Middle Englanders are taking back control

So many of my friends reckon they're becoming increasingly left-wing, but they're just the same as they always were. It's just our politics that temporarily went a bit crazy.

Labour’s election victory came as a relief, but on Brexit and Gaza they’re wrong. Photo: Samuel Regan-Asante 

In George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston Smith was fighting to remain true to himself and his values in a state where it was expedient to mould and adapt both regularly. Over almost ten years, I've felt engaged in such a fight myself.

A great many of my friends are telling me they feel the same. They almost always add they reckon they are becoming increasingly left-wing. I suppose they feel the need to tell me this because they see what I have to say on the social media site I still stubbornly think of as Twitter. Whatever happens, my responses are, broadly speaking, predictable and maybe reassuring.

I don't care for hatred — racism, Islamophobia, homophobia, anti-Semitism, the demonisation of any minority group at all — because I know where it ends. I know the country can't help anyone unless it's making money, so I like to see governments in office that have sensible economic policies. I recognise we have to pay our taxes if we are to have a country that's well run, with public services that are fit for purpose, but that money must be spent wisely and not corruptly. I don’t wish to see children blown to pieces in far-away lands with missiles we have supplied. I am under-stated, rather than over-stated in my patriotism, but it's there all the same, and strong.

I am aware, too that we are, compared to a lot of countries, very lucky and we have a great many blessings to count. We have a moral responsibility that comes with that to help others less fortunate that ourselves. There was a time when affording refuge to desperate souls was a source of national pride rather than confected outrage.

It wasn't until Brexit reared its ugly head that I was greatly interested in politics as I’d previously counted on politicians of both the main parties to just get on with it and look out for all of our best interests. I certainly didn’t expect them to actively make our lives worse.

None of this is, of course, remotely radical. The reality is I haven't changed and nor have my friends, who now see themselves as veering to the left. It's our political parties that have changed — the Tory party, most of all — and our media, most notably the Daily Mail and the BBC whose tabloid journalism that once great organisation is now aping. I am sure my friends would define themselves in much the same way as I just have: those values are all quintessentially British. All of us belong to a demographic that looked for a while as if it was going to be rendered extinct: those that would describe themselves as socially liberal, but fiscally conservative.

Once we occupied the political centre-ground and the country was ours. It was a kinder, gentler time. I could get around a table with Tory and Labour voters and there were no furious rows. Some of us even switched our votes from time to time. We all recognised that our country and what it stood for was bigger than any of us and it wasn’t done to be a big unpragmatic ‘I am.’

The years we held sway seem relatively boring ones now, but the country seemed a lot more at ease with itself. I was on the BBC and Sky News constantly. I doubt if anyone did more paper reviews in the early years of the new millennium than I did, but then, as one producer told me, no one had a more instinctive feel for what Middle England was thinking. I would routinely get to bed at around 1 am after doing a late-night paper review and then get up again at 5 am to review the very same papers for an early morning one. I was working happily on the Daily Mail and later the Daily Telegraph and I couldn't put a foot wrong. I felt like I was Mr Middle England.

‘Johnson asked not what he could do for his country, but what his country could do for him.’

Then one day on the Telegraph I met Boris Johnson. Ugly, boorish, drinking heavily and utterly self-centred, he was probably the first total narcissist I ever set eyes upon. He asked not what he could do for his country, but what his country could do for him. I had got into journalism with a heady sense of idealism after the Watergate crisis and the film that was made about it called All the President's Men and I genuinely believed that this trade — and, for that matter, politics — should be about making the world a better place. All Johnson cared about was making the world a better place for him and he was then warping journalism as he was later to warp politics.

‘Fuck 'em, they're all morons,' I recall my Old Etonian colleague saying whenever I'd inquire if some new hard-right policy he was advocating made any sense or was in any way practicable. I struggled to find the words to debate with him because he never debated by any recognisable rules: facts and intellectual coherence were never any impediments to his arguments. Once I recall telling him that if the country ever heeded his advice and got taxes down to virtually nil, it may well be that we might all end up living in vast houses in Belgravia, but, on our way to our Maseratis parked outside, we were liable to be stabbed to death by a member of the vast desperate underclass his ideology would creatre. Still, he seemed to believe — as Thatcher apparently did — that there really was no such thing as society, only the self-preservation society.

I'd taken it as read that Johnson would always be on the mad periphery both of journalism and public life, but in that I was of course very much mistaken. If I had to pinpoint the moment it all finally came to an end for me it was in 2016 when a booker from Sky News phoned up and asked me if I'd like to debate Brexit with Kevin Maguire of the Daily Mirror. He asked me what my position was and I said obviously I agreed with Kevin that it would a disaster for the country, both socially and economically. There was a long pause at the end of the line. The booker — who had become a friend — asked me if I was sure. I said I was. He said in that case he'd have to find someone else.

I told one of my friends on the Telegraph what had happened and he was aghast. Journalism — like acting — was a tough old game and it was about always accepting work, never turning it down. He pointed out that with my fair hair and blue eyes I looked very much like a Nazi officer in an old Fifties war film and would be just right to put the case for Brexit. I protested that I didn't believe in it. He warned it would cost me dearly in terms of freelance television work, and that, going forward, he could honestly see no point in me as a television pundit, given how I looked and spoke, it I didn't embrace Brexit.

He turned out to be commercially right of course, if morally wrong. I somehow believed that it would all work out for the best and people like me who had stood firm would come out of it alright. I had underestimated the extent to which, among my fellow countrymen and women, ‘judgement had simply fled to brutish beasts and men had lost their reason.’

The years after the EU referendum of 2016 were thus about diminishing returns for my media career. There were election columns for the Daily Mirror and a long-running gig for The New European that continues to this day, but the television work dried up completely. It was good for me in that it compelled me to diversify into books and plays — there was Bloody Difficult Women — my play about Gina Miller’s court cases against the governments of May and Johnson — in London and Edinburgh, and, next year another play featuring one of our greatest actors about the celebritisation of politics — and I took on a lot of PR work which I found intellectually challenging.

All the while, I saw former colleagues who had always professed to me in the old days how left-wing or liberal they had been switching allegiances and getting gigs on publications like the Spectator and extolling the virtues of Brexit and populist politicians 24/7 on television. In common with so many of my friends — my fellow inhabitants of Middle England — I was conscious, too, of the ‘left-wing’ tag that had started to be applied to me. We were all relieved, of course, by the General Election result, but, on issues such as Gaza and Brexit, I would say most of us regard Sir Keir Starmer as profoundly disappointing. The Labour government is a step in the right direction, but it’s going to be a long journey.

‘The Daily Mail once encouraged its readers to look outwards, not inwards.’

I believe last week's riots were significant. We had gone from Nigel Farage's cynically hysterical 'Breaking point' poster — that image of him standing before a poster showing vast numbers of immigrants pouring into the country — to a turning point away from him. Like an alcoholic, we had to reach rock bottom before we could begin the process of recovery. The outpouring of public revulsion — the vast crowds that gathered in the streets on the side of decency and real British values — so vastly outnumbered the racists and the thugs whose tarnished heroes were Trump, Farage, Johnson and maybe even Putin that I believe the kind of Middle Englanders I once embodied are about to take back control again.

At a restaurant the other day, I saw Paul Dacre, who was my editor on the Daily Mail in the days before he and his paper succumbed to the Brexit fever. I knew from all the legal letters the Mail’s lawyers had sent me that he hadn't taken kindly to the way I had portrayed him in my play Bloody Difficult Women, which was as much as about the media as it was Miller’s cases. I found the situation mildly amusing and smiled at the old ogre, but all he did was glare back.

It occurred to me as I reflected on the encounter that I'd actually been the one who had been loyal to the Mail — or at least the great newspaper that his predecessor Sir David English had created. A newspaper that had compassionately airlifted Vietnamese orphans to the safety of Britain in 1975 and campaigned vigorously for the country to join the European Community. A politically adroit, sure-footed, innovative and clever newspaper that made a star out of a black journalist named Baz Bamigboye and encouraged its readers always to look outwards, never inwards.

It was the misfortune of the Mail, like the Tory party, and the country itself, to have ended up with the wrong people in charge at the wrong time. They warped our journalism, our politics and our values for their own ends, but our national personality is strong. Historians will I believe look back on this unhappy period as an aberration. The country is recovering both its equilibrium and composure and very soon I have no doubt our politics will soon be regarded as boringly middle-of-the-road again and my views will once again be deemed fit for the airwaves.