If there were any ambitious journalists on the right who still thought that the best route to the top runs through the newsroom, it may be time for them to start looking for a safe seat. Consider the evidence. George Osborne’s stint at the Evening Standard didn’t do much for the editorial reputation of former ministers; the Conservatives have since been comprehensively told where to go by the electorate. It doesn’t matter. Whether as columnists or podcasters, radio hosts or GB News fulminators, Tory grandees who believe that the public just wants to hear more from them continue to blight the media.
The latest is Michael Gove, who has been appointed editor of the Spectator by the magazine’s new owner, the GB News and UnHerd boss, Paul Marshall. Gove will take over on 8 October, just in time to direct the Spectator’s coverage of the business end of the Conservative leadership contest, and perhaps to endorse whichever of the final four candidates – Robert Jenrick, Kemi Badenoch, James Cleverly and Tom Tugendhat – he favours when they set out their stalls at party conference next week.
News of Marshall’s purchase comes at a difficult time for the Conservatives’ ailing realist faction, who already resemble compass salesmen at a meeting of the Flat Earth Society. In fairness, though, editing a magazine of Tory ideas isn’t very much like editing a daily London newspaper, and Gove looks a more serious appointment than Osborne ever did: as Fraser Nelson, Gove’s departing predecessor, pointed out in a letter to readers, he’s a “journalist who took a detour into politics and not (as so often happens) the other way around”. Meanwhile, Gove seems too invested in his image as a free-thinking renegade to allow himself to be a total patsy.
While he has been cast as Badenoch’s mentor in the past, and endorsed her in the early stages of the 2022 contest, he is surely too canny an operator to adopt the kind of slavish coverage that would allow him to be presented as her surrogate. Where Osborne responded to a message from Matt Hancock “calling in a favour” for an upbeat front page on Covid tests by saying, “I’ll tell the team to splash it,” Gove’s cover stories are likely to piss off as many frontbenchers as they please.
If he is allowed to edit as he sees fit, that is. It is perhaps too early to conclude that Marshall dropped £100m on the leading magazine of the right merely to impose his own worldview, and the Spectator – for all its history of publishing writers hailing from considerably beyond the pale – is still a publication with space for views from the more moderate right. Its journalists, who are intensely loyal to Nelson, nonetheless say they are reassured by the appointment of the magazine’s former editor Charles Moore as chairman with a remit to protect editorial independence. And Tim Montgomerie, the founding editor of UnHerd, has said that Marshall has never interfered with the editorial direction.
On the other hand, £100m is a lot for a magazine that had profits of £2.6m in 2022: however optimistic Marshall is about mooted expansions in the US and Australia, if he just wanted to make money, he would have stuck to his hedge fund. His pursuit of the Telegraph suggests that he wants to be the dominant owner on the right of the British media – and he surely has designs on being something more than a compere. If Marshall’s purported approval on social media of calls for the mass expulsion of migrants and descriptions of Muslim immigration as “Islamic conquest” are any guide, Gove’s editorship may not be the high-minded examination of the Tories’ best route back to power that he probably hopes it will be.
That is all the more significant because of the shape of the rest of the rightwing media, with the Spectator standing alongside ConservativeHome and Substackers such as John Oxley as one of the few places you can still find the party challenged from within its own ranks. The most popular Tory publications, the ones read by most of the members, appear to have very little incentive to set out a serious path to victory.
A survey of how past leadership contests have unfolded in the wider rightwing press suggests how much has changed. Once upon a time, it was a pretty broad church: the Daily Mail endorsed Kenneth Clarke against Iain Duncan Smith in 2001, asking its readers if it was “better to belong to a small rightwing faction that is characterised by the purity of its opposition to Europe but faces years in the wilderness?”. So did the Spectator, under the editorship of one Boris Johnson.
Duncan Smith nonetheless drew support from the Telegraph and others to win the leadership. But after his defenestration and then the party’s defeat under Michael Howard in 2005, the Tories’ media supporters collectively decided that they had seen enough of their navel. The Telegraph, the Mail, the Sun, the Times and the Spectator – Johnson again, with an eye on returning to the frontbench – all backed David Cameron over David Davis, accepting him, in the words of the Telegraph’s leader column, as a “natural winner”.
If both those cases suggest an appetite for challenging the instinct to prioritise ideological comfort over electability, the Liz Truss-Rishi Sunak contest of two years ago did not go that way. With the honourable exception of the Times, just about the only paper to have stood still as the party veered ever rightwards, every newspaper that backed the Tories in 2019 endorsed Truss. The Telegraph said she “looked and sounded competent and proficient”, while the Mail thought she had “boldness, imagination and strength of conviction”. These pieces are very funny to read now, but they looked plainly wrong even at the time – to Nelson’s Spectator, for example, which warned Truss: “To attempt reform without a proper plan is to guarantee failure.”
Nor have the Mail and the Telegraph, or their sister Sunday papers, made any accommodation with reality since the election. You don’t need a political science degree to understand why not. The Brexit vote and subsequent Tory meltdown have deprived the right of its most effective betrayal myths, forcing the creation of still more implausible narratives of disfranchisement: Reform doesn’t get enough airtime, Truss and Johnson were unfairly treated, and the “blob” is all leftwing anyway.
Meanwhile, one-nation Conservatives are either dying or leaving the party. With the parallel decline in paying readership making competition more ferocious than ever, strategies for commercial survival and for bringing the Tories back to power will often pull an editor in different directions. When they come into conflict, the former will always prevail.
The irony is that the success Marshall has bought into at the Spectator has been built on resisting these tendencies – and the best insulation against any change in approach before the new leader is chosen may be just how jarring it would be. Gove’s own heavyweight status also affords some protection. But over time, it seems inconceivable that his boss won’t have some thoughts on the best way forward. As Tim Montgomerie also said, of Marshall’s attempt to buy the Telegraph: “He wants to shape the wider culture, so he is investing because of a political agenda.”
That may not mean a column for Lee Anderson. But if anyone is expecting someone like Gove to fend off the forces of populism on his own, it might be time for them to think again. A compass that points true north isn’t much use, after all, if your fellow travellers think it leads off the edge of the world.