This Christmas issue is my last as editor of the New Statesman: I am standing down after 16 years at the end of 2024. It has been a privilege to edit this great magazine for so long and I am especially grateful to our readers for their continuous support. For a long period, I edited the letters pages. It’s important for an editor to know what the readers think, especially the paying subscribers, to know what they like and dislike and care about. New Statesman readers are intelligent, politically committed, fair-minded, forthright, principled and never bashful about letting us know what we are getting wrong. And sometimes even telling us what we are getting right.
A highlight of my editorship was working on the 180-page centenary issue of the magazine in April 2013 as well as the two collector’s editions we published that showcased our wonderful archive – HG Wells, George Orwell, JB Priestley, Christabel Pankhurst, Virginia Woolf, Bertrand Russell, Claire Tomalin, Christopher Hitchens, AS Byatt, Clive James, etc. Back then I received from the historian and former BBC executive Hugh Purcell a long, fascinating essay on John Freeman, the inscrutable former New Statesman editor who became British ambassador to the United States. Hugh and I met soon afterwards, and he later introduced me to Norman Mackenzie, who had worked on the New Statesman during the “golden years” of Kingsley Martin’s editorship, from 1931 to 1960. Norman was 91 and in poor health when I first visited him at home in Lewes (he died in June 2013). But he was lucid and, after several decades when he had stopped reading the magazine because of the “silly left”, he had resubscribed. “It’s like coming back to the place after 30 years away to find someone has been polishing the doorknobs,” he told me.
Norman wrote for the centenary issue, and it was a pleasure to talk to him about working for Martin and the radical spirit of the New Statesman. He recalled lunches with Orwell – then a struggling freelancer who loathed Martin because he’d refused to publish Orwell’s dispatches from the Spanish Civil War – and Monday editorial meetings at the offices in Great Turnstile Street in central London, cherishing the moment the cartoonist Vicky would erupt into the room with his latest sketches.
One afternoon, on the train back from Lewes, Hugh mentioned the moment he knew he was ready to stand down as editor of the BBC’s Start the Week. “The programme was as good as it could be and one was running out of ideas,” he said. I am not running out of ideas, but having grappled with non-negotiable weekly print deadlines (as well as daily digital ones) for so long, one feels the burden of repetition – if not quite the Nietzschean sense of eternal recurrence.
A notable challenge for any New Statesman editor is to know what to do about the Labour Party, which through the decades has attempted to abuse, manipulate or control the magazine. In recent years,we have pursued our own sceptical, independent liberal politics with vigour. One decision we made, however, was to endorse Ed Miliband in 2010. By November 2014, convinced that he would lead Labour to defeat, we warned in a special issue that he was “running out of time”. His response to our intervention, widely covered in the media, was never to speak to me again. But a few days after the publication of our issue – as letters calling for his resignation reportedly circulated among his MPs – Miliband attempted to relaunch his leadership on a visit to Harlow in Essex, my hometown, accompanied by the BBC’s political editor. I had written that Miliband did not understand the aspirations of Essex Man and Woman and approached politics as if it were an elevated Oxford PPE seminar. “This is an election we can win, this is an election I’m determined we win, and I know we can with the vision we have for how we change Britain,” Miliband said at Harlow College, where I’d been a sixth-former.
In the event, Ed Miliband lost the 2015 election, squandering 40 of Labour’s 41 Scottish Westminster seats. David Cameron had been gifted a surprise majority. But the Conservative leader was now compelled to honour the pledge he’d first made in a speech at Bloomberg’s London HQ in 2013 to hold a binary plebiscite on the UK’s membership of the European Union. A period of turmoil and extraordinary politics had begun.
In the autumn of 2008, when I became editor, I received a handwritten postcard from Anthony Howard, editor from 1972 to 1978. I got to know Tony when he was obituaries editor of the Times in the 1990s; he sometimes used to enjoy a post-lunch nap in his glass-fronted office before waking to pass proofs, talk about politics and share some Fleet Street gossip. “As almost the Old Man and the Sea of the enterprise,” he wrote, “I hasten to send you all my congratulations. You’ll find it a tough job but I’m sure you’ll do it brilliantly. If you ever feel I can do anything to help, you only have to ask… As for you, you must dig in and stick it out till the paper’s centenary in 2013!”
Well, I stuck it out, for longer than we both expected. Now I should like to thank my colleagues for their enthusiasm, dedication, unstinting support and total commitment to quality journalism. The good ship New Statesman sails on.
Jason Cowley was editor of the New Statesman from 2008 to 2024
This appears in the Christmas 2024 issue of the New Statesman magazine, on sale 6 December 2024 – 9 January 2025
[See also: Bill Gates: the Optimist’s Dilemma]
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