The glittering launch of The Spectator Australia magazine at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music last night ended farcically when a fire alarm went off causing A-list guests, chefs and catering staff to surge outdoors and into Macquarie Street.
Minutes later two siren-blaring fire engines arrived and “firies” conducted a search of the premises before leaving. False alarm. Or was it a supernatural warning of the fate of the Oz edition of the High Tory British mag?
Andrew Neil, chairman and editor-in-chief of The Press Holdings (The Spectator) Group launched the magazine after a short speech from his local editor, Oscar Humphries, the dissolute son of Bazza.
Neil, known to Private Eye readers as “Brillo pad” because of the unusual arrangement of his hair, believes the right-wing conservative publication has a future among the elite white settlers of the colony, and he has been given generous time to spruik his commercial message by Leigh Sales on the ABC’s Lateline and Frank Kelly on Radio National.
He amused the crowd, which included the next federal Opposition leader Peter Costello, with a self-deprecating story of his journalistic disasters. Writing a travel piece from Jerusalem he described it as “a Mecca for tourists”.
Launched in October last year, The Spectator Australia replicates the UK weekly publication and may be followed by The Spectator India where there is a large expat community and an enclave of Brit wallahs — Indians who are more English than the English.
The expansion is being financed by the rather eccentric, reclusive Barclays brothers, the billionaires who launched The European weekly newspaper in the 1990s and lost a small fortune on it. Under Neil’s tutelage The European became a “Eurosceptic” publication which rather took its readers and advertisers by surprise.
He launched The Sunday Business which has gone out of business, but remains as an online operation. He turned The Scotsman, one of the great British newspapers, into a version of the right-wing Daily Mail, complete with sub-Thatcherite views, and ran through eight editors in eight years.
In the course of his stewardship, he helped to transform the 85,000 circulation paper into one now selling less than 60,000.
Private Eye relentlessly pursues Neil by publishing a picture of him wearing a singlet, and posing with an Asian babe.
He continues to describe The Spectator as “champagne for the brain” but judging by the latest Oz edition — with excruciating articles by John Howard, former federal MP Neil Brown, Kathy Lette, Christian Kerr and Tom Switzer — it’s more like a pint of flat, warm Theakston’s Old Peculier.
as a long rerm reader of the Spectator i consider the Australian edition with lazy writing from Switzer and other to be a mistake. i buy it and read the british bits for the combination of excellent written English good book and film reviews humour and crazy conservative maunderings that it has always offered.
Give us back our magazine please!
Personally, I enjoy the odd pint of OP
Alex, I usually enjoy your analyses of NSW affairs, but I think you’re trying a little too hard to be flippant in a New Yorker sort of way with this piece.
But my main gripe is with your attempt to link tired and flatulent writing contributions (Howard and Switzer in particular) with a unique and enjoyable English ale. Long live Old Peculier!
Could’ve been worse. I once saw and a tired and emotional Neil in a HK bar in 1997, where he was delivering an impassioned and boorish speech on the British empire’s contribution to the island from the top of a table, off which he slipped and fell to the floor – much to the delight of everyone present.
I must have had the left and right beaten out of me as I age, as I’m now finding it hard to tell the difference. Rudd’s fondness of saying heads need to be knocked together , people need to be slapped , or get out of the way ( a bit Kindy level really), means all that brutal political talk has addled my brain. I felt like I was reading about the left in “Spectator ” with a piece on Italian workers being hired for something to do in Britain. Local yocals were saying it wasn’t fair, it wasn’t even advertised, as in the Anglo/Celt/Scots. Now it seemed left , in the sense that workers wondered where their rights had gone; but was it right , in the sense it wanted to be protectionist towards British jobs? Or is that in the middle? I found the analogy about the GFC & the round heads (Cromwell’s savers) & cavaliers ( Charles 1st’s cronies & off course, being aristocrats, -spendthrifts) rather amusing actually; something about the fact all those cavalier bankers made light with risk, laughed merrily one imagines, a la Errol Flynn in a movie , sailing off like pirates to nestle down on an nice island until the flack dies down. Kathe Lette’s ex pat comments on the perils of our shore was quite rye; but I thought she and her husband were in theleftie socialist human rights lawyer file, so how is that right? Do chardonnay socialists count as covert rightists! I’ve actually enjoyed having a break from Aussie press gurus, reading other writers for a change. Found it in my 24 hour store recently, not knowing my left from my right, and bought it unwittingly. I do notice there are proud right wingers outed in it.I hope it has a balance of international press and Aussie content, a la “Time”. Now “Time”, left or right? That is the question! So what’s left… to read? Used to be the National Times? Interesting to hear all views and make up my own mind, eventually. Adds to the spectrum. You know what the Guardian is going to say before you read it, which gets boring.