When Spectator Sport Was the Best Game in Town

The 15 years when I was the chief proprietor of the Spectator were a never-ending cavalcade of amusing interactions between the many memorable personalities associated with that magazine. The experience was made more pleasant by the extraordinary economic success that we had with it. We acquired the Spectator from the Fairfax company in Australia, (four years before we acquired control of the Fairfax newspapers themselves), and were immediately able to consolidate much of the costs of the Spectator into the routine expenses of the Telegraph Group.The minimal administration cost was easily absorbed at the Telegraph and the cost of typesetting, printing, and the glossy stock paper was consolidated into existing costs for our Saturday and Sunday inserted Telegraph magazines, where we were naturally able to command a high discount. Because of the outstanding performance of our editors, Charles Moore, Dominic Lawson, and Boris Johnson, and all the talented new contributors they were able to arrange, the Spectator became more prestigious and rewarding a read than ever, and we were able to use the Telegraph to promote its circulation very substantially. But the greatest financial initiative that my associate Dan Colson and I took for the Spectator was to engage a talented upscale American advertising sales executive, Luis Dominguez, as the Spectator’s advertising director. He was the brother-in-law of one of our Telegraph directors, Peter (Lord) Rawlinson, former attorney general and solicitor general of the United Kingdom. Luis organized excellent research on the high education and income levels of Spectator readers and designed a rate card that made the magazine an almost irresistible bargain for all the quality businesses along Bond Street and Savile Row. Our advertising revenues skyrocketed, which permitted us to print a somewhat larger magazine. Charles Moore introduced the cartoons, which though a bit obscure at first, soon became a much-valued editorial asset. A benign cycle ensued and where the former proprietor, Henry Keswick, also a Telegraph director, remarked that his experience was that the Spectator “broke even before expenses,” it quickly became and grew steadily as a profit center.Given the personalities of the principal editorial personnel and others associated with the magazine, there was no end of disagreements and controversies, many of them very amusing. One afternoon, the publisher, Kimberly Fortier, a capable youngish American woman, telephoned and asked if the deputy editor, the delightful Petronella Wyatt, would be attending the Spectator quarterly dinner the following evening. I referred her to the person in her own office who received the RSVPs for that occasion and asked the reason for her curiosity. “I will not sit at the same table as that scarlet woman,” she explained, objecting to an alleged romantic relationship between Petronella and Boris. (Petronella‘s mother had helpfully informed the Daily Mail that Petronella had had an abortion with Boris, who was married at the time to one of Britain’s prominent lawyers.)I said I knew nothing about it and that the private lives of employees were no concern of mine as long as there were no serious illegalities or outrages against public decency. A few days later it came spectacularly to light that Kimberly herself, ostensibly happily married, was in a torrid relationship with my friend the Home Secretary David Blunkett, who was blind and accompanied at all times by a service dog. The Spectator’s circulation surged to a new high.Owen Paterson, Dominic Lawson, and Conrad Black at a Spectator summer party on July 3 2014. Wikimedia CommonsOne of our most talented and valuable writers, Mark Steyn, was so popular that we published him almost simultaneously in our other publications on different continents including several Canadian and Australian newspapers, the Chicago Sun-Times, and even the Jerusalem Post. Mark was and remains a writer of extraordinary virtuosity. Approximately every third week I would get a call from one or more of these far-flung centers explaining that Mark was not filing and refused to resolve his complaints with anyone except Dan Colson or myself. Mark was not always easy to reach as he seemed to spend much of his time in a comfortable mobile home moving between New Hampshire and Québec and calls were generally referred to one of his two assistants, (of whom only one actually existed). When we did catch up with him, his complaint was invariably a tiny grievance about a change of punctuation or a disagreement on the American or British spelling of a word in his Spectator piece, which caused a serious problem in the other publications, even though the copy he had filed there was different. In order to sort it all out I had to produce a conciliatory response from the Spectator editor. I occasionally became embroiled in minor controversies in the Spectator myself. The first was when we had just taken control and Christopher Hitchens wrote a column demanding that President Reagan not humiliate the Western world by having a meeting with the new Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in Switzerland at which, Hitchens opined, Reagan, because of his recent cancer surgery would have to repair to the lavatory every twenty minutes. This was an outrageous, unfounded, and tasteless observation and I wrote a letter to the editor criticizing it. This inaugurated a long series of public acerbities between us on a variety of subjects culminating in my review of his book accusing Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger of organizing the assassination of Chilean President Allende in 1973. I pointed out that since the book had adduced and claimed no evidence whatsoever of the charge, it was a novel concept to conclude from this as Hitchens did, that the absence of any evidence merely proved the fiendish cunning of the culprits, rather than the normal deduction that an absence of evidence might suggest a lack of guilt. This was something of a turning point and thereafter, until his brave and premature death from cancer, our exchanges, though amusingly abrasive, verged on cordiality. On one celebrated occasion my friend Taki, the “High Life” writer, announced to his Spectator readers that the armed forces of the United States were in fact under the command of the Israeli security agency Mossad. I telephoned Boris on his cell phone on a Saturday evening in winter to tell him that we simply couldn’t publish such rubbish and he advised me that he was at the top of the most dangerous piste in Gstaad, “staring into the face of death.” We agreed, before he pushed off down-hill that I would write a rebuttal and given the anti-Semitic nature of Taki’s remarks, I unoriginally titled my response “J’accuse!”Taki was also in Switzerland and misunderstood my article to mean that he had been fired as a columnist which was never my intention, and he consulted his Swiss neighbor, Bill (William F.) Buckley, who was a member of our advisory board and also a good friend, and he undertook mediation. A good deal of amusing comment was bandied back-and-forth in subsequent weeks, some of it in the magazine.There was never a dull moment at the Spectator and it was one of most agreeable ways of racking up a handsome continuous profit that I’ve ever experienced. The magazine is now bearing down like a heat-seeking missile and will celebrate its 200th anniversary in 2028. I wish good fortune to all who are associated with it.Conrad Black will speak at the Spectator’s Nixon Revival event on September 30.

When Spectator Sport Was the Best Game in Town

When Spectator Sport Was the Best Game in Town

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