'I like doubt and uncertainty': New Statesman editor Jason Cowley on coronavirus, England and novels

Source: Cherwell

“This is the big one”, Jason Cowley says when I ask him about the coronavirus pandemic. He should know. 

Having been appointed editor of the New Statesman in 2008, Cowley has edited the magazine at a time of “permanent crisis”. He arrived in October, a month after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, followed by the financial crisis. He has been there for the coalition government, austerity, the Scottish referendum, the rise of Corbyn, Brexit and international turmoil in the Middle East, Europe and the United States.

The New Statesman has evolved in the 12 years under his leadership, and occupies a niche in the British political and cultural sphere. It was founded in 1913 by the socialists Sidney and Beatrice Webb and intended to be a weekly review of politics and literature. It is now a print-digital hybrid which publishes longer pieces and essays, usually of a liberal but sceptical tone. Revered figures to have featured in its pages include Virginia Woolf, George Orwell and Christopher Hitchens.

Yet the magazine has “been through periods of difficulty over its long history”, Cowley said when we spoke over Zoom at the end of a week in which the government encouraged us to work from home. When Cowley was appointed editor in 2008, he inherited the magazine in one of those difficult patches. Under its previous two editors, the magazine had been suffering from a crisis of political identity in the monochromatic 2000s, was partly beholden to the Labour Party, and had a faltering circulation.

“I thought the space was there to change the New Statesman’s politics”

The year after he was appointed, Cowley won the Current Affairs Editor of the Year award at the British Society of Magazine Editors. “I thought the space was there to change its [the New Statesman’s] politics,” he explained to me, “to make the magazine more sceptical, more unpredictable, to break away from the hold the Labour Party had over it, to publish longer pieces, and to revive its literary pages.”

The New Statesman’s books pages are of personal importance to Cowley. His background is as a literary journalist; he spent five years as the New Statesman's literary editor. Yet he acknowledges that the novel “is no longer at the centre of the culture”. He regrets the loss of novelists like Don DeLillo and Philip Roth from the cultural mainstream — “you thought they were telling you what it was like to be in America now”. 

Our conversation about the literary giants of the 1980s and 90s falls onto the polemicist Christopher Hitchens, reinvented posthumously as a strident YouTube religion-basher. “He was a brilliant writer, but he became an internet sensation because of his brilliance as a debater. His mistake politically was to back the Iraq War, but it would have been great to have him around to go after Trump”.

Cowley’s enthusiasm for elegant writing led him to hire and develop a new generation of young writers, an endeavour which has produced figures including Laurie Penny, Mehdi Hasan, Rafael Behr, Helen Lewis and Stephen Bush.

“The New Statesman, under me, is a sceptical publication above all else. We remain of the left, but I always say we’re not on the left, or with the left. We’re part of no faction.” 

A symbolic moment in Cowley’s editorship was the decision not to endorse Labour at the 2019 general election. He was surprised by the backlash, because “if anyone had read the magazine and knew our positions they wouldn’t have been surprised by that leader. Because we’re a publication associated with the left, some think we should automatically cheerlead for the left. I don’t like that. I like a range of opinions — views from my left, views from my right, liberals, socialists, and others”.

I ask him whether there was any friction in the magazine's  offices. “It was a decision perceived as being just mine, but it was an expression of the New Statesman. There wasn’t any dissent. I’m sure some of the team thought, and they did say, that we should have endorsed Labour, but ultimately we agreed [not to endorse] through open discussion. We were unanimous as a team in being appalled by the antisemitism in and around the Labour leadership at that time. Not one member of the team disagreed on that issue and that was obviously a big factor in our decision.” While the New Statesman lost a few subscribers over the decision, “we gained many more new ones”.

Cowley has been impressed by the new Labour leader Keir Starmer. “He’s done well. Behind that nice guy persona, he’s a very calculated man.” He contrasts Starmer´s managerial experience with Corbyn’s. “Corbyn had never run anything, he’d never even been a shadow minister. Keir Starmer was Director of Public Prosecutions — that’s a big job. He’s competent, he’s pragmatic, and he’s reduced that huge gap between the Tories and Labour, but he’s not in the lead. The Tories have still got that solid, pro-Brexit vote behind them”.

I ask him about the government and the prime minister. The New Statesman published an ‘anatomy of a crisis’ special issue in July, in which the magazine condemned the government’s response to coronavirus. A large part of the issue was led by the magazine’s new data journalism team, headed by David Ottewell. The issue focused on the effects of austerity on the healthcare system, as well as more immediate failures with testing and PPE. “We wanted to marshal the facts,” Cowley explained. “We tried to use data so it was less a series of polemical pieces”. But a polemical response to Johnson? “I think he’s really struggled. Johnson’s great gift — and he has gifts — is that he’s not a conventional politician. He speaks in such a way that people find amusing. His natural mode of delivery is boosterism, optimism, bluster, and it worked at first, but all national leaders at the beginning of the pandemic had spikes in their popularity. As time’s gone on, he’s been exposed for his lack of seriousness, his bluster, his incompetence, his inconsistency.”

“I don’t like stridency and certainty. I like doubt and uncertainty”

One of the New Statesman’s most widely-read pieces during the lockdown was by the political philosopher John Gray, in which he called the pandemic ‘a turning point in history’. Gray’s scepticism and elegant literary style is perhaps the quintessence of the magazine under Cowley’s editorship, and Gray has become one of the magazine’s lead essayists. “John doesn’t really believe in progress,” says Cowley. “He thinks that what’s gained can also be lost. So we shouldn’t be surprised that we’re in the situation that we’re in”. 

Cowley’s own politics echo some aspects of Gray’s thinking. “I’m a moderate. I believe politics is about balance. I’m sceptical of grand ideas to remake society — utopian ideas. I prefer incrementalism. I’m not against radical reform, though — I am of the left. I don’t like stridency and certainty. I like doubt and uncertainty”. 

Yet the editor’s preference for gradualism did not imply the New Statesman’s lack of support for the Black Lives Matter movement following the epochal moment that was George Floyd’s murder in May. “We ran a signature essay by Gary Younge. We were very supportive of those movements around Black Lives Matter and the terrible Floyd murder. That’s the great campaigning side of the New Statesman. We’ve always been on the side of racial equality, women’s rights, gay rights. That’s been very much part of the New Statesman’s liberalism. I’m in no doubt there’s absolute institutional racism. I grew up in the 70s and 80s when racism was everywhere. In football, especially. The racial abuse directed at black players was terrible.”

Cowley has written extensively about football, especially about its implications with English identity, a theme which he will expand upon in his book on England and Englishness, to be published by Picador next year. “Gareth Southgate is a really quite unusual football manager who is alert to the nuances and complexities of modern English identity…There’s an unease around the English Question, but it’s going to be forced upon us as the UK fragments, and as the Scottish and the Welsh become more confident in their identity”. Cowley has long anticipated the fragmentation of the UK, and says that, while Sturgeon is not a purely cynical operator, she is sagely using the pandemic to contrast Scotland’s governance with England's.

I finish by asking him if he has any advice for students looking to get into the world of writing, criticism and journalism. “It’s a really difficult time, and I really wish young people well.” Cowley’s own background is not one of privilege, so he speaks from a place of empathy when asked about the intimidating spectre of the media job-market. “My advice would be to work on the student paper, talk to people, do interviews, write and read as much as you can, but above all else, follow your interests. Be true to what you’re interested in. Sometimes you might have to compromise and take a diversion, but always try and come back. Though what I would finally say is to read the New Statesman!”

With thanks to Jason Cowley for taking the time to be interviewed for Pi Media. 

His book on England and Englishness will be published by Picador in 2022. 

His collection of essays, Reaching for Utopia, is published by Salt Publishing.

You can subscribe to the New Statesman at newstatesman.com/subscribe