Almost 10 years on from the Brexit referendum and former staffers at the fervently pro-Leave Spectator are revisiting the history of who decided to back it: journalists at the title, or its oddball then-owners, the Barclay brothers?<\/p>\n
The debate was kicked off by a typically ill-spirited engagement on X between Femi Oluwole, the pro-Remain activist still fighting the referendum, and Andrew Neil, former chair of the Spectator. Oluwole had posted a poll on the site asking who appointed the editor of the magazine \u201cduring the time when it was pumping out Pro-Brexit propaganda\u201d, offering as choices Andrew Neil, \u201cNEIL, Andrew\u201d and \u201cMr Andy Neil wearin [sic] a hat\u201d (Neil appointed Fraser Nelson to the editor\u2019s seat in 2009).<\/p>\n
The ever pugnacious Neil rose to the fight, describing Oluwole as \u201can irrelevant, rather thick has-been\u201d, and insisting that, at the time of Nelson\u2019s appointment \u201cBrexit was on almost nobody\u2019s agenda, certainly not ours. We never discussed it at any stage. It just wasn\u2019t an issue.\u201d<\/p>\n
The decision to back Brexit was \u201centirely that of Fraser and his team,\u201d Neil went on. \u201cI kept the proprietors out of it and my only advice to Fraser was, whatever side he decide [sic] to back, to make the endorsement compelling, informed and in the best traditions of The Spectator.\u201d<\/p>\n
Nelson himself then waded in on his Substack account, writing a lengthy post on how backing Brexit was a decision he took, along with his journalists, rather than the Sark-based brothers who bankrolled the title.<\/p>\n
\u201cTo this day, I have no idea which side \u2013 if any \u2013 Andrew Neil supported,\u201d wrote Nelson. \u201cAt 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\u2019d like to see. Aidan Barclay asked me to come and see him to let him know our plans once we\u2019d decided: his only request was that we make the case properly.\u201d<\/p>\n
Still, by good fortune, it turned out that Nelson had managed to come to the conclusion which would please his paymasters most. \u201cI only found out later that they were so mad-keen on Brexit that they commissioned a bust of Nigel Farage,\u201d he says. Alas, the whereabouts of this memento are not known: in the world\u2019s worst political museum with Ed Miliband\u2019s headstone perhaps?<\/p>\n
The Barclays, Nelson writes, did not attend any of the Spectator\u2019s infamous summer or Christmas parties, one wise choice on their part, you might say. But then their judgement is completely undermined by the single event held by the magazine they did attend during the entire time they owned the Spec: \u201cThey only once showed up at a Spectator event: in the audience to hear Rod Liddle at the Palladium.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Almost 10 years on from the Brexit referendum and former staffers at the fervently pro-Leave Spectator are revisiting…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":786852,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5226],"tags":[802,748,2000,299,5187,1699,4884,2452,16,15],"class_list":["post-786851","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-brexit","tag-brexit","tag-britain","tag-eu","tag-europe","tag-european","tag-european-union","tag-great-britain","tag-media","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/116128274461586434","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/786851","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=786851"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/786851\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/786852"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=786851"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=786851"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=786851"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}