How The Spectator backed Brexit

I was a Europhile editor who backed Leave. This is how the decision was made - and who didn't make it for us

A bizarre row has broken out online about whether Andrew Neil, when chairman of The Spectator, ordered the magazine to back Brexit. Rather than join it, I thought I’d tell the story here about what happened ten years ago. To me, it sums up the complete - perhaps unprecedented - degree of editorial freedom I was given and how Andrew created and protected the space we operated in.

I’m a Europhile (in that I love Europe) and EU membership never made the top 30 list of my problems that I thought were holding Britain back. When Cameron unexpectedly won the 2015 general election, he had to deliver the referendum he’d pledged as a ploy to neutralise Nigel Farage. So those with no strong opinion on Brexit - like me - would be forced to take sides.

I didn’t relish the battle ahead. The 2014 Scottish referendum had shown how referenda draw tribal lines, and I estimated our readers were evenly split. I didn’t want to alienate either half. Throughout the campaign we covered both sides, aiming to give readers the best versions of both sides of the argument. Matthew Parris, Sam Leith and Hugo Rifkind were strong Remainers; Douglas Murray, Lionel Shriver and Charles Moore had become Leavers. What I wanted was debate, rather than diatribe: our readers liked well-argued articles with which they might disagree. The Spectator was a journalistic, not a political project. It defines itself against tribalism. Until we actually declared, no one could tell which side we’d come down on. Our job was not to campaign. The clue was in the name: we’d spectate.

To this day, I have no idea which side - if any - Andrew Neil supported. At the time he was a BBC presenter giving everyone hell. More oddly, the Barclay family, our proprietors, gave me not the slightest inkling of what they’d like to see. Aidan Barclay asked me to come and see him to let him know our plans once we’d decided: his only request was that we make the case properly. Andrew reinforced it: the editorial team were with the decision. His point: it was a big deal, perhaps historic. We had to make it in a proper, robust way. Explain our thinking.

We discussed it among ourselves, and by the time of Cameron’s failed renegotiation I had been mugged by reality. The reformed European Union I’d wanted was not going to arrive. I had to accept it was a train hurtling towards an unknown destination and the referendum gave us our final chance to get off. Freddy Gray, Mary Wakefield, James Forsyth - the key staffers at the time - were all pro-Brexit. Ditto Charles Moore and Dominic Lawson, two of my predecessors and (as editor) big influences. To this day, I don’t know how Isabel Hardman or Katy Balls voted in the referendum (or any general election) and wouldn’t dream of asking. They’re not that kind of journalist.

Oddly, Rod Liddle wasn’t really into Brexit either way until after the result when he worked out that those complaining the loudest were those people who most annoyed him. (At one stage, he impersonated them all in a video.) He then more than made up for his earlier reticence and even wrote a book about it.

In the Spectator office, the decision was never formally taken: the discussion just drifted from what we’d do to how we’d do it. Most of our columnists and staff, who didn’t have a position at the start of the year, moved towards Leave. As, I suspect, had most of the readers.

I then went off to tell the Barclay family about our decision: the only time in 15 years as editor that I went to inform them of what we were doing. I thought at the time how easy it would have been for them to lean on me one way or another. At the moment I did tell them, I genuinely had no idea how they would react. How many editors, I wondered, have ever so free of proprietorial pressure on such seismic issues?

It’s not as if they were neutral. I found out later that the Barclays were so mad-keen on Brexit this that they literally commissioned a bust of Nigel Farage. But Andrew Neil had made clear to them that he didn’t just want zero pressure applied but now preference expressed. Not an eyebrow raised. As he put it, a magazine champions its readers, not the views of its owners. As a point of principle, the editor and staff should not know what the views of the proprietors are.

Birth of the Brexit butterfly

I started to work on a two-page editorial backing Leave. That evening I went to a dinner hosted by Michael Gove, who gave a superb speech on the liberal case for Brexit. His words perhaps had the biggest influence on the 2,000-word unsigned editorial. I sent drafts to all of the senior staff for edits: this was the voice of the magazine. And the art? As so often when seeking inspiration, I turned to the Spectator’s back catalogue. As Nigel Lawson said when he was editor, The Spectator always has been a “radical liberal” magazine in the classic sense. We were the only magazine to back Brexit in the first referendum and our 1975 cover had the slogan “Out and into the world.” It was inspirational. Then were one of only two publications to back Brexit in that referendum (the other was the Morning Star)

I called Morten Morland, the cartoonist - and a Remainer. I gave him the option of not drawing given the sensitivity. He worked for The Times which, I thought, would probably back Remain and I didn’t want him to feel conflicted. But, ever the professional, Morten rose to the brief. He emailed us rough sketches on his iPad, as he always did. We chose. Here’s what he sent. Our final cover is the last one.

Mary Wakefield broke her maternity leave to suggest option 1) with 3) - a Brexit butterfly emerging from the EU box - so she, remotely, art-directed perhaps our most famous cover. It became so associated with The Spectator and with the campaign that people later (wrongly) remembered us as having campaigned for Brexit all along.

The reaction

Bizarrely, my initial reaction to our best-ever cover was disappointment: why was there a 2D butterfly and a 3D box? But this mix was, of course, was part of its visual appeal. It became was a favourite of readers, prime ministers and even divinities like Liz Hurley (‘Beautiful graphic,’ she tweeted. ‘Beautiful sentiment.’) For opponents of Brexit, it was anything but: Morten’s image was used by Remainers (with the butterfly caged, etc) because it had become the most easily-recognised symbol of Brexit.

Morten came to hate his butterfly, especially when used almost as a weapon of war by Brexiteers. For later cover roughs, he would send us images of a butterfly pinned to a table or being caught in a net, squashed by a car etc. Once, he sent over a cover suggestion with just two words: “we’re f****d”. We never ran it (but might have put it up on the wall).

I suspect our readers were, in the end, about 60/40 for Brexit. We never did polling, so I’ll never know. I hated to think that our Remain readers - who sided with Hugo, Sam and Matt - might think they’d lost their magazine. I tried to keep tribalist pejoratives like “Remoaners” out of copy in the months that followed. I wanted for The Spectator to be a place where the two sides met, discussed, teased each other then had a drink. My guess is that we lost quite a few Remain readers, but that loss was more than offset by Brexit-inclined ones.

I’ve been amused, subsequently, at the point-blank refusal of anyone I meet to believe that we suffered no proprietorial interference - that we genuinely just sit in office sofas, talk it over, work out which side to back. Why no edict? What’s the point of owning or running a magazine if you don’t call the shots? The point - as Andrew Neil understood - is that the only relationship that matters with a strong publication is that with its readers. The editor’s job is to mediate that relationship; the chairman’s job is to protect the editor and the proprietor’s job is to stay out of the picture.

As proprietors, the Barclays visited once every couple of years, a distance that underlined the independence they wanted for us. They only gave me one instruction: “your job is to make us proud to own The Spectator.” Never did they write a word in the magazine or even attend our parties. Not once did they use their proprietor status to pose as powerbrokers. Oddly for media-owners they were shy, almost reclusive. They only once showed up at a Spectator event: in the audience to hear Rod Liddle at his sell-out gig at Palladium. If they did want to exert more of a presence, I never found out about it. Andrew handled them, not me.

When I first met them, they passed on a (good) tip that shale gas was surging. Andrew told me not to act on it: it would only encourage them. The most he ever asked me about the magazine’s content was to ask what the cover was that week. He wanted me, as editor, to have what he most prized (or wanted) under Rupert Murdoch: to be left alone. The magazine was later sold for 5x its 2009 value with subscriptions doubled. I like to think that we more than repaid the trust shown in us.

Afterwards, I had Morten’s rough Brexit drawings framed alongside the now-iconic final cover version. They still hang on the wall of the my old office, now of course occupied by Michael Gove. Which is fitting in a way: Brexit was his battle more than mine and his words at that dinner were the main inspiration for the white-smoke editorial. But the picture was put in the office as a reminder not of which side won, not even to display original artwork but as a symbol of something far more precious: freedom to decide for ourselves. Esto perpetua.