In the lead up to Gifford's retirement, various men, singly or in combination, attempted to use the succession to gain the Quarterly Review for their personal or corporate cause. From mid-1822, when Murray was first confronted by the prospect of Gifford's imminent withdrawal, to September 1824, when the incumbent could no longer proceed, in his effort to wrest control of the editorship from the journal's political sponsors, Murray sometimes acted unprofessionally and, to those unaware of his intentions, at times inexplicably.

During the succession crisis, Gifford taunted Murray for his indecision, yet he himself continually set up road blocks. In his stubbornness he was venting sixteen years of sublimated resentment, but he was also trying to derail Murray's plan to hire a subservient, tractable editor. In the end, Murray and Gifford settled on John Taylor Coleridge – ‘a nice young man’ the editor called him – Southey's literary protégé whom they regarded as a safe candidate. In person deferential and refined, in print a self-righteous moralist, Coleridge crusaded in the Quarterly Review to clean up the literary neighbourhood. His campaign made Gifford, to whom his anonymously published reviews were imputed, the bête noire of the Cockney and Satanic Schools, but as Gifford enthusiastically shared his views, Coleridge's articles endeared him to the editor. Murray, though, had his doubts about Coleridge's commitment and perhaps was uncomfortable with his religiosity. In December 1824, when the transition took place, neither man knew they had hired a fifth columnist; Coleridge, along with Southey and a collection of High Churchmen and High Tories, in 1822 had resolved to gain the Quarterly Review or, if that proved impossible, to compete with it by setting up a new conservative journal.

Murray opened the contest for the succession when in September 1820 he introduced the idea at the end of a letter to Croker in which he complained that Cabinet had failed to avail itself of the Quarterly Review, a ‘machine’ that a million pounds could not suddenly create.