The magazine’s circulation has grown steadily to what is now about 1.3 million but may be much more with electronic copies. The Agnellis, of Fiat fame, are also in there somewhere. It is owned, and likely controlled, by a complex set up which heavily involves the UK branch of the Rothchild family, (arguably the richest family in the world, ever, one estimate at $350billion total!), gaining income from international high finance. It has run through many editors during its existence and its present one is a modern young feminist of what is now seen as being of liberal-Left persuasion, although its change pre-dates her tenure from 2014.

The Economist was started (after The Spectator of course ) in 1843 to pursue then emergent liberal principles. I was of exactly the opposite view and thought both Brexit and Trump should and would win. The Economist campaigned very hard against Brexit and Trump – very hard. It was somewhere around the Brexit/US election period and I was very critical. Sometime in this process of disengagement, The Economist sent me an opinion poll about itself, which I filled in. I noticed last year that I was actually reading less and less of it. The Economist now arrives every Friday morning on my iPad. So, I became once more a weekly reader after a lapse of almost half a century. In retirement, I did some irregular consulting for firms and one gave me a sub to The Economist, presumably to keep me honest and well informed. There is now so much on the web to compete. I used the very good textbooks by then available with great technical support. Returning to Australia I only taught some sort of economics for my last decade of paid work. I wrote a column for the NZ Business Review Weekly and found The Economist to be well informed and well focused on and within a country then beset with Tsarina Clarke’s brand of destructive and ruinous leftism. The magazine only came back into my life when I moved to New Zealand at century turn. I then plunged into politics where only a poseur would be seen reading a serious journal.

It was just outside my sphere of interest. Our alienation remained through my re-alignment to some sort of realism and contributions to The Australian in the 1980s. The Economist, then a supporter of the war, became a vile enemy, used indeed by supporters of the war for a crib before debates. I then drifted off to Australia, to the dark side, to political science and then, sigh, Leftism after the impact of the Vietnam War sunk in. I used it very successfully when I moved to teaching economics at Shooters Hill Grammar School and the class did very well at university entry, then a key test. It tried to depict the world according to economic principles in a dry scholarly way. Richard Lipsey and Lord Robbins recommended it to me. I first encountered The Economist magazine as an undergraduate at the London School of Economics in the early 1960s.

I never read the economist