The Economist’s recent performance had been less-than-robust, with many long-term readers losing sympathy with the paper’s EU obsessions and woke lurch exemplified by the title’s new slogan “in pursuit of progress since 1843”. Now, with falling advertising and newsstand revenues, the company has just put out the first profits warning to shareholders in living memory, consoling them with the knowledge that the CEO, non-executive directors and senior management would not be taking bonuses and will be taking double-digit pay cuts. 100 people have been laid off from the commercial side – not a single journalist.
For the editor, Zanny Minton Beddoes, that means she’ll have to get by on a meagre £364,000 (based on her 2019 salary of £455,000). It will not come as a total surprise that the Economist’s overall commercial performance is suffering. Zanny can’t bear to be around the vulgar commercial people who sell the things like advertising, conferences and the subscriptions which pay her and her team’s far more generous salaries. Zanny’s grand offices for her and her journalists in John Adam Street cost three times the rent in Canary Wharf – to where the salespeople have been shunted off. The morale of the sales team she needs to pull her out of this crisis is, unsurprisingly, not great.
Nobody personifies the woke metropolitan elite more than Zanny Minton Beddoes, who has been editor of the Economist since 2015. Has the shift to a more woke editorial slant been good for business? How non-executive director and major shareholder John Elkann (scion of the Agnelli family) feels about this is unclear. The Economist’s constitution means that in practice the editor can’t be fired. So even if at times it seems to shareholders like the lunatics run the asylum, there is little they can do about it.
Guido has been chronicling the decline of The Economist and in particular the once revered Bagehot column for some time. This week’s copy has a letter to the editor from a former editor-in-chief of The Economist, Andrew Knight and Charles Moore, the biographer of Margaret Thatcher. It is a a corker on the subject of a recent Bagehot column on “Thatcher Undecomposed”. They are not impressed…
The full letter is worth reading, it tears apart the contradictions, oversights and mistakes in the column. The conclusion alone is pretty damning:
What one looks for in Bagehot’s newspaper is analysis, rather than generalising replete with attitude. Leaving aside his protracted expression of dismay over Brexit and Euroscepticism (the “flames” of which Thatcher wickedly “fanned” with her Bruges speech), Bagehot’s overall conclusion is an odd (in your pages) mercantilist sally. His Little-Britain lunge is that Thatcher’s free-marketry has left Britain “the Wimbledon of global capitalism, more successful at hosting world-class players than producing them”.
Thatcherites should celebrate that metaphor. Wimbledon: a great global tournament in the heart of British suburbia creating lots of jobs; lots of national prestige; lots of exciting visitors to the grass courts; lots of competition. Lots, in short, of the levelling out, the subsidy-less prosperity, the excitement, enjoyment and fun of the very sort she (and the original Walter Bagehot) would have relished.
That today’s Bagehot can be accused of mercantilism shows how far The Economist has strayed from and is betraying the free trade cause it was founded to further.
Somehow this letter to the editor only appears online and not in the print edition. Fancy that…
The full letter is reproduced below:
The Economist is celebrating it’s 175th year of publication with a paen to liberalism in the form of an essay. It is a bit of navel gazing combined with dollops of self-justification. Editor Zanny Minton Beddoes admits in her essay that The Economist has become the in-house journal of the liberal elite, what Steve Bannon calls “the party of Davos”. No institution is immune to intellectual fashions, the newspaper has in Guido’s lifetime championed Keynesianism, then neo-liberalism, and now the ‘Washington Consensus’. It has of late become overly preoccupied with climate change and whatever else concerns the faddish Davos crowd. The irony of The Economist, which was founded in 1843 to champion free trade, free markets and limited government, being on the wrong side of the argument on Brexit, in thrall to the EU and the thousands of tariffs that protectionist bloc enforces, is striking. Never mind the ambitions of those in Brussels for a pan-European super-state rigidly regulated from the Black Sea to the Atlantic.
On immigration Zanny admits for liberals “it is not too wide of the mark to caricature their views on migration as more influenced by the ease of employing a cleaner than by a fear of losing out.” Not a single democracy has escaped pain from uncontrolled mass migration, no politician can ignore the votes of those who have to compete with newcomers, the so-called “deplorables” in America and working-class Brexit voters in Britain. Almost all Western democracies have tired of fast migration. On this Zanny recognises reluctantly that “in the short run, liberals risk undermining the cause of free movement if they push beyond the bounds of pragmatism.” She proposes reform of the rules for refugees, despite accepting that in reality most immigration is driven by economics.
How adrift the current editor of The Economist is from the founding principles can be seen with her support for Universal Basic Income – putting everyone on the dole, disincentivising work. She cites a modest proposal for America to introduce a “UBI of $10,000 a year” which she admits “would require a tax take of at least 33% of GDP”, to be paid for by more disincentivising wealth taxes. So much for limited government.
One could go on, Steve Bannon did at their recent shindig. Judge for yourself how Zanny fared:
Happy birthday to The Economist…
Job number eight for George: he will be advising Exor, which owns Juventus football club and has stakes in Ferrari and Fiat. Even more of interest is has a 43% stake in The Economist magazine. Those jobs in full:
- Washington Speakers Bureau after-dinner speaker
- Adviser to Blackrock
- Chairman of Northern Powerhouse Partnership
- Fellow at McCain Institute
- Editor of the Evening Standard
- Economics professor, Manchester University
- Visiting fellow at Stanford University
- Adviser to Exor
But what job does he really want?
12 hours after setting up The Radicals, the Economist’s Jeremy Cliffe has hilariously quit the party:
It is also clear from the — entirely unanticipated — scale of this unplanned experiment that taking this forward would not be compatible with my job as Berlin Bureau Chief for The Economist. But I do not want this remarkable network to go to waste. So having spoken to a number of supporters this morning I am arranging to hand it over to a committee in Britain that might, if it opts to do so, advance the Radicals to a next stage. Details of the committee will follow soon.
The shortest lived political movement in history?
You know how it is, it’s 10pm, you’re a self-important Economist journalist sitting on Twitter, and you decide to set up a new political party to stop Brexit. Berlin correspondent Jeremy Cliffe, a former intern to Chuka Umunna, says he has the plan to make Britain the world’s largest economy within 18 months: reverse Brexit, join the Euro, join the EU army and make Ken Clarke the next European Commission president. Other key manifesto pledges are to share Trident with Germany, raise inheritance tax and move Britain’s capital from London to Manchester. Don’t laugh, he’s actually serious…
Remotely interested in a possible new anti-Brexit party with transformative social-liberal policies? Email “I’m in” to: radicalsuk@gmail.com
— Jeremy Cliffe (@JeremyCliffe) October 17, 2017
He says he’s humbled and reckons he has thousands of votes in the bag already:
Thanks to the many hundreds who have now emailed radicalsuk@gmail.com. Can’t say I expected this… But will see what we can make of this.
— Jeremy Cliffe (@JeremyCliffe) October 17, 2017
Taking stock: it seems I accidentally launched a new political movement this evening, the Radicals (@RadicalsUK).
— Jeremy Cliffe (@JeremyCliffe) October 17, 2017
He’s gone full Chappers. You never go full Chappers.
