Posted on 04/23/2004 7:49:36 PM PDT by GeronL
By Denis Boyles
A friend of mine has had the misfortune of being hired to run a fairly well-known glossy magazine in London, one that competes for readers with a handful of other magazines, all exactly alike. We know. We looked at a pile of them. They're all identical. Having found a formula that delivers success on the newsstand, the only circulation battlefield that counts in the U.K., they each replicate themselves month after month after month
Until very recently, that problem didn't really exist among British political magazines. The New Statesman leaned toward Labour and generally sold that line of goods to its sympathetic readers. The Spectator meanwhile batted right. There were and are others, but those two were the opposite poles of the political magazine world, or at least the British corner of it.
Of the two, I always felt The Spectator was generally more eccentric and less pompous, a fact even a casual reader could spot the moment he came across the small jewel of a column called "Low Life," written until his death in 1997 by Jeffrey Bernard. There's a different low-life writer doing the gig now, but he doesn't really know low: First of all, he works out, and second, he's apparently sober enough to drive a car. That leaves him very far from the stature of a Jeffrey Bernard, who took low to mean prone and was sometimes rendered so incapacitated by drink that he was unable to type his column. When that happened, The Spectator would simply print a small notice in the place where his column normally appeared. It read, "Jeffrey Bernard is unwell."
But now the entire magazine has gone face-to-turf, drunk on political correctness and affected pacifism. These days, The Spectator is unwell.
I'm a fan of the mag, so I should have seen it coming. In fact, I did. It was the night the Hutton Report, damning the BBC and exonerating Blair, was released. There, outside Westminster, was Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson (formerly of the Daily Telegraph, famous TV pundit, Conservative MP for Henley, and, since 1999, editor of The Spectator), insisting to a plainly skeptical reporter that no matter what Hutton said, the reverse was true: Blair was the one who had lied and Andrew Gilligan (a BBC reporter, formerly of the Daily Telegraph, and, since earlier this year, defense and diplomatic editor of The Spectator), was right when he said Blair had manipulated intelligence reports in order to support his argument for going to war in Iraq alongside America.
Like so many from the left and the right who despise Blair for one thing or another, the suicide of David Kelly and Blair's assumed contribution to it was supposed to be the big, black block upon which the cheap and chippy chopper wielded by Lord Hutton would deliver a short, sharp shock to Britain's prime minister — at which point the red flag of the Left or the blue ribbon of the Right, depending, would once again ascend. It did not happen, of course. What Hutton found was as obvious as Dick Van Dyke's ottoman: Blair was right; the BBC and Gilligan were wrong.
For The Spectator, that just couldn't be true. Boris Johnson and his colleagues at the magazine, joined by Gilligan, have filled the long, painful months that have passed since Hutton delivered his rather straightforward report with an obsessive, desperate, and now embarrassing effort to prove, somehow, some way, that, as one Spectatorcover story claimed, Hutton got it all backward, that Blair must have lied, and that in any case the war in Iraq is an evil lunatic's adventure.
It's a point of view that has been repeated lately with numbing predictability in The Spectator. In recent weeks, the magazine's writers have excoriated the Coalition as "international vigilantes" and ridiculed Blair for warning about the dangers of terrorism (the item appeared within hours of the bombings in Madrid, alas). The magazine claimed that "the war on Iraq has done nothing to damage Islamic terrorism: quite the reverse" and then proclaimed in an editorial titled "We Are Not at War" that terrorism would never be defeated anyway.
This shrill little crescendo peaked in last week's big peacenik issue, featuring a piece by Rod Liddle headlined "Things Were Better Under Saddam," a concept that not even Mrs. Saddam would buy. "As a result of our actions," Liddle claimed, "many more people have lost their lives (or, for that matter, been maimed or made homeless) than would have been occasioned by another ten years of Saddam's rule." Liddle had no source for that clever stat, but it doesn't matter. He just types it; The Spectator just prints it. And if Liddle sounds a little off-center, he is: He was replaced as editor of Radio 4's "Today" program after the BBC claimed he was unable to "square with the BBC's obligation to be impartial and to be seen to be impartial" — and at the BBC, the bar for that particular standard is set someplace below sea level and protected by dykes.
Meanwhile, in the same issue, Sam Kiley complained from Iraq about the annoying "Hogs of War," as he called the four private security guards who were murdered and mutilated in Fallujah while escorting a food convoy. They had no business being there, wrote Kiley, who apparently did.
The week's cover story: "The Sound of Rockets in the Morning," by Andrew Gilligan. The defense and diplomatic correspondent argued that in Iraq, a disaster's right around the corner because the U.S. is inept. Baghdad's tense — on edge — he wrote. At an airline office, where he went to secure a seat home again, "The scene...is like Saigon, say, two weeks before the fall: not quite open panic just yet, but not far off it." You can be sure that Gilligan's reporting from Saigon back in '75 was lots better than his reporting last year from Baghdad, when he missed the arrival of the U.S. Army.
Anyway, by Spectator standards, it was quite a week. For seven days, the magazine got to pretend it was Esquire and the staff all dressed up like Michael Herr and wrote about the rock and roll of war. It was cool.
Then, this week, an apparent hangover: In "The Cynicism of the Defeatists," the magazine gave a little room to William Shawcross who took aim at both Liddle and Gilligan:
| "The more progress, the more violence to stop it. Mario Vargas Llosa has written of 'the various sects and movements bent on provoking the Apocalypse in order to prevent Iraq from soon becoming a free and modern country ...a perspective that rightfully terrifies and drives insane the gangs of murderers and torturers [of Saddam Hussein's rule] along with the fundamentalist commandoes from al-Qa'eda....' |
"Vargas Llosa is right. How sad it is that two senior writers of The Spectator prefer to resort to meretricious, sneering commentary. The 'trahison des clercs' is truly upon us."
Like white on rice. But Shawcross's piece, and an accompanying Mark Steyn item, are too little, much too late, and way beside the point. It isn't that any one of these stories is without interest; in fact, it's been fun to watch The Spectator spend as much money as possible in the waning days of Hollinger ownership by sending busloads of writers to Iraq. And one of the pleasures of reading The Spectator is the obvious fact that favored writers can write whatever they please as long as they also write well. (*snip*)
(Excerpt) Read more at nationalreview.com ...
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