Letter to the editor: Why has The Spectator’s coverage of Ukraine this year been so conventional?

‘Has he gotten back to our box note?’ we asked, sitting around the Cabinet room table, July 2020, the middle of the day on a Thursday. ‘No, sorry. He’s in his office reading The Spectator’ replied the then-Prime Minister’s private secretary. This same month, Rishi Sunak (then Chancellor) appeared on the magazine’s cover alongside a magic money tree, and I found myself (then a No. 10 special advisor) locked in a three-week-long battle with HM’s Treasury to unfreeze clearly needed funding for prison building. Certain newspapers and magazines get dropped off inside No. 10 each morning. Roaming the corridors of 10 Downing Street in 2020, The Spectator was far and away the most prominent on display. Something I can report from a year in the nerve centre of British government: the magazine has an effect on the people who run our country.

The Spectator’s editor, Fraser Nelson, is someone I first met in 2015, when I was just 22 years old. In 2016 (a week after the Brexit referendum), I was one extremely fortunate beneficiary of the magazine’s no-CV internship it runs each year – that would give someone like me, who left school aged 17 to pursue entrepreneurship (and who doesn’t have A-levels – or any background in journalism, for that matter) a shot inside such a prestigious institution. Based on admission ratios, an internship at The Spectator is harder to land than getting into either Harvard or Oxford. Proving myself my first two weeks, I was asked to stay on for three months longer than my term, and working closely with the editor, I learned as much from him that summer as I have from any other mentor figure I have had in my career – and I have been fortunate to have many. Upon leaving the internship, late 2016, I went on to co-found an (entirely bootstrapped) multi-million dollar a year publishing company, aged 24, using much of what I’d learned from Fraser in so doing.

It is not exaggeration to say that I have read almost every published word of Fraser’s the past eight years – and the man writes a lot. Despite him having an inbox with the most unread emails of anyone I have ever met, he has, consistently, been as generous in making time to help me throughout my career as anyone I know. He was kind enough to edit my cover letter for my application to become one of Dominic Cummings’s ‘weirdos and misfits’ (which helped me beat out 35,000+ fellow applicants), and for the application Fraser was a referee on the only CV I have ever written in my life, writing ‘Edward is one of the most influential interns ever taken on via The Spectator’s CV-blind scheme’.

Since meeting Fraser, I’ve seen him, time and again, influence British government thinking in a positive direction. His writing was instrumental in causing George Osborne to back-track on tax credit cuts in 2015. Fraser once wrote a column asking ‘where is Boris?’ (as then Foreign Secretary). The very next day, Mr Johnson came out of hiding and published a 4,000-word column in The Telegraph – as if summoned by a higher power. Fraser writes masterful leading articles weekly, often taking deeply unpopular (and contrarian – though accurate) stances, not fearing to take on basically every developed government in the world. He puts principle above friendship, having no hesitation in challenging friends (and former editors of the magazine) when he thinks they’re wrong. He notably collected and held Boris’s pre-Prime Ministerial writing against him to see off the draconian idea of vaccine passports: ‘He should start by rereading his 2019 manifesto and then some of the old articles he wrote and (as editor of this magazine) commissioned.’

Fraser consistently writes about the need for robust debate in a democracy, and gave a brilliant presentation (that didn’t get nearly enough of an audience for how good it was) on the architectural underpinnings of this in our parliament. His writing contains no shortage of criticism for the husband of his own commissioning editor (which I consider must make for occasional office discomfort). And in December 2021, Fraser was a one-man Opposition writing about the imminent error in judgement the government was about to make in locking down yet again due to the Omicron variant. For those who observed this period closely, it is not exaggeration to say we in the UK who got to spend Christmas 2021 with our loved ones had Fraser near single-handedly to thank for our liberty to do so. He has deservedly been called ‘the king of British political commentary’ by Niall Ferguson – one of his own intellectual heroes.

So, with all this said, why has The Spectator’s coverage of Ukraine this past year been so conventional? Fraser has said of Nigel Lawson (who, amongst all other accomplishments, we should not forget was also editor of the magazine):

‘One of his most profound quotes was what he made about consensus. He would say “Whenever there is a consensus you end up with a dangerous dysfunction in democracy, where nobody is really challenging; nobody is asking the difficult questions. In that environment, this is where the greatest policy mistakes can be created.” He saw this as a kind of demon in democracy. Every time that happens, the public risks being seriously underserved, because there’s going to be a huge mistake. I’ve always taken his point to heart. That where there is a consensus, it’s up to journalists to challenge because politicians aren’t going to. When lockdown came along, and there was a cross-party consensus behind it, I did think it was important that The Spectator should follow the Lawsonian spirit and try to put as many constructive but rigorous critiques forward as we could... As editor, I often think to myself: what would Nigel do?’

Fraser has written that such freedom of (dissident) expression is of particular importance in times of war:

‘The disagreements over Brexit are as nothing compared to the Iraq war where Mark Steyn was urging support for Blair and Bush, while the leading articles were suggesting that Blair was impeached… We like to think our pages contain the very best arguments from all angles.’

This sentiment is even shared by our now Prime Minister. Rishi Sunak (as Prime Minister) wrote for the magazine on the passing of Nigel Lawson:

‘It says much about his belief in the power of argument that Nigel carried on writing for The Spectator when he wished to challenge a consensus, something of which he was instinctively suspicious.’

So, with Ukrainian flags flying high above the Cabinet Office and other central government buildings – no surer symbol of consensus thinking if ever there was one – you would think The Spectator would be the outlet to ask a few questions to probe at government thinking here? The magazine has an unparalleled combination of: being read by the most influential people in government (right up to the Prime Minister), and is historically willing to offer divergent views on the biggest issues of the day: ‘The Spectator has a long record of being isolated, but right… We were the only publication to support Brexit in the 1975 referendum (other than the Morning Star).’ 

In following along, I’ve never taken any of this to be empty rhetoric. The editor of The Spectator has – as I’ve observed him do many times during his tenure – the power to shift UK government policy for the better. To boot, the magazine’s former political editor is now Rishi Sunak’s chief No. 10 political advisor. And thus I would assert: the role of editor of The Spectator is at present of equivalent importance in how our present government is run as those of the ministers the editor writes columns holding to account weekly. The magazine is itself a crow’s nest, and an ultimate back-stop in preventing errant British government decision-making.

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In June 2023, I personally began to worry about Ukraine. A mix of academics and entrepreneurs I admire – some of whom, with great prescience, had long foreseen Russia’s invasion coming – were sounding a very different tune about the military picture than what was being presented in prestige media. Before this summer was even upon us, there was a leak of Pentagon documents noting that many in the US intelligence establishment had grave fears about the fate of Ukraine’s coming summer counteroffensive. It was clear to me then that there was a radical gap between military reality and what was being portrayed by both the British government and our traditional press to garner support for it.

Compelled to look into this, I was struck that what had come to be a generally accepted consensus of the diplomatic chronology following Russia’s invasion was, as far as I could tell, incorrect. I felt a particular poignance here: from my vantage point, this seemed like a generation of men my age being used as chess pieces in a geopolitical proxy war. I was puzzled as to why more was not being written about this, and why no divergent views were being offered outside of Twitter Spaces and Substack.

The military picture today

Time magazine reported in October that the average age of the Ukrainian army is now 43. (Ukraine has quite literally run out of young soldiers.) This profile – by the same writer who a year earlier profiled Zelensky for Time’s ‘person of the year’ cover – now quotes Zelensky’s own aids referring to Zelensky as ‘delusional’. Ukraine is further now sending civilian women to the front line. And the analysts who at the onset of this summer were warning ‘the counteroffensive is surely doomed’ (and have been proven correct) are now saying ‘it is not a stalemate’ – Ukraine is actually at risk of military collapse.

Richard Haass, President Emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, who was pro-counteroffensive in April, has said in the past week: ‘As desirable as it is [to drive Russia entirely out of Ukraine], it’s simply not feasible. Even if we give everything we need and want to give to Ukraine, it still won’t lead to success.’ And a recent Wall Street Journal headline:

Yet, our Prime Minister continues with such thinking:

Mainstream Western coverage has, in almost every outlet this year, been extremely pro-counteroffensive. But many outlets other than The Spectator have allowed at least a sliver of divergence.

• ‘Freddie Sayers debates Ukraine escalation on the BBC’ (23 Feb 2023)

• ‘The Tale the West Tells Itself About Ukraine’, NYT guest essay (16 Jun 2023)

• ‘Ukraine’s Lack of Weaponry and Training Risks Stalemate in Fight With Russia’, WSJ (23 Jul 2023)

• ‘Slow counteroffensive darkens mood in Ukraine’, Washington Post (10 Aug 2023)

• ‘Troop Deaths and Injuries in Ukraine War Near 500,000, U.S. Officials Say’, NYT (18 Aug 2023)

• ‘The Case for Negotiating with Russia’, The New Yorker (29 Aug 2023) – and an extremely good podcast discussion to accompany it

• ‘The Ukraine war is in a new phase. Biden must rethink the US position’, The Guardian (5 Oct 2023)

There has been no shortage of serious people attempting to speak out about this.

• Professor Stephen Kotkin (17 Feb 2023):

‘If you look at the North Korea–South Korea outcome, it’s a terrible outcome. At the same time, it was an outcome that enabled South Korea to flourish under American security guarantees and protection. And, if there were a Ukraine, however much of it – eighty per cent, ninety per cent – which could flourish as a member of the European Union and which could have some type of security guarantee – whether that were full NATO accession, whether that were bilateral with the US, whether it were multilateral to include the US and Poland and Baltic countries and Scandinavian countries, potentially – that would be a victory in the war.’

• Professor John Mearsheimer: Bound to Lose (2 Sep 2023)

• Professor Jeffrey Sachs: The Real History of the War in Ukraine: a Chronology of Events and Case for Diplomacy (17 Jul 2023)

• Elon Musk: ‘It’s going to get worse from here, not better. The flower of Ukrainian youth is dying in trenches.’ (28 Jul 2023)

• And not least: Donald Trump (who, according to The Spectator’s data hub, is probably going to be next US President): ‘Ukraine is being obliterated.’ (12 Apr 2023)

A number of figures arguing this stance have been suppressed from getting their views published. In email correspondence with me, Professor Mearsheimer noted:

‘It’s amazing and disgraceful how the mainstream media refuses to publish pieces that challenge the conventional wisdom. It was nowhere near this bad in the run-up to the Iraq war in 2002–2003, although it was not easy then to challenge the war party. But things have gotten much worse.’

I asked Professor Jeffrey Sachs (who gave testimony at last week’s UN Security Council meeting) if he had experience of editors not being willing to publish his arguments encouraging diplomacy. His reply: 

The Spectator did, admirably, have Professor Mearsheimer on for one segment on SpectatorTV in May 2023. But questions put to him were on a distant possible 2025 Trump presidency, not the then-imminent Ukrainian counteroffensive, which Prof. Mearsheimer had extremely strong (and now proven correct) views on.

British readers would surely have found hearing about the grim military reality unappetising. But The Spectator’s editor has previously noted in interview: ‘We serve up cask-strength opinion, and by and large our readers like it. Even I as editor have one or two pieces each week I’d like to pull because I disagree with it so much.’

The Spectator having a Ukrainian writer chiefly responsible for presenting the reality on the ground has not given ample spectrum of coverage. This is no criticism of Svitlana, whose coverage, from a Ukrainian point of view, has been excellent. But why has a team of such influential editors not commissioned further detached writing?

Two regular writers for The Spectator seem to have quite strong views about Ukraine. Here’s Rod Liddle in The Times, June 2022: ‘Sadly for Ukraine, the West has a surplus of wishful thinking and a shortage of steel’. And Peter Hitchens in January 2023, in a video with the editor of UnHerd entitled ‘The Covid censors are moving on to Ukraine’:

‘It’s none of the government’s business if people disagree with it. Should I ever be in a government that engaged in suppressing or in any way preventing the expression of opinions which opposed what I was doing, I would consider myself a complete traitor to my country. As far as I am concerned, you have to have fair fights and debate about policy – the more important the policy is, the more open it has to be to debate. And I think this has been forgotten.’

Where have Rod and Peter’s voices been on this for the past year? In the outlet in which their views would undoubtedly have had most influence, why have they seemingly not been permitted to voice their concerns? Fraser wrote on the editorship of Alexander Chancellor: ‘He introduced a formula that has defined the magazine ever since: to assemble the best writers and, with a minimum of editorial interference, let them write what they want.’ Have Rod and Peter not wanted to write anything about Ukraine for the magazine? I find this difficult to believe. The government not being robustly challenged here suggests that lessons from Covid (which The Spectator’s editor has been extremely vocal about) – simply from a journalistic-challenge perspective – have not yet been implemented.

Reality revealed

In a piece for the magazine two weeks ago (18 November 2023, ‘Zelensky must be honest about the state of the war’), Svitlana finally noted: ‘Zelensky’s policy of sharing only positive narratives’ and ‘I spent time on both sides of the divide earlier this year, and saw this perception gap for myself’. Svitlana concedes herself to having seen the gap and not reported on it. The military picture Svitlana painted in this piece was bleak for Ukraine. But nothing she said in this piece was new information. The military picture had not suddenly deteriorated. In her own admission: it was simply finally being revealed. This begs the question: why has a magazine that champions ‘challenging consensus’ (and admirably does hold the government to account in all sorts of ways) been disseminating magical thinking for so long? 

I wouldn’t necessarily have expected a Ukrainian-born journalist to have come out about this five months ago. But a magazine that prides itself on having ‘the very best arguments from all angles’ should have balanced its coverage with an opposing view long before now.

Further, the illustration accompanying Svitlana’s article depicts Zelensky alone at a negotiating table, waiting in a city of rubble for a Russian interlocutor.

But Zelensky signed a presidential decree in October 2022 making peace talks with Putin illegal from the Ukrainian side. While Putin has (not at all reported in the West) routinely been asking for talks. Despite the cartoon-villain depictions of Putin we in the West have been subject to for the past two years, the neutral countries of Israel (militarily supported by the US) and Turkey (a NATO ally) do not think Putin has been insincere in saying this. (And Svitlana has noted to Fraser on video: ‘Putin does listen to Erdogan.’) And in late March 2022, there were nearly-agreed plans for security guarantees for Ukraine such that a peace deal struck would not have been reliant on Putin’s goodwill.

‘Victory will come’

In September 2023, The Spectator published an extremely pro-more-arms-to-Ukraine cover piece from Boris. ‘Even if they [Ukraine] can’t do it in the next few weeks – or however much remains of the 2023 fighting season – they can certainly do it next year… All that will change once Ukraine wins… I believe that victory will come.’ It was a majestically written piece – typical of Boris’s writing. But as one reader pointed out: it’s plausible Boris has a rose-tinted outlook here, perhaps tied to his initial (and in many ways heroic) personal support. This appeal for arms was published as a cover story, without any opposing viewpoint.

More recently still (21 October 2023), a column from Professor Timothy Garton Ash noted: ‘What’s the right conclusion from these two worrying trends, one on the battlefront and the other in distant Washington? I think it’s clear: Europe must do more [to arm Ukraine militarily].’ But in 2019, Fraser himself noted:

‘Now and again, we hear reports about the readiness of Europe’s various armies. They’re invariably terrifying. The Dutch admitted recently that half of their army vehicles won’t start. Two months ago, all 53 of the Bundeswehr’s attack helicopters were declared unfit to fly. France does a bit better: at the last count 160 of its 460 military helicopters work... If Turkey were to lead a surprise attack against Europe, rather than the Syrian Kurds, it’s by no means clear what opposition it might meet.’

President Trump (who Professor Garton Ash now refers to as a ‘disaster’) argued vociferously for Europe to increase its own defence spending during his term. 

Do Oxford professors really think industrial production can be conjured from thin air?

*

In The Spectator’s partial defence, in the summer of 2022, it hosted an interview with the late Henry Kissinger by (now) Lord Andrew Roberts. This contained a great deal of unfettered realism, and put the possibility of a negotiated outcome in a notably uplifting light:

‘Quite the contrary. If the war ends as I sketched at Davos [the 2022 status quo ante], I think it will be a substantial achievement for the allies. NATO will have been strengthened by the addition of Finland and Sweden, creating the possibility of defence of the Baltic countries… Russia will have been shown that the fear that has hung over Europe since World War II, of a Russian army descending – the conventional army descending into Europe across established borders – can be prevented by NATO conventional action.’

And Kissinger wrote in the magazine’s Christmas 2022 edition:

‘I have repeatedly expressed my support for the allied military effort to thwart Russia’s aggression in Ukraine. But the time is approaching to build on the strategic changes which have already been accomplished and to integrate them into a new structure towards achieving peace through negotiation… The preferred outcome for some is a Russia rendered impotent by the war. I disagree. For all its propensity to violence, Russia has made decisive contributions to the global equilibrium and to the balance of power for over half a millennium. Its historical role should not be degraded.’

(To give due balance to those arguing a more militaristic view, Dr Kissinger did further write here: ‘A peace process should link Ukraine to NATO, however expressed… The alternative of neutrality is no longer meaningful, especially after Finland and Sweden joined NATO.’)

But such appeals for diplomacy appear to have gotten lost turning the page into 2023. It’s true that Svitlana wrote movingly about Ukraine’s medical first aid crisis in late August 2023: ‘The stark truth is emerging: soldiers are dying in their hundreds or even thousands due to poor medical provision. The problem is being ignored by the military hierarchy, whose focus is on sourcing weapons and pushing the counteroffensive rather than prioritising injured fighters.’ And Owen Matthews in September spoke on SpectatorTV with realism about the military and political picture in Ukraine: ‘I hate to be pessimistic, and I really wish I’m wrong, but I think there’s actually going to be a very painful reckoning at a certain point about the loss of territories.’ But this did not make it past editors into any of his actual columns.

Owen (who does readily note the goal of recovering 1991 borders is unrealistic, and that the populations of Donbas and Crimea would regard reconquest by Ukraine as a war of coercion not liberation) has, writing for The Spectator, propagated the claim of Putin not being willing to negotiate. Quoting Michael McFaul: ‘Explain to me your plan for getting him [Putin] to negotiate now.’ Owen went on to write: ‘Only a humiliating, comprehensive and decisive military defeat or a collapse of the Russian economy could force Putin into talks before then.’ But this ignores overwhelming evidence that Putin does wish to talk – and has been saying so for quite some time. McFaul, a former US Ambassador to Russia (2012–2014), and arguably the most ardent defender of Ukraine in the West (rivalling even Boris here), did acknowledge this on X (Twitter) recently:

(This referring to the present lines of control.) If we in the West were accurately informed by our media of how grim the military picture in Ukraine really is, we would see this as an actual realistic option – and arguably now in the best interest of Ukraine itself. Throwing more lives and weaponry into a black hole does not appear to be improving the situation. We are merely further hollowing out Ukraine’s population – now including civilian women – and actually inviting Russia to capture more land. Noble attempts by diplomats to stem this have not been faithfully told – or, as the military picture has continued to deteriorate, learned from. 

McFaul is one of the masterminds of sanctions packages Owen readily acknowledges have ‘backfired’. But McFaul has, regrettably, reverted on Twitter to saying ‘Putin does not want to negotiate right now’. We should, of course, have extreme vigilance in conducting any diplomacy with Russia, but McFaul – who is capable of making honest and compelling arguments for fighting for Ukraine’s territorial integrity – here wilfully misrepresents reality.

All the way through to 18 November 2023, the one unmentionable in The Spectator’s 2023 coverage: diplomacy.

*

I find the topic of Ukraine a peculiar omission in Fraser’s own (voluminous and expansive) 2023 writing. The conflict is of such importance, yet Fraser has written so little on it in his own columns. There has been a gaping void where contrarian thought, exquisitely argued, usually sits. 

I’m of course pro-West in this. But our inability to acknowledge reality has gravely weakened our position with Russia – not strengthened it. We’ve created the worst-possible incentive structure for Ukraine. As reported in Ukrainian Pravda (a pro-Zelensky outlet – and the place our PM last month chose to place an article to reach the people of Ukraine):

‘Zelenskyy’s team believes that the only way Ukraine can convey to “peacemakers” like this that its struggle is not over is to give its partners a small dose of victory every day. As Zelenskyy himself put it: “We need a result for Ukraine every day. Withstanding Russian assaults, killing occupiers, moving forward, even if it’s only a kilometre, even 500 metres, but moving forward every day to improve Ukraine’s position, to put pressure on the occupiers. This gives the state strength. It motivates the whole world to help us.’

Going on an unrelenting offensive like this (particularly without air superiority) – as the Wall St. Journal, Professor Mearsheimer, Elon Musk and others have pointed out to no end – creates mass casualties, and is something the US military would never itself do. The outcome: Ukraine has lost thousands of men this summer, with resulting negative territorial gain.

We in the West are responsible for creating this political incentive – Zelensky having to throw his own troops to the slaughter in a bid for paltry progress.

My own attempt at getting published

In late August, The Spectator’s editors considered a revisionist history I had drafted on what I consider actually occurred diplomatically at the onset of Russia’s invasion. I argued we would be wise to learn from past diplomatic attempts. It was a piece I hoped (both the UK and Ukraine having new defence ministers that very week) would have a chance of nudging government thinking in a more pragmatic direction. At editors’ pushing, I gathered primary source evidence for everything I had asserted, but the piece was ultimately passed on. (I hold no bitterness here – I have never been published by the outlet.) This chronology was turned down by a further 15 outlets before I finally gave in and self-published it in video on X. YouTube upload:

I had received several rejection letters from editors at other prominent outlets (cough: The New Statesman) not even willing to look at the piece – ‘It’s not one for us’ – despite my having extremely authoritative written endorsement direct from the Turkish and Israeli diplomatic teams. This suggests an awful lot about today’s media landscape, and the yet further importance of our bravest editors sticking to their ways. (All of this was before the 7 October attack on Israel.)

I was not the only person putting forward this argument. Though I consider my chronology to be the most detailed account that has yet been compiled, Sir Simon Jenkins wrote a column for The Guardian with a similar sentiment at the time of the events: ‘That this conflict is being exploited by Britain for a sleazy upcoming leadership contest is sickening.’ The Times hinted at the same: ‘A senior government source told The Times last week there were concerns that allies were “over eager” to secure a peace deal, adding that a settlement should be reached only when Ukraine is in the strongest possible position.’ And Gerhard Schroeder, former Chancellor of Germany, has also stated that peace talks were indeed broken off by the West. (Note: Schroeder is now on the board of Gazprom, and one could argue he is conflicted.)

But in the past week, Davyd Arakhamia, Zelensky’s closest advisor, and parliamentary leader of Zelensky’s Servant of the People party, has confirmed in video interview everything I had tried to get published in August-September. In his words: ‘Boris Johnson came to Kyiv and said that we would not sign anything with them at all, and let’s just fight.’ 

This has still not been reported on. (There were other reasons Davyd explained in the full interview for Ukraine’s hesitancy – but Israeli and Turkish mediators believe that, without Western meddling, they were surmountable.) Editors throughout the West have demonstrated an astonishing lack of curiosity towards what is arguably the biggest story of the year. We should also remember who was Foreign Secretary during this time: one Liz Truss. Is it possible there was a hubristic error in judgement atop the British government at this time?

In Boris making a trip to Kyiv on 9 April 2022 and purportedly saying to Zelensky ‘let’s just fight’, the UK government was the primary point of communication that prohibited a deal between Ukraine and Russia from coming together. Yet there has been no public scrutiny in questioning Boris about his 9 April visit. Not a single journalist, as far as I am aware, has ever asked the question of Boris: ‘What did you actually say to Zelensky on 9 April 2022?’

I consider there ought to be a media enquiry: what did Boris actually say on this trip? And the history of March/April 2022 diplomatic talks – in Istanbul, and conducted directly between Zelensky and Putin by Israel’s then-Prime Minister – needs to be more widely known.

I remain, like the most integral negotiator (Naftali Bennett), open-minded that the counterfactual of negotiating peace in March 2022 could have been premature and seen as appeasement, and incentivised other invasions globally. But my assertion from where we are today is that history will likely look back on Boris as having done something simultaneously heroic yet misjudged. In a democracy (meaning: we in the UK, and the US – as our governments appear to have worked together here), I consider evidence of diplomatic interference this strong ought not to be ignored by our press.

How has Ukraine’s military deterioration been allowed to happen?

One of the stated virtues of democracies is that we tolerate divergent views, and that our governments can course-correct resultantly. Fraser:

‘Without debate and dissent, it’s harder to spot and correct errors. The arguments and protests that make democratic politics so messy are a feedback mechanism. Without this feedback, governments end up embarking on – or wedded to – calamitous mistakes.’

But here, this has not happened. Is this as a result of intelligence agencies? The bank temporarily in ownership of the magazine (supposed to break such views to the mainstream) blocking its speaking out on this issue? A blindspot (and groupthink) besetting its editors?

I do not consider lack of coverage here to have been a face-saving coverup of a former Spectator editor (in Boris). Fraser – admirably – has had no hesitation in calling out Boris’s failings on a wide range of vital issues, including a no-punches-held assessment of his lacklustre performance as Prime Minister. And Fraser regularly takes the present Prime Minister (and, by implication, the PM’s closest political advisor) to task with great force.

I consider busyness should not be an excuse. The editor has in recent months been busy soliciting new ownership for the magazine. But the conflict in Ukraine is of sufficient global importance, this should not be plausible to suggest anymore than it would be for a minister to use ‘busyness’ as an excuse for the government’s latest blunder (which receives due criticism in the magazine’s pages weekly, no matter a Secretary of State’s workload).

Though realist views on Ukraine’s counteroffensive have proven accurate, they have been sufficiently marginalised and – being outside the Overton window – so little-discussed, they have arguably not been on the radar of most editors, allowing a certain groupthink to emerge. I think Fraser (and other editors) would argue in self-defence: we’re a small magazine. We have limited editorial resources – which is true. But equally, the magazine had no trouble putting out prominent pro-arms pieces about Ukraine, and the magazine has a stated editorial policy of publishing both sides. There was another side here.

Fraser has written of Boris: ‘I wrote a Telegraph column saying that as a writer (again) he would be in a position to explain all of this. Did he, in No. 10, think his old ideas were naive, unviable or anachronistic?’ I, in humble turn, hope Fraser will one day go on to explain his assessment of what has happened here. The government will make mistakes. This should be our baseline expectation. But part of our media’s job function is to point it out when it does. Why, for the past year, has this been left to doughty academics and businesspeople like Elon Musk? We should not want the British government to be given room to be so idealistic as to near-destroy an ally.

As Fraser further noted of Boris’s Prime Ministership: ‘What matters is that such mistakes are identified, corrected and that the sense of original mission restored.’ On a much less severe case, writing on Niall Ferguson’s change of heart post-Brexit, Fraser noted:

‘The leading article in The Spectator, which made the case for Brexit, used Fergusonian logic. Even if Ferguson himself had arrived at a different conclusion… Perhaps the bigger question is: why did he admit that he was wrong? Because Ferguson is that rare thing: a historian who is mindful that experts get it wrong. He makes no claim on infallibility himself. He loathes the way that pundits never admit to errors and box themselves in to the wrong positions… It’s a novel approach in his line of work, certainly. But Niall Ferguson is nothing if not novel. He is admitting he got this wrong because he holds himself to a higher standard.’

My writing here is my best attempt at channelling Nelsonian logic – everything I have learned from him the past eight years. I hope Fraser will be big enough to do the same as Niall.

I admire Fraser immensely. He’s pulled off near-miracles for the magazine. And I cannot imagine there are many (if any) people who follow his work more closely than I. Fraser wrote on Boris: ‘And yes, I revere my predecessor as a writer and remain in awe of his hugely successful editorship. But did he expect The Spectator to cheer him on as he implemented the very things that – when he was editor – the magazine had campaigned against? We regularly held up his own words against him asking: what had he become? And why?’ I feel similarly here. I have no animus, and I continue to think of Fraser’s editorship as historic. Just: The Spectator’s editor could have challenged government thinking here to help bring about a better course than the one we have been on.

Why have we so badly miscalculated NATO’s artillery production capability such that, in a July 2023 panic, the US had to resort to sending cluster munitions? And why have we miscalculated the efficacy of sanctions? These are the kinds of questions the editor I ordinarily know would be asking. Our Prime Minister can do better than offer Ukraine the training of pilots for F-16s (which former US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Mark Milley, has long said are unlikely to make any material difference), and someone who commands the PM’s attention ought to have pointed this out to him.

Unlike net zero or welfare reform (both of which have made the cut for scrutiny), the conflict in Ukraine could be resolved in a week if a handful of key people applied themselves. But until now, key figures in the West have not even tried. Biden and Putin have reportedly not even spoken on the phone since the February 2022 invasion began. This fact alone should have been deserving of a near-weekly leading article until (convened by the British Prime Minister) it is rectified.

In closing

The Spectator is not a normal publication. It doesn’t merely serve its readers; it serves its country. It holds our Prime Minister to account more intimately, more forcefully, and more eloquently than any other publication in the land. Boris Johnson, our last but one Prime Minister, was the magazine’s last but one editor. The Spectator’s immediate former political editor is Rishi Sunak’s now chief political advisor. The Spectator is thus uniquely placed to challenge and affect this government’s policies for the better. 

The UK government, in turn, is perhaps the only global power that has a meaningful shot at influencing present US foreign policy (which, one could argue, is in part responsible for the anguish today in Ukraine). Our Prime Minister is one of only a handful of people on the planet who could conceivably get Zelensky, Putin, Biden and Xi on the phone today if he so wanted. It is not exaggeration, thus, to say the editor of The Spectator (having influence with the present PM) sits in a crucial seat of responsibility for Western society. As the Wall Street Journal correctly noted in 2019, this was actually the most important geopolitical opportunity of Brexit: ‘The world also needs the Tories’ pro-American streak – as ballast between the US and Europe.’

Questioning orthodoxy on Ukraine has become controversial simply by virtue of so few editors being brave enough to allow the publication of opposing viewpoints. Historically, this has been The Spectator’s role – more so than any other outlet. In this instance, the magazine has failed to live up to its own editorial ideals. Consensus thinking has triumphed, and the West is worse off for it.

The world is worse off when The Spectator remains silent. As conflict and turmoil mount, this cannot be allowed to happen again. The Spectator needs to rediscover its Lawsonian spirit – which, geopolitically in 2023, it has tragically been missing. Fraser has previously written: ‘We give them [our writers] complete freedom to say what they want, even if it’s a column attacking the editor.’ Here, I have wished to take him up on it.

Edward Druce was a 10 Downing Street Special Advisor 2020–2021.