Political rags are tired and tainted

I can just about remember a time in the Sixties when I thought it compulsory to buy the New Statesman and The Spectator on a Thursday evening to read on the train going home. Today I would not even feel the urge to look at the cover lines at the station bookstall.

I first started to read The Spectator when I was in National Service in Malaya in 1957. In those days it was owned by the Left-wing Tory MP lan Gilmour and the editor was Brian Inglis, a famous journalist who had recruited a team of brilliant young radicals, notably Bernard Levin, the first journalist in my time to write about Parliament in a thoroughly disrespectful way. Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene were regular contributors.

The New Statesman hit its peak a little later when the circulation rose to 93,000 in 1965 under the editorship of Paul Johnson, at that stage a fiery radical famous for the enthusiasm with which he greeted the students' revolt in Paris.

Various reasons, political or economic, are given for the decline of magazines. But the more mundane one is that the wrong people are appointed editors. In the case of the New Statesman, the rot set in in 1978 when Bruce Page, a doctrinaire Left-winger from the Sunday Times Insight team, took over from Anthony Howard. Page imposed a regime of Marxist orthodoxy on a paper which had always operated very successfully on the "pan-tomime horse" principle, the front half being political, the rear given over to books and the arts.

Nicknamed the Staggers by its devotees, the magazine proceeded to live up to its name as it staggered on through the Eighties and Nineties with a series of undistinguished editors, eventually being bought in 1996 by New Labour's (at that stage) favourite businessman, Geoffrey Robinson MP.

One reason for the continuing success of Private Eye is that it is a genuinely independent magazine with no allegiance to any large parent company or interfering proprietor. But since it was sold to Conrad Black in 1988, The Spectator is not in the same fortunate position. The magazine has become a satellite of the Daily Telegraph, dependent on its big brother for marketing and promotion. The job of editor, which otherwise would be open to all-comers, is now limited to a small circle of Telegraph journalists and seems to be regarded as little more than a stepping stone to the editorship of one of the two Telegraph papers.

Perhaps this would not matter so much were it not for the markedly Right-wing agenda of Lord and Lady Black - one reason, perhaps, why the present editor, Boris Johnson, has refrained from sacking his notorious columnist Taki, a writer with the opinions of a semi-educated cab driver but one who remains a dinner companion of the Blacks, sharing their admiration for Lady Thatcher and the late Sir James Goldsmith.

Johnson's new-found role as Tory MP for Henley further restricts his independence. Apart from the difficulty of combining two jobs, he knows that his constituents will not thank him if he makes life difficult for his leader, Iain Duncan Smith. Would Johnson ever go as far as his predecessor, Dominic Lawson, who famously caused the resignation of Tory minister Nicholas Ridley when he published a highly indiscreet interview with the minister?

Proprietorship has had its effect at the New Statesman too. As a critic of New Labour from the Left, using columnists such as John Pilger and the Observer's Nick Cohen, the magazine - which has enjoyed a modest recovery under current editor Peter Wilby - is regrettably compromised by its owner, Geoffrey Robinson. How can it convincingly campaign against Labour sleaze when the proprietor is tarred with the same brush?

In answer to such criticisms, the weeklies will point to their healthy circulations - in The Spectator's case, a record 61,000 - as proof that, whatever I say, they are still required reading among the chattering classes. But like opinion polls, circulation figures should be taken with a pinch of salt. And, as the direct-debit promoters know, subscribers may take a long time before they finally get round to cancelling. Once that happens, the decline can be swift and very difficult to reverse.