Isabel Hardman - and the blend that changed politics

What started as a side-project became Britain’s most-read politics email — and a blueprint for modern journalism.

Isabel Hardman sent her last Evening Blend today — and with it ends an era. For 13 years she has written Britain’s most-read politics email, with an unprecedented 180,000 readers. But the email is just one part of what she’s given The Spectator. I want to say a bit more about the rest.

She joined as online editor in 2012 when The Spectator didn’t do very much online. “She’s the sort of woman who will quite obviously pass through The Spectator after two years at most” said James Forsyth, then political editor (who had set up our Coffee House blog) after the interview. “But she’ll do us a lot of good in the process.” He was wrong about the timeframe, but right about what she did for The Spectator. Upon joining, she applied for a lobby pass and based herself not in the office but in Parliament. I hadn’t realised that was an option. With James, she was putting together a new model. She built contacts, broke stories and did something I hadn’t thought possible: provide daily political news, faster than the newspapers. Coffee House was designed to soak up James’s excess energy. Now, it was also powered by Isabel’s. Quite a combo.

Journalism in real time

At the time, most newsrooms were still geared to the next-day cycle. Isabel would have a 10am story live by lunchtime, while the dailies were still holding back. With James doing the same, we suddenly had a political team. Soon, the Radio Four newspaper roundup would say “and on the Spectator website…” For a weekly magazine, that was new, and the kind of advertising that money could not buy. Our subscriptions went on to double, in a market down by two-thirds. But that’s because The Spectator was being redefined as a daily, not just a weekly, fix.

Soon after she joined, Isabel suggested sending out an email summarising the day’s news, as she had done on Politics Home. It sounded a bit of a weird idea to me - was there really a market for that? But she was in the Forsyth mould of journalist-entrepreneur. She came up with ideas for new products, would then develop them, look after the tech, make it all happen. All she wanted from me, the editor, was a green light. Which I gave, not thinking much would come of it. The Evening Blend email (named after Coffee House) was a smash hit.

We then started our podcast: Coffee House Shots. It needed literally no preparation time, let alone a script: James and Isabel were always so well-briefed that they just ad-libbed. The podcast had quite a following, especially in Westminster. Isabel’s career then started to take off.

Her first major broadcast gig was being asked to review the papers on the 2m-viewer Andrew Marr show. I remember us prepping in my office, doing a mock review: she was nervous, with notes as to what she’d say. When she did it for real, the nervousness vanished. She was a natural. Soon, everyone wanted her. This was at the dawn of the 24-hour news era, with shows proliferating. She ended up doing paper reviews morning and night, segments for BBC1’s Daily Politics, presenting Radio 4’s Westminster Hour. I remember thinking of her as the first political journalist who was a regular on every platform going: print, online, emails, video, broadcast. Presenting and commentating. To do so is more common now but, at the time, she was blazing a trail.

The flame - and the Phoenix

And then, the iceberg. She has written powerfully about her breakdown, and I remember advising her not to. Just take time off sick, I said: come back when you’re better. No one need know; not even in the office. If word gets out, it could harm your career: people pretend otherwise but there’s still a huge stigma. That’s precisely the problem, she replied: no one ever admits it. People struggle with mental health all the time: it’s normal. The stigma is only there because of the reticence, the pretence. She wanted to break the cycle. A fine theory, I said, but did she have to be the one to do the breaking? She took the opposite view: why should it not be her?

During those months and years, Isabel showed the kind of courage that I would not have believed existed had I not seen it in her. She went through hell, then clawed her way back. Again and again. Depression is sometimes called the ‘curse of the strong’ and she certainly has no end of strength. Andrew Neil, The Spectator’s chairman, was 100pc behind me in giving her all the time she needed to get back on track.

I may write elsewhere about the model we eventually found worked for both of us - and moved beyond the sick vs well dichotomy that you find in most contracts. Mental health issues are usually sporadic, unpredictable - and often with a snakes-and-ladders recovery trajectory. We sought to give her the security she needed and keep a writer who had come to be seen by readers as a crucial part of what The Spectator had become.

I have no doubt that many young people who hit difficulties now, who struggle with mental health when all - in theory - should be going well for them, will be less lonely as a result of all she has written. They will learn and draw strength from the lessons she has offered about her own experience. I remember someone at our office Christmas party (after a few drinks) trying to console by her saying “What have you got to be depressed about? You’re amazing!” It was funny in a way: an insensitive, if quite sincere, attempt to express sympathy. But it also captured something else: all the outside world saw was a funny, driven, intelligent, first-class journalist. It seemed incongruous that she’d be going through all this underneath. But that’s the nature of what Churchill called the ‘black dog’.

Isabel had no professional incentive to open up, to talk and write the way she did about her struggles. But having concluded that it was the right thing to do, nothing would stop her. She’s like that. And thanks to what she has written, what she went through is now better understood. Brilliant, accomplished people can live and work, even thrive, while managing mental health issues. Her eloquence, bravery and honesty, her willingness to talk about her problems and her hunt for solutions, will be invaluable to those plunged into a similar maze at a similar age.

Isabel didn’t just go on to recover but went on to write a smash-hit book, How We Get The Wrong Politicians. And her Evening Blend went from strength to strength.

Within a few years, most newspapers had an evening newsletter. Politico put huge resources into massive Westminster emails. But I was astonished to find that ours had 180,000 readers: more, far more, than any other. Even those produced by newspapers, who had hundreds of journalists. Evening Blend isn’t and has never been written by committee: Isabel would write the bulletin items and the lead analysis, all in her inimitable playful-yet-smart voice. With a headline pun that always made me laugh.

When The Spectator was sold for £100 million - five times what it was valued at in 2009 - we were able to present the email division as one of the jewels in the crown. Isabel’s Blend was the most-read ‘editorial product’. Axios had floated for $500 million, showing the importance of emails that are not seen as second-class products. The Spectator could be the next Axios: we had a huge audience, so big that more people read the Evening Blend on a typical weekday than would read the cover story when it was published.

And they read it for Isabel’s trademark mix of humour and intelligence, a smart summary not of all the day’s news but certainly of all that’s worth knowing. Her ability to see through the spin, to pick out the relevant and the funny, shines through in every sentence that she writes.

Now, Isabel is leaving to write a fourth book: Power Cut. Unusually for non-fiction books it went to an auction which was won by Bloomsbury. After 13 years of brilliance, years that involved more drama than she would have liked, and at a still-absurdly-young age, she’s ready to focus full-time on the book. And then on whatever comes next.

I’d often say that one of the best parts of editing The Spectator was that the journalists who most inspired me, the ones I looked up to, were the people who were working for me. There are many people I could point to as an example of those words, but when I said them I was always thinking about Isabel. Her humour, intelligence, grace and grit made her an inspiration to me, a joy for The Spectator readers and an asset to journalism. I’m hugely excited to see what her next chapter will bring.