The following column was written in 2024 for former Spectator editor Fraser Nelson when he left the magazine. This is the first time it has been published.

My favourite ever email came from a friend and fellow hack, Roland White. It said: ‘You bastard. I had a 50 quid bet that Charles Moore would be the first Spectator writer to use the word “clunge” in an article.’ Ha. I admit I had been surprised to see the word there, in hard copy, when the mag was published. I had expected the usual haggling. ‘Can’t you say vagina, Rod? Or just leave it out altogether? Or how about Lady Garden?’ And in childish petulance, almost howling, I would aver no, it absolutely must be clunge, only clunge will do, because it speaks of a rogue and earthy demotic, which in a very real sense is the antithesis of what I am elsewhere suggesting and is therefore funny. So it must be clunge – or at the very least, minge, or if even that offends, splattered clam.

But it never happened. There was no kickback. The silence on that Tuesday night was unendurable. Why isn’t Fraser ringing me about the fucking clunge business and explaining why he has decided that the word was not befitting of a publication which had such an exalted pedigree, all the way back to those fucking liberal leftie Regency chancers, and which was now owned by people – refined, decent and very well-off people – who did not have much truck with clunges and the like? But there was no argument rolling down the line.

I checked my phone to see if I had missed the call. Nope. And as a consequence the editor within me began to nag. ‘Ring them up and tell them to replace clunge,’ this voice said, ‘because it’s not becoming. It’s just cheap. You often cheapen yourself in such a way because at heart you’re 12 years old and possessed only of an aspiration to shock.’ The editor within, you see, is always crueller and more censorious than the actual editor.

But I didn’t ring the mag. Probably got pissed and fell asleep watching Family Fortunes on Yesterday. But I did wonder why that call from Fraser had never come. Perhaps he was dealing with something more pressing than an infantile columnist – that thought occurred. Perhaps he is just sick to death of you and your obsessions. Or is having trouble with a Taki column, or Douglas has maybe told the truth a little too resonantly again, or Lionel has said something a bit gamey or or or or…

There were so many of those ors. So many fires to put out, every week. And then fires which after consideration he decided should let blaze for a bit. Nobody has trodden that incredibly thin line with greater legerity and acuity than Fraser Nelson.

It must be clunge – or at the very least, minge, or if even that offends, splattered clam

He was extraordinarily prescient about the trouble coming down the line from the massed hordes of hate-not-hopers on the left who wanted the magazine closed down because it possessed, in general, a point of view with which they disagreed. Intellectual pygmies like Owen Jones, tapping feverishly on their little Twitter accounts, splaffing their fury and self-righteousness over their keyboards, determined to close mouths.

What actually happened of course these last 15 years was that the circulation of The Spectator increased almost exponentially, because Fraser allowed the important stuff to get through and just stopped enough to prevent us from becoming an easy target for those whose only concern is to silence voices which dare to dissent from an increasingly censorious left-wing hegemony. His success as an editor will become, in time, legendary and is even now scarcely believable. In an age when the attention span of the world was reducing almost exponentially and the appetite for newsprint was drying up, The Spectator soared. Thanks to a singular journalistic vision which was at once both liberal, in the best sense of the term, and conservative in its these days rarely seen unspastic manifestation.

Fraser – we are all hacks and we all shuffle off to Buffalo, sooner or later. One way or another. But you are an exceptional journalist and I will miss you terribly, as a friend and also as your perpetually splenetic and furious and undoubtedly annoying, arrogant, employee. The one who argued with you, sometimes in a rage, on a Tuesday evening, when you decided that it was per-haps an inopportune time to have a go at the trannies and wondered if I might contribute something to the magazine which was perhaps less fantastically bigoted.

I have to say that in all our many arguments over the years, you were almost always right. Only almost always, mind. You were wrong that time regarding the piece I wrote about poofs. I was SO fucking right about that one. Just SO bang on the money. Might dig it up and see how Gove likes it. Think he’d be OK. But you can’t tell, can you?