It has been described as conservative and right-wing Surface.
“The magazine cleaves to a purple-faced, pro-fox-hunting, climate-change-denying, insidiously Islamophobic worldview that's so hardened in its arteries it feels some weeks as if I've gone undercover with the dangerous right-wing splinter group of a rural parish council. Their TV reviewer actually described the recent defeat of a red-brick university on University Challenge in terms of "barbarians at the gates".
But the magazine can be erudite, commanding and witty, and you have to respect its devotion to the cause. It takes a lot of creativity and chutzpah to work the issue of our pandering to Muslims into every single article.”
“In 2017, the author and essayist Pankaj Mishra wrote that the
Spectator, “once suavely edited, now serves as a fraternity house… pummelling Muslims and high-fiving on Brexit, these right-wing bros are to the posh periodicals what Jeremy Clarkson was to the BBC”. On 31 October, that description was proved at least half right when Liddle wrote a column in which he ridiculed the Labour MP Rosie Duffield for speaking out about her experience of domestic abuse, while also appearing to suggest that the general election be held on a day when Muslims would be forbidden to vote for religious reasons.”
“.... Liddle & Co may be bullies but they aren’t fascists, nor have they incited political violence against those they taunt and demean in their writings. From their berths at the
Spectator, and other titles in the British mainstream media, they have instead provided a slow transfusion of bigotry into a historically repressed and underdeveloped English nationalism, which has now assumed a more strident position in the national consciousness.
In the literary and intellectual history of the right the current
Spectator commentariat will be judged as lightweights. But that does not lessen the deleterious impact their septic vapourings have had on the political and cultural life of the nation.”
The collapse of the intellectual right.
www.newstatesman.com