Politics Magazines in Britain: The Best UK Political Titles Compared and Explained

Boris Johnson edited The Spectator from 1999 to 2005, and in October 2024 Michael Gove took the same chair. Few other jobs show so plainly how closely British journalism and government overlap, and it is a fair reason to take politics magazines seriously even though most of them sell fewer copies than a regional newspaper. This guide sets out the UK political magazines that still matter, who founded them, who owns them now and how to choose between them.

The main politics magazines in Britain at a glance

UK political magazines from the right and the centre

The Spectator was started on 6 July 1828 by Robert Stephen Rintoul, a Scottish reformer, and claims to be the oldest surviving magazine in the world. It began as a liberal paper and moved over the following century to the conservative position it holds today, strongly Eurosceptic and Atlanticist. In 2020 it published its ten-thousandth issue. Paul Marshall bought it in September 2024 for a reported £100 million, and Gove’s appointment as editor followed a month later. Johnson’s years in the chair, remembered as colourful, are credited with lifting subscriptions to about 70,000, and total circulation was just over 107,000 at the end of 2023. Beyond the politics it prints serious arts pages on books, music, opera, film and television, which is one reason people who dislike its line still read it.

The Economist is harder to place. It was founded in September 1843 by the Scottish businessman James Wilson to argue for repeal of the Corn Laws, and it still holds to free trade. Articles carry no bylines, on the principle that the collective voice counts for more than the writer. It also still calls itself a newspaper, a habit it kept after becoming a magazine in format in 1971. Exor, the Agnelli family’s holding company, owns 43.4 per cent. If you want one weekly that covers the world with a clear economic argument, this is it. If you want British politics told from inside, it is the wrong place.

UK political magazines from the left

The New Statesman began on 12 April 1913 as “a weekly review of politics and literature”. Sidney and Beatrice Webb founded it with support from George Bernard Shaw and other Fabians, who wanted a paper closer to their politics than The New Age. Kingsley Martin edited it from 1931 to 1960, the longest term of any editor, and took the circulation to about 70,000 by the end of the Second World War. The businessman Mike Danson has owned it fully since 2009, and Thomas McTague became editor in 2025. A figure of 43,230 was reported for 2023.

Tribune is smaller and older in spirit. It was founded in 1937 by two Labour MPs, Stafford Cripps and George Strauss, as a daily paper against fascism. Aneurin Bevan edited it from 1941 to 1945, George Orwell was literary editor from 1943 to 1947 and wrote his “As I Please” column there, and Michael Foot edited it twice. It became a magazine in April 2001. The American socialist magazine Jacobin bought it in late 2018, and it is now quarterly. In June 2025, Mohamed Ali Harrath, owner of the Islam Channel, acquired it. That change of ownership is the open question on anyone’s mind: whether Tribune’s old independence survives it.

New Left Review is a different kind of publication, closer to a journal. It began in January 1960 when The New Reasoner and Universities and Left Review combined their boards. Stuart Hall was the first editor, and Perry Anderson took over in 1962. A governance dispute in 1993 saw nineteen members of its editorial committee resign. It comes out every two months, is edited by Susan Watkins, and its committee has included Tariq Ali, Mike Davis and Nancy Fraser. It is not light reading, and it makes no attempt to be.

Best politics magazines for argument rather than news

Prospect was founded in October 1995 by the Financial Times correspondent David Goodhart and the chairman Derek Coombs. It is monthly and favours long essays over reaction. Its “world’s top 100 public intellectuals” list in 2005 was won, by reader vote, by Noam Chomsky, which says something about who votes in such contests. The magazine has also run its Think Tank Awards since 2001.

The London Review of Books is nominally a literary paper, but its fortnightly essays on foreign policy, Brexit and the state are what many readers buy it for. It began in 1979 during the year-long lock-out at The Times, which had suspended the Times Literary Supplement, and for six months appeared as an insert in the New York Review of Books. It went independent in May 1980. Karl Miller, Mary-Kay Wilmers and Susannah Clapp were its founding editors, and Wilmers ran it for nearly three decades. The London Review Bookshop in Bloomsbury opened in May 2003. In 2011 a review by the historian Pankaj Mishra of a book by Niall Ferguson drew a libel threat from Ferguson, an episode that shows how seriously the paper’s essays are taken, and how much lawyers read them.

The best of the satirical magazines is Private Eye. It was founded in 1961 by Richard Ingrams, Willie Rushton, Christopher Booker and Paul Foot, and Ian Hislop has edited it since 1986. The founders had met at Shrewsbury School, where they produced a school magazine called The Walopian, and a friend, Andrew Osmond, paid for the first issues. It looks like a cheap comic on purpose, and it recorded its highest circulation in 2016, when the Christmas issue passed 287,000 copies. Hislop is in the Guinness Book of Records as the most sued person in English legal history, and the magazine sets aside close to a quarter of its turnover for libel payments. Few other politics magazines in the UK carry a legal reserve on that scale.

How the UK political magazines divide their work

The titles above do four different jobs, and it helps to know which one a magazine is doing before judging it.

Weeklies react. The Spectator and the New Statesman print columnists who must respond to a Tuesday vote by Thursday, and their strength is speed and voice. Monthlies and fortnightlies interpret: Prospect and the London Review of Books give a writer eight thousand words and a month to think, so the same event reads quite differently in them. Satire, which Private Eye supplies, works by exposing the gap between what was said and what happened. The journals do the slowest work of all, testing claims against evidence.

A reader who treats all four as the same thing will be disappointed by each. Anyone looking for a politics magazine UK shops will stock on a station newsstand is really choosing between the first three.

A last point on tone. Several of these titles are far more argumentative than their circulation suggests, and none of them hides its position. That is a feature: you know where the writer stands, and can adjust.

Westminster and academic political titles

Two categories sit outside the newsstand. The House Magazine, founded in 1976 by MPs including Mike Thomas, Richard Faulkner and Patrick Cormack, is aimed at members of both Houses and political professionals, and appears weekly when Parliament sits.

The academic end is slower and more rigorous. The Political Quarterly, which describes a centre-left outlook but stays independent of any party, dates from 1914, stopped during the First World War and was revived in 1930 by Leonard Woolf, Kingsley Martin and William Robson, with a £1,000 gift from Shaw. The British Journal of Political Science, published by Cambridge University Press since 1971, is peer-reviewed and quarterly. Neither is a magazine in the newsstand sense, and the line between a magazine and a journal is covered more fully in the guide to types of journals.

Ownership, money and what to check

Politics magazines are small businesses, and the owner matters. The Spectator changed hands in September 2024 in a deal reported at £100 million. The New Statesman has been fully owned by the businessman Mike Danson since 2009. Tribune passed from Jacobin to the owner of the Islam Channel in 2025. Private Eye is the odd one out, with the same editor, Ian Hislop, since 1986. Each of these facts is public, which is why it pays to look them up for any politics magazine UK readers might be considering.

Before subscribing to any title, three things are worth five minutes: the current editor’s name, the owner’s name, and the date of the most recent issue on the publisher’s site. A masthead that has changed twice in three years tells a reader more than the editor’s letter.

Each magazine is also a different shape on the table. The Economist’s anonymous articles, its refusal of bylines, make it impossible to follow a single writer, which is a loss if you read to find voices. The New Statesman and The Spectator do the reverse and sell their columnists by name.

Which political magazine to buy

For most readers the best single choice among politics magazines is the one you disagree with. Any of the UK political magazines named here will do for a start, and the sharpest pairing is two that disagree. Pair The Spectator with the New Statesman for a year and the arguments sharpen on both sides. If the interest is world affairs, add The Economist. For essays that last longer than the news cycle, choose Prospect or the London Review of Books. Choose Private Eye if you want to know what the others will not print.

Political magazines also have their own visual history, and the guide to magazine covers shows how a front page makes an argument before any article does. For the long view, the oldest magazines page puts The Spectator’s claim in context. The culture side of the argument, the arts-funding fights, appears in the guide to best art magazines, and the American equivalent of a weekly with real weight is The New York Times Magazine.

Whether Tribune’s quarterly pages will still carry Orwell’s kind of plain argument, or turn into a brand under new ownership, is something only the next few issues can show.