Bruce Anderson

Bruce Anderson read History at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where he was a contemporary of the historian Paul Bew. In his youth he was a Marxist, and it was as a member of the radical organisation People’s Democracy — alongside Bew — that he first became involved in the civil rights campaign in Northern Ireland. On New Year’s Day 1969, he joined a four-day ‘freedom walk’ from Belfast to Derry. On 4 January he and his fellow marchers were attacked by approximately two hundred loyalists at Burntollet Bridge, just outside Derry. It was, by all accounts, the most dramatic moment in the story of People’s Democracy. It was also the beginning of a political education that would carry him a very long way from where he started.

By the mid-1970s the Marxism had gone. What replaced it was a deep and abiding Toryism — conservative in temperament, sceptical of utopias, grounded in history and in a belief that the best one can do is ensure that good keeps its nose ahead of evil, world without end. He became political editor of The Spectator, covering the Heath collapse, Thatcher’s ascent, and the reshaping of post-war conservatism from the inside. He wrote for The Daily Mail and, from 2003, for The Independent — a right-wing columnist on a left-leaning paper, which suited his taste for argument and his indifference to the comfort of agreement.

In 2003, writing in The Independent, he identified David Cameron as a future leader of the Conservative Party — against the paper’s own editorial line and at a time when Cameron was barely known beyond Westminster. He has been described as ‘the John Bull of British journalism’: a one-time Marxist who built a reputation as the sword-bearer of the Right, and yet was a staunch advocate of Remain. The contradictions are the point. He has never been interested in consistency for its own sake, only in being right about the matter at hand.

He continues to write the Spectator’s Drink column, which has become one of the magazine’s most popular features — a fortnightly meditation on wine, friendship, politics, and the feeling of the man at the table, written with a warmth and an ease that belies the sharpness underneath. A selection of those columns was published as Drink!, with a foreword by David Cameron.

This site is his attempt to do what the news cycle cannot: explain why things happened, what they mean, and where we are now. Politics, culture, memoir. The things he could not write until now.