TCW: An Announcement

By Kathy Gyngell, as published by The Conservative Woman (“TCW) on 4 July 2026

It is with great sadness that I have to announce the closure of TCW on 18 July, two weeks today, when our last “edition” will go out.

As some of you know, I have edited TCW voluntarily seven days a week for 12 years. It might look as though it appears by osmosis, but believe me, it doesn’t. It was only with the advent of Margaret and Alan Ashworth in 2017 and their commitment and professional expertise that the site truly “took off.”

Though I say it myself, 12 years is an incredible record for a site run on a shoestring. We have taken readers through some of the most turbulent years of dissent and unease in Britain’s democratic history. Brexit, the plandemic and lockdown, one election after another and five Prime Ministers; a sixth arriving as we leave. A period when the mainstream corporate media catastrophically failed in its role as the fourth estate by not holding government to account. Many readers have told me TCW is what the Spectator should be, but isn’t. A “merit” achieved by a tiny, underpaid (but principled) team compared with their lavish staffing.

Yet despite the high quality of our output, my best efforts at pitching for the investment that would have put us on a secure financial footing have come to naught. I have failed to attract either the type of funding behind The Critic or UnHerd or sufficient regular reader subscriptions to make us viable. Why?

Well, we have been hoist by our own petard. TCW has never slotted into that carefully curated, acceptable face of dissent that establishment figures dare endorse. When you are blacklisted, investors run scared. That blacklisting also took the form of a barrage of censorship that stopped us advertising – a significant source of revenue. We were banned by every single online ad agency and by the whole of Facebook (Meta) during lockdown which, we were advised via a government tip-off, was because of an issue with Whitehall, most likely over our covid reporting. Such was the Conservative government’s covid censorship crackdown. From then on we were totally reliant on donations and never recovered the readership to fund the revenue stream we needed to grow. There was another reason for that.

Read More – The UK Censors have struck again: TCW is closing down