Michael Gove, Spectator editor: The long relationship between Westminster and the media

M ichael Gove has a new job. The former Conservative MP and senior government minister will take over as editor of The Spectator this month, assuming the UK’s advisory committee on business appointments raises no objections.

The Spectator, a political weekly, was founded almost 200 years ago. Although, like Gove, it leans noticeably to the right, it was one of the few moderate voices in the Conservative media during the party’s recent internal conflicts and electoral collapse.

It now has a new owner, Sir Paul Marshall, who made his money running a hedge fund and already owns other right-wing media outlets, including GB News and online publisher UnHerd. Some predict that Marshall will want to steer The Spectator further to the right. Gove’s appointment as editor reinforces this impression.

Gove’s shift into (or rather, back into) journalism is not surprising. He made his name by working in the Scottish and UK press, including as a leader writer at The Times, before becoming an MP in 2005.

Other Conservative luminaries have similarly moved back and forth between the editor’s chair and the cabinet table. George Osborne was chancellor of the exchequer from 2010-16, and then became editor of the London Evening Standard from 2017-20.

Boris Johnson had a long-running role at The Telegraph and was editor of The Spectator from 1999-2005. For some years he was both editor and MP. After leaving Downing Street, he took up a well-remunerated role as a columnist at the Daily Mail, breaching parliament’s rules on post-ministerial jobs in the process.

And if former Conservative MP and government minister Nadhim Zahawi’s bid to purchase The Telegraph is successful, Johnson could find himself back in the editor’s chair.

The path between Westminster and Fleet Street (the base for the UK’s press for much of the 19th and 20th centuries) is well-trodden, particularly by Conservative politicians. The Labour Party has generally been less closely connected with the newspaper industry, in part due to the political affiliations of commercially minded press magnates.

As Max Hastings (editor of The Daily Telegraph between 1986 and 1995) put it, UK newspaper proprietors have generally been motivated by “an uncomplicated desire to make the world a safe place for rich men to live in.” Backing the Conservatives has generally seemed the best way to further this goal.

In contrast to the press, when it comes to the broadcast media, the regulator Ofcom has recently censured one of Marshall’s other assets, GB News, for using politicians as news presenters. According to Ofcom’s broadcasting code, a politician should not be hired as a “newsreader, news interviewer or news reporter unless, exceptionally, there is editorial justification.”

Broadcast news has to be impartial, and Ofcom maintains that politicians are, by definition, partial.

Such considerations are not applied to politicians commenting on the news in the press. This is, in part, because of British traditions of press freedom that stretch back to the middle of the 19th century. Since then, British newspapers have not been directly regulated by the state (although they are subject to libel laws and some other legal restraints). The government should not legislate who can, and who cannot, write for our newspapers.

This has allowed close links between the worlds of journalism and parliamentary politics to become a core and enduring feature of the British press. By the late 19th century, most newspapers were directly linked to one of the two main Westminster parties, which were then the Liberals and the Conservatives.

During that era, politicians frequently owned or edited newspapers. They viewed the press not as a means to make money, but rather as a tool to generate political influence for themselves.

Government by journalism

At that time, many commentators regarded the close link between Westminster and Fleet Street as a good thing. In Government by Journalism, an influential article published in 1886, the British editor W. T. Stead described the press as “at once the eye and the ear and the tongue of the people.”

Stead argued that newspapers told politicians what the public thought about the key issues of the day. They also acted as watchdogs, holding politicians to account to ensure they served the public interest.

But newspapers also gave politicians an opportunity to shape the political agenda. As Stead wrote:

“A minister who has some little social reform which he wants to push gets a friend to button-hole a few journalists, and to induce them to insert paragraphs or articles in favour of his proposal.”

As long as editors did not get too close to ministers (Stead disdained what he called “subservient journalism”), newspapers could play a constructive democratic role.

More than a century later, there remains a tricky balance between holding power to account, and being influenced by it.

When it issued its report in 2012, the Leveson inquiry into press practices (commissioned after the News International phone hacking scandal) echoed Stead in claiming that the true purpose of journalism was “to hold those with power to account.”

But Leveson was less worried about “subservient journalism”, and more concerned about the influence that powerful media moguls wielded over British government ministers. This reflected long-running anxieties about behind-closed-doors discussions and personal connections, notably between senior executives in Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation empire (including Murdoch himself), and key figures in the Blair and Cameron governments.

Leveson’s report argued that these relationships had become opaque and unaccountable, raising concerns that “politicians and the press have traded power and influence in ways which are contrary to the public interest and out of public sight.”

Power, press and politics

Politicians and former ministers who write for newspapers can play a legitimate role in a free press, especially if a wide range of titles exist to allow the expression of competing political viewpoints.

But having ministers meet with media magnates behind closed doors to make pacts is something else entirely. And having former ministers, who still wield significant influence within their parties, become editors for those media magnates, also raises questions about the role of newspapers in democratic politics.

Some speculate that Marshall’s purchase of The Spectator is part of a move to build a global right-wing media empire, linking up like-minded audiences in the UK, the US and Australia. After all, the £100 million he paid reflects the magazine’s political influence more than its profitability.

Marshall and Gove may now collaborate to make The Spectator a more strident voice of the Conservative party’s right wing, perhaps by backing Gove’s favoured candidate for the party leadership, Kemi Badenoch.

Alternatively, Gove may become the sort of editor that Stead and Leveson both admired, insisting on his editorial independence and holding his former colleagues and enemies (on both sides of the House of Commons) to account.

Whatever the outcome, the ties that have bound Fleet Street and Westminster together since before Stead’s day are unlikely to loosen any time soon.

Sources:

▪ This piece was originally published in The Conversation and re-published in PUBLIC SQUARE UK on 6 October 2024. | The author writes in a personal capacity.

▪ Cover: Flickr/UK Government. (Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.)