My 15 years as chief proprietor of The Spectator remain one of the most enjoyable and commercially successful chapters of my career. When we acquired the title, its former proprietor remarked that it “broke even before expenses.” Under the successive editorships of Charles Moore, Dominic Lawson and Boris Johnson, and with the dynamic advertising leadership of Luis Dominguez, the magazine’s revenues rose sharply, and it became a reliable profit centre. Some elements of that time were also quite humorous. There were the inevitable personal dramas, including the refusal of our publisher, Kimberly Fortier, to attend a Spectator event if the deputy editor, Petronella Wyatt, would be present. It later turned out that the dispute stemmed from both of them having an extramarital affair with the visually impaired Home Secretary, David Blunkett. Approximately every third week I would get a call from Mark Steyn, one of our most talented and valuable writers, informing us that he would not be filing his immensely popular column on account of an invariably tiny grievance about an editor attempting to move a punctuation mark or impose the American rather than the British spelling of a word. I occasionally became embroiled in minor controversies in The Spectator myself. The first was when we had just taken control and Christopher Hitchens wrote an especially hostile piece about President Reagan, which I took issue with and responded to. This inaugurated a long series of public acerbities between us on a variety of subjects. Through our public disputes we developed an odd sort of camaraderie, and by the time of his brave and premature death from cancer our exchanges, though still amusingly abrasive, verged on cordiality. On another occasion Taki, the writer of the popular “High Life” column, made the assertion that the American armed forces answered to Mossad, which prompted my reply in the following issue under the heading “J’accuse!” Taki misinterpreted this as my issuing him a very public pink slip, whereupon he engaged our mutual friend, William F. Buckley Jr., to mediate the dispute. In those days there was never a dull moment, and it was an unusually agreeable way of generating a profit. The magazine is now bearing down like a heat-seeking missile and will celebrate its 200th anniversary in 2028. I wish good fortune to all who are associated with it.