering public debate

As legendary Washington Post columnist George F. Will marks 50 years of opinion for the paper, I try on the columnist's identity and explore its nature

And what do you do?

I am struck by a strange uncertainty when anyone asks what I do. In my days in Parliament, the obvious answer, “I’m a clerk in the House of Commons”, was less helpful than it might have been, as almost no-one knows what clerks do anyway (I intend to write something about that soon) and it let to a conversation of unlooked-for intricacy about official (that is, non-partisan) and political staff and the distinction between Parliament and government. It was all a bit Bagehotian for a casual inquiry at parties, but at least I had an official title.

Moving into the private sector made the issue less clear in some ways, though easier to deflect in others. “I work for a PR company” was for a while broadly true, if in a shallow sense, and in that case, if pressed, I could explain that I was a writer, responsible for all the copy that came out of the office. It still felt both evasive and insubstantial, though, compared to friends and contemporaries who had straightforward professions like lawyer, doctor, teacher, even banker or wealth manager, or, in more than one case, clergyman. (I don’t know how many clerics the average person knows these days: for me, a couple of Benedictine monks, a Dame of the Order of Malta and an Anglican priest, with one or two friends who know far more.)

Being a writer

At the beginning of 2021, I decided that enough was enough. Given that I was by that stage, as I am now, being paid to perform the task, I decided to screw my courage to the sticking place and say, if asked, that I was a writer. I wrote—well, what else would I do?—an essay on LinkedIn which explained my reluctance, something of my journey to grabbing that status at last, and why I had felt finally able to pin the label to myself.

Inevitably, that has not solved the “What do you do?” problem. If you answer confidently, “I’m a writer”, you can hardly be surprised that your interlocutor wants to know more. After all, it is a broad category. Now, although I write for newspapers and magazines, I am not a journalist, or at least I don’t classify myself as one. As I explained a couple of years ago in another essay, I think journalism is something different, certainly in no way inferior to what I do but requiring very different skills. I said that I defined a journalist as “principally the discoverer, collator and presenter of facts”, and prayed in aid the definition used by City University, which provides some of the most respected training for journalists:

As a journalist you will work with stories. It will be your job to find stories, package them in a certain format and communicate them to an audience through a variety of media. These may include television, radio, print or online.

That’s not what I do. I didn’t train to do it, it doesn’t necessarily play to my strengths and there are parts of it I would not enjoy (even if there are other parts I could do and might enjoy).

The difficulty is that (and I don’t think this is just my own paranoiac interpretation) when you tell people you’re a writer, they start with the idea of someone who writes books (or conceivably plays or screenplays) and must then be talked down. Maybe not down, but away from their instinctive reaction. If you don’t want to say you’re a journalist, as I don’t, then you have to explain with some kind of exactness what you do, I say I write about politics—because mostly I do, or at least most of my paid work is about politics—and may throw in “column”, “opinion piece” or even “op-ed” to try to give a sense of my occupation. It usually provides enough information to satisfy casual inquiries, and I try to refrain from explaining the origin of the term “op-ed”, and the misconception that “op” relates somehow to “opinion” (read my essay on why I’m not a journalist if you’re curious).

In some ways, I suppose I am, principally but not exclusively, a columnist. After all, what I write are columns, or opinion pieces, or articles, but “columnist” is a standard word, relatively widely understood. It has about a century of provenance to it; the Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest citation in 1920 in Blackwood’s Magazine, a publication which in its day (it ceased publication in 1980) boasted some of the best literary talent going: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, James Hogg, Thomas de Quincey, George Eliot, Joseph Conrad, John Buchan. (For a time it boasted on its cover a portrait of the 16th century Scottish theologian and scholar George Buchanan, for whom I have an illogical and visceral hatred, but there we are.)

Perhaps as a free lance I shy away from the regularity implied by “columnist”, though I shouldn’t: I write a weekly column on politics, widely defined, for City A.M. and have done for more than four years, this week hitting the total of 308 pieces for the paper since July 2019. I am, I suppose, a political columnist, even if it’s not everything I do, and it’s certainly nothing to be ashamed of. There are some formidable people out there performing that role, people with judgement, insight, wit, style and considerable craft with words whom I respect and admire, by no means all sharing my political leanings: Simon Heffer, Matthew Parris, Isabel Hardman, Alex Massie, Bruce Anderson, Fraser Nelson, Madeline Grant, Hugo Rifkind, Marina Hyde, Stephen Bush, Ben Sixsmith, Robert Hutton, Gillian Tett, Robert Colvile, David Ignatius, Jonah Goldberg, Thomas Friedman, as well as some beyond the confines of politics like Hannah Betts, Kara Kennedy Clairmont, Helen Lewis, Hadley Freeman, Janice Turner, Christopher Howse, Ben McIntyre… you get the picture.

The columnist as a species

Two things collided, as they often do, in my head to make me think about this more carefully and in more depth. The first was the calculation, in response to a casual inquiry from a friend, that this calendar year I have written 272 pieces of paid journalism (all here at my Authory page as ever, as you know). As we are on day 333 of the year of Our Lord 2024, I think that’s a fairly high operational tempo, as the Ministry of Defence would say, spread across 10 separate publications, and not counting what I write for CulturAll or my essays here on Substack. It is also combined with, and in many ways underpins and fuels, the occasional outing on broadcast media, which this year has included, off the top of my head, Times Radio, TalkTV, Sky News and LBC. As I say, it’s not everything I do, officially and unofficially, but it is a substantial part of my activity, which became clear once I quantified it.

The second item was the marking of 50 years as a columnist for The Washington Post of one of my favourite writers on politics, the great George F. Will. Not being American I have come to Will’s work relatively late and have not grown up with him as part of the fixtures and fittings, as many in the United States will have done, but I quickly fell for his careful, erudite, perceptive but never laboured or over-earnest observations which are always (for me) a joy to read. David Von Drehle wrote a very fond and perceptive appreciation of Will, whom he describes as “the Iron Man of America’s op-ed pages”.

At the end of last month, Will focused on the business of being a columnist, and wrote the best advertisement for the occupation I have read. It is no exaggeration to say it has had a considerable effect on my conception of the job—perhaps “role” is better?—and has given me real encouragement.

Will is not in business of mollycoddling or maintaining convenient and comforting illusions. “Most people do not read newspapers; most who do skip the op-ed page,” he observes. This does, however, have the advantage of self-selection. A writer can reasonably assume that the reader comes to his column with some context, some frame of reference, some grounding in the broad area. As a result, “the columnist can assume the readers’ foundation of knowledge, which enables large arguments in small spaces”.

This is a balance I wrestle with and sometimes entrust to editors, I must confess. The reader will probably know that, say, Stanley Baldwin was a Conservative Prime Minister of the 1920s and 1930s (three times, no less! and at the head of the largest single-party majority in British history from 1924 to 1929, 209 over a still-juvenile Labour Party and a waning Liberal Party, reunited after the Asquith/Lloyd George schism but without an overriding purpose in British politics). They will probably know that the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 ended Ireland’s war of independence and paved the way for the establishment in December 1922 of the Irish Free State, which would become (the Republic of) Ireland. But what is the less intrusive error, explaining to those who already know, or leaving those who don’t adrift, even if the main argument doesn’t depend on it? I address that question every time I start writing.

The role of the column and the columnist

Will rightly points out that reading an op-ed column, or anything, is an positive activity, by which I mean that you engage in it actively, rather than letting it wash over you, and, if it is any good or is to have any effect, requires the reader to think. At the very least, your reader must, at the end of the 700 or so words, consider the question: do I agree or disagree with that? I can’t speak for other writers, but I never write assuming readers will agree, or even particularly hoping that they will, though it is always pleasing and complimentary when they do. My primary task, as I see it, is to explain my position on a subject and present it in the most coherent and persuasive way, so that the reader will at least be satisfied that I have thought about it and come to my conclusion after consideration and reflection, rather than as an instinct. That modicum of respectful acknowledgement is sufficient reward.

Our hero adds another consideration: to inform. “A columnist’s opinions will lack momentum for respect unless they are accompanied by platoons of facts that give readers the delight of discovery: ‘I didn’t know that.’” On that score, I am relatively confident: perhaps a legacy of my mother, I have an impossibly didactic streak and a memory retentive of facts and anecdotes, and those which please me, I tend to want to share. Anyone who reads my essays here with any regularity will know that I sometimes allow myself, as I cannot in commercial writing, to set off down a side road which I think is interesting and informative. I take the view that the reader can always skip ahead and leave it for those whom it interests, an option denied if I omit the diversion.

Ultimately, and I think he is right here, Will sees columnists as part of an ongoing public debate. With a weight with which the American press tends to invest its work while in Britain we do so much less, he concludes:

In the unending American dialectic between legislatures and courts—between majorities and restraints thereon—the perennial subjects of Western political argument are constantly contested: the concepts of freedom, equality, consent, representation and justice. Americans are permanently enrolled in this seminar.

Columnists are also enrolled, happily, willingly, eagerly. I would not say we are the tutors, because that suggests too much authority, but we are there to offer opinion, helpful information, guidance if it is wanted. And, despite what I said a few paragraphs ago, yes, we are there to some extent to persuade and convert. We should be cautious: it is an occupational hazard but also a fallacy to think that if only a position could be explained in the right way, phrased and framed properly, then it would be accepted universally. (That is one aspect, in a way, of what I call the centrist fallacy, an ongoing source of bitter hatred in my heart and soul.)

There is also a strange emotion, which I see often but noticed yesterday in Lionel Shriver talking about Covid-19 on Spectator TV, that of feeling disappointed that others do not agree with you. That is to me baffling and not a little presumptuous, because the disappointment must, surely, stem from an unfulfilled expectation, and that expectation of agreement is a peculiar thing for a columnist and dealer in ideas to have. Crudely, your audience will be divided (never equally) into three groups: those who are already in agreement with you and read for confirmation, for additional ammunition or for the pleasure of your writing and your company; those who are uncertain and are trying to come to a conclusion by testing various stances; and those who are unshakeably of a different opinion and unpersuadable. Small numbers can peel off from those groups but they are the basis of a readership.

The occasional value of transience

There is one last consideration, the transient nature of the columnist’s work. As an historian by training and a lover of history, I am instinctively comfortable with broad sweeps and grand vistas, heavy chronicles and towering peaks of evidence. But, as (probably) Alan Barth first said, news is only the first rough draft of history, and commentary on that news annotations to the first draft. There is nothing wrong with that. It may be a rare column which really stands the test of time and can be read as having meaning and significance long afterwards, but what columnists do, as far as historians are concerned, is encapsulate how events were seen at the time and what issues were being debated.

A tiny example, but in the first half of 1914, before the cataclysm of the First World War engulfed Europe and changed the world forever, the most pressing issue in British political circles was not the balance of power in continental Europe, relations between Serbia and Austria-Hungary, nationalism in the Balkans or the growing military and naval threat of the German Empire. It was Ireland. The Third Home Rule Bill, which would eventually become the Government of Ireland Act 1914, had been introduced to the House of Commons in April 1912, and it offered a bicameral Irish Parliament with a Senate and a House of Commons, a corresponding, substantial reduction in the number of MPs elected to Westminster by Ireland and the abolition of the administration at Dublin Castle then run by the Chief Secretary for Ireland (though the position of Lord Lieutenant would be retained).

The bill was passed by the House of Commons later in 1912 but rejected by the House of Lords in January 1913. It was reintroduced later that year, with the same result, agreed by the Commons and defeated in the Lords. In May 1914, just months before the First World War would erupt, the Commons gave the bill a Third Reading by a majority of 77, and when the Lords yet again voted it down, the Prime Minister, H.H. Asquith, prepared to use the provisions of the relatively new Parliament Act 1911 by which the bill could now bypass the Lords and be sent directly to the King for Royal Assent. In June, however, in parallel with this, the government introduced the Government of Ireland (Amendment) Bill [Lords] in the upper house, which would temporarily exclude Ulster from Home Rule. But it was not settled what that meant, whether “Ulster” was four, six or nine counties, and for how long the exclusion would last. The amending bill was abandoned at the outbreak of war.

I dwell on this at some length because it was dealing with issues of the greatest important, the constitutional structure of the United Kingdom. It was not in itself existential, though many feared—and they were surely right—that Home Rule for most or all of Ireland would be another step towards independence. It highlighted the ongoing tension between the Lords and the Commons, despite the former having its powers curtailed by the Parliament Act, and the tone and tenor of debate showed how polarised, emotionally stark and potentially violent feelings had become.

In March 1914, the British Army in Ireland, based at the Curragh Camp in County Kildare, had all but mutinied: 61 officers, most prominently Brigadier General Hubert Gough, made it clear that they would resign their commissions or be dismissed rather than participate in any action against the paramilitary Ulster Volunteers, formed in 1912 to oppose Home Rule. Extraordinarily, they were given an undertaking no such orders would be given, and that prompted the resignations of the Secretary of State for War, Jack Seely, and the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Field Marshal Sir John French. On the eve of the most expansive and intense war the world had ever seen, the British Army had all but mutinied over a political stance.

Yet it is easy for historians to miss this, because they always run the risk of seeing sequences of events as inevitable. Since the First World War broke out in July and August 1914 (it might easily have not), everything that happened before must have been building to that crescendo. The role I think the columnist plays, that of taking a snapshot, of being in the dust of the area, would reveal a different story of politics in early 1914.

Sometimes you hit a nerve

It is possible to write a piece which, even in only 700 or 800 words, captures an issue or idea so profound that it stands the test of time. By this I don’t mean that it was important or influential in its context and is therefore memorable, like, perhaps Boris Johnson’s endorsement of Brexit in The Daily Telegraph in March 2016 (one of a pair of articles he drafted, endorsing each side of the argument, being himself uncertain).

In British journalism, George Orwell’s October 1945 Tribune article “You and the Atom Bomb” set important (and early) context for debates about nuclear weapons, marking perhaps the first use of the phrase “cold war” and warning that the atomic bomb was “likelier to put an end to large-scale wars at the cost of prolonging indefinitely a ‘peace that is no peace’.” Iain Macleod, early in his brief stint as editor of The Spectator, turned a review of Randolph Churchill’s The Fight for the Tory Leadership, itself barely more than an extended opinion piece, into a column manqué, “The Tory Leadership”; in it he savaged the Conservative Party’s nebulous process of allowing a leader to “emerge”, mocking it as the “Magic Circle”, which had a long-term effect on the party’s selection of leaders and indeed the party’s image. More surprisingly, William (later Lord) Rees-Mogg used a leader in The Times in July 1967, “Who breaks a butterfly on a wheel?”, to argue that Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, arrested during a police raid on Redlands, Richards’s country home in West Sussex, and charged with illegal possession of drugs and other offences, were being treated more severely because of their celebrity status. Admirably but at variance with his image as an unbending conservative, Rees-Mogg wrote:

If we are going to make any case a symbol of the conflict between the sound traditional values of Britain and the new hedonism, then we must be sure that the sound traditional values include those of tolerance and equity. It should be the particular quality of British justice to ensure that Mr Jagger is treated exactly the same as anyone else, no better and no worse. There must remain a suspicion in this ease that Mr Jagger received a more severe sentence than would have been thought proper for any purely anonymous young man.

That the argument came from Rees-Mogg, recently appointed editor of The Times and a former Conservative parliamentary candidate, gave it potency and currency beyond similar opinions voiced by “the usual suspects” at the progressive end of the spectrum. So it became more than an editorial concerning Jagger, Richards and a drug raid, instead seeking to redefine the relationship between the traditional Establishment and the rising popularity of young, talented and suddenly very rich stars.

American journalism strives more consciously for the enduring and portentous. Sometimes, undoubtedly, it achieves its aim: think of Molly Ivins’s “A Short Story about the Vietnam War Memorial” which appeared in The Dallas Herald Tribune in November 1982. It summed up a notion of the conflict in Vietnam, which at that point was not quite eight years in the past, as not only futile but lacking in glory. Of a dead soldier, she wrote “He did not sacrifice his life for his country or for a just or noble cause. There just were no good choices in those years and he got killed.”

Eugene Robinson, writing for The Washington Post, used the election of Barack Obama as President of the United States in November 2008 to speak more broadly about the state of the nation. In “Morning in America”, he wrote of the deep symbolism of the result for Black Americans, of the impact it had even on major figures like Jesse Jackson and John Lewis, veterans of the civil rights movement. Robinson was both lyrical and realistic: “I can’t help but experience Obama’s election as a gesture of recognition and acceptance—which is patently absurd, if you think about it,” he said. When he had recited the Pledge of Allegiance or sung the national anthem before that point, he had not been insincere, but Obama’s election had made them more significant. “Now there’s more meaning in my expressions of patriotism, because there’s more meaning in the stirring ideals that the pledge and the anthem and the fireworks represent.”

Public discourse has a definite place for columnists

Activities should never be elevated beyond their true nature. If they are important, it is unnecessary and demeaning, and if they are trivial or disreputable, the gilding only serves to make that more obvious. So I won’t say that the political columnist is a “first-hand witness to history” or a “barometer of the nation’s feelings”. Equally, quality matters: a good columnist plays an invaluable role while a mediocre or bad one does not, or at least plays a much lesser role. There is a role, however, and it is not a lowly or marginal one.

If you can write well and engagingly, if you know a great deal about politics, if you can analyse and crystallise issues and events for an interested but (in relative terms) lay audience, and if you have good judgement and can sometimes sniff the wind in an unscientific but ultimately accurate way, you have a valuable set of skills which can benefit our public discourse. You may not achieve the immortality of an H.A.L. Fisher, an A.J.P. Taylor, a David Reynolds or a Robert Dallek, but you will be in the arena; perhaps not a combatant (or at least not always), but helping to define the context of the combat and inform it. If you can persuade people to pay you to do it, that’s another step forward. Do your best, give it the old college try and sometimes you may have an influence greater than you expected. If it is an inherently ephemeral role, and if what you produce is ephemeral, that is merely a function of its nature. Columnists matter, even if we can’t all aspire to George Will’s half-century and counting.