Observing The Spectator's Lowest Life
Lloyd Evan's grim column is another entry into the magazine's annals of awfulness.
Previously: Excessive Truss Issues
Whether their reviewers are mocking or mollifying, the British press is giving Liz Truss' book something it doesn't deserve – attention.
In May 2023, Jeremy Clarke, who’d occupied The Spectator’s performatively grotty Low Life column since 2000 (after the death of its originator Jeffrey Bernard in 1997) died. Clearly itching to fill that vacancy, the magazine’s theatre critic Lloyd Evans has been filing a column called No Life since December last year. It’s gone unnoticed by anyone other than the most committed Spectator readers until now.
In his fourth dispatch in the slot but the second so far to cover the topic of receiving sexual services from masseuses, Evans opens by writing leeringly about a lecture:
‘Like being chained to a lunatic.’ That’s how a man feels in relation to his libido. And the lunatic latches on to anything, irrationally, and without warning. In Cambridge recently I dropped into a lecture given by a beautiful historian, Lea Ypi, from Albania, whose discourse included this observation about revolutionaries: ‘Once they attain power they lose all interest in revolution.’ Good point. Her blonde hair spilling over her shoulders absorbed far more of my attention than her political reflections and I was desperate to speak to her afterwards, but I had no way to orchestrate a meeting.Unsurprisingly, Professor Ypi has objected to her walk-on part in Evans’ public wank fantasy. She tweeted:
Advice for scholars: next time you lecture on Kant and revolutions at “Downing” (Darwin College) Cambridge, make sure your hair is neatly tied and that you’re not blonde. Or else your research impact will be on The Spectator libido section.Ypi’s correction to Evans’ original copy, which said her lecture took place at Downing rather Darwin College, is worth noting because The Spectator has taken the time to correct that minor error while leaving the rest of the reprehensible piece unaltered.
The obvious and unsustainable defence of Evans’ column will be that he was the butt of the joke, showing how pathetic it was that he couldn’t concentrate on the lecture because he was horny for the academic’s hair. But his grim confession includes her name and neither he nor his editors saw any problem with dragging her into his muck.
Things get even worse when Evans uses his inability to harass Ypi in person as a bridge to an excruciatingly detailed, word count-filling description of visiting a sex worker in which he casts himself as thoroughly decent guy:
As we got dressed afterwards, she complimented me on my old walking shoes. ‘Thank you,’ I said, feeling baffled that she’d chosen to praise my sorry-looking boots rather than my lean and toned physique. Then she turned shyly towards me with her pale tummy exposed. ‘I’m fat,’ she said mournfully. I sprang instantly to reassure her. ‘Not fat. Beautiful,’ I said, smoothing my palm tenderly across her stomach. ‘Lovely, pretty, gorgeous,’ I added, spraying out synonyms in the hope of finding a word that lay within the compass of her understanding. She seemed satisfied.
As we padded about, tugging our clothes back on, I realised we were like a long-married couple observing the conventions of mutual respect and co-operation. We’d known each other for 17 minutes and yet the grooves of domestic harmony, so etched into the human character, brought our disunited interests together and gave our small talk an air of ease and familiarity.How many men in the history of the world have persuaded themselves that someone they’ve just paid to fake intimacy and desire actually thought they were different? It’s a number so large that it could be mistaken for a national debt. A column written by Shea, the second woman turned into column fodder by Evans, would be a far more interesting read.
Let’s be frank about what Evans’ column was: An unsolicited sexual review of a female academic who he named, followed by another review of a woman he paid for sex. The Spectator thought this was an amusing diversion to publish in its back pages. It’s not an aberration, it’s entirely in line with the magazine’s editorial playbook and history.
At this point, The Spectator — where Taki, now convicted of attempted rape, wrote his encomium to the Wehrmacht, Rod Liddle confessed that he couldn’t be a teacher because he’d try to have sex with children, and vast library of Toby Young columns resides — shouldn’t retain the capacity to shock. It would matter less if the magazine received the justified disdain it deserves but it’s still treated as a respectable outlet with the ‘great’ and the ‘good’ desperate for invites to its summer party.
Evans’ column has provoked an explosion of criticism — something that the Spectator editors will no doubt consider a great success — but it’ll subside like so much uproar before it. In the British press’ game of Monopoly, The Spectator has endless chances. The inevitable next step will be for Evans or some other Spectator contributor — probably Brendan O’Neill — to turn this into a story of ‘cancel culture’ rather than a example of normal disgust at a pathetic man’s grubby hijacking of a woman’s work.
It’s tempting to write that The Spectator has gone from low life to pond life in a few short hops but the truth is the magazine has been rolling around in that slime for what seems like forever. But don’t worry, the media figures who are fulminating over this latest outrage will be be back on side in time to sample the canapés this summer.
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