Who decided the Spectator would back Brexit?

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?

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 “during the time when it was pumping out Pro-Brexit propaganda”, offering as choices Andrew Neil, “NEIL, Andrew” and “Mr Andy Neil wearin [sic] a hat” (Neil appointed Fraser Nelson to the editor’s seat in 2009).

The ever pugnacious Neil rose to the fight, describing Oluwole as “an irrelevant, rather thick has-been”, and insisting that, at the time of Nelson’s appointment “Brexit was on almost nobody’s agenda, certainly not ours. We never discussed it at any stage. It just wasn’t an issue.”

The decision to back Brexit was “entirely that of Fraser and his team,” Neil went on. “I 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.”

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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.

“To this day, I have no idea which side – if any – Andrew Neil supported,” wrote Nelson. “At 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’d like to see. Aidan Barclay asked me to come and see him to let him know our plans once we’d decided: his only request was that we make the case properly.”

Still, by good fortune, it turned out that Nelson had managed to come to the conclusion which would please his paymasters most. “I only found out later that they were so mad-keen on Brexit that they commissioned a bust of Nigel Farage,” he says. Alas, the whereabouts of this memento are not known: in the world’s worst political museum with Ed Miliband’s headstone perhaps?

The Barclays, Nelson writes, did not attend any of the Spectator’s 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: “They only once showed up at a Spectator event: in the audience to hear Rod Liddle at the Palladium.”