New Statesman - After Kingsley Martin

After Kingsley Martin

Martin retired in 1960 and was replaced as editor by John Freeman, a politician-journalist who had resigned from the Labour government in 1951 with Bevan and Harold Wilson. Freeman left in 1965 and was followed in the chair by Paul Johnson, then on the left, under whose editorship Statesman reached its highest ever circulation of just over 100,000. For some, even enemies of Johnson such as Richard Ingrams, this was a strong period for the magazine editorially.

After Johnson's departure in 1970, the Statesman went into a long period of declining circulation under successive editors: Richard Crossman (1970–72), who tried to edit it at the same time as playing a major role in Labour politics; Anthony Howard (1972–78), whose recruits to the paper included Christopher Hitchens, Martin Amis and James Fenton (surprisingly, the arch anti-Socialist Auberon Waugh was writing for Statesman at this time before returning to his more natural home of The Spectator); Bruce Page (1978–82), who moved the paper towards specialising in investigative journalism, sacking Arthur Marshall, who had been writing for Statesman on and off since 1935, as a columnist, allegedly because of the latter's support for Margaret Thatcher; Hugh Stephenson (1982–86), under whom it took a strong position again for unilateral nuclear disarmament; John Lloyd (1986–87), who swung the paper's politics back to the centre; Stuart Weir (1987–90), under whose editorship Statesman founded the Charter 88 constitutional reform pressure group; and Steve Platt (1990–96). By 1996 it was selling 23,000 copies a week. New Statesman was the first periodical to go online, hosted by the www.cleanroom.co.uk, in 1995.

Statesman acquired the weekly New Society in 1988 and merged with it, becoming New Statesman and Society for the next eight years, then reverting to the old title, having meanwhile absorbed Marxism Today in 1991. In 1993, Statesman was sued by Prime Minister John Major after it published an article that discussed rumours that Major was having an extramarital affair with a Downing Street caterer. Although the action was settled out of court for a minimal sum, the paper's legal costs came close to bankrupting it.

In 1994, KGB defector Yuri Shvets said that the KGB utilized New Statesman to spread disinformation. Shvets said that the KGB had provided disinformation, including forged documents, to the New Statesman journalist Claudia Wright which she used for anti-American and anti-Israel stories in line with the KGB's campaigns.