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Five months after that Question Time appearance, on my regular Friday morning slot on Good Morning Britain, I didn’t just think about walking out, I actually did it. Normally, I’m on each week with Jacqui Smith to talk about the political stories of the day. On this occasion she was on holiday, so they told me that left-wing economics commentator Grace Blakeley was to be my partner for the day. I like Grace, and after she came on my radio show for the first time I promoted her with producers of several leading TV shows. Ten minutes before we were due on air, we were told we were to be joined by Radio 5 Live presenter Nihal Arthanayake. I’d never met him before but knew him by reputation as someone who had to feign impartiality, because he is a definite man of the Left. Presenters Ben Shephard and Kate Garraway started by asking Grace about the tragic case of the mentally ill 18-year-old who threw a six-year-old off a sixth-floor balcony at the Tate Modern. She spoke for about a minute, with no interruption from me, blaming the whole thing on austerity and government cuts. I regarded this as preposterous and spent a whole nine seconds saying so. I was then interrupted by both of them, who wouldn’t let me continue. It’s a typical tactic of the Left. Shut down the debate and don’t let the other person speak. I made repeated attempts to continue, but I was in the middle and it was a pincer movement from both sides. The presenters didn’t intervene, so I decided to calmly take off my microphone, stand up and leave. I had no interest in another ten minutes of being shouted down by two people who weren’t interested in debating or even listening to another viewpoint. Social media went into meltdown. Initially it was 90 to 10 in my favour, but as time progressed, it split down tribal lines. If you were on the Left, I acted childishly, spat out my dummy and had no counter to Grace’s wonderful arguments. If you were on the Right, I was completely justified in doing what I did and the other two were a disgrace for closing me down. The argument continued for days afterwards. I made my peace with Grace over direct messages on Twitter, but Nihal launched into a barrage of unprofessional tweets seeking to undermine me. It said more about him than it did about me. The whole thing was an object lesson in why these panel debates aren’t worth having unless the participants can bring themselves to acknowledge that there may be another point of view. It’s why Jacqui Smith and I are popular on that show and on our podcast, because we can disagree without falling out. There is a real appetite for respectful debate nowadays, in a way that maybe there wasn’t in years gone by.
As the end of the twentieth century drew near, even at election time, it was difficult to attract an audience to hear a politician sell their electoral wares. I remember in the 1983 general election organising a public meeting for the revered electors of Norwich North to hear a speech from Peter Walker, then a senior cabinet minister in Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet. The meeting was attended by a grand total of seven men and a dog, and the dog had only walked in because it was trying to find its owner.
In my own election campaign in North Norfolk in 2005, three public meetings were organised by local churches and community groups across the constituency, in Wells-next-the-Sea, Fakenham and North Walsham. Out of an electorate of more than eighty thousand voters only about three hundred and fifty of them could be bothered to venture out on a spring evening to hear the candidates debating with each other. If memory serves me correctly, they were actually rather constructive and polite debates, but I doubt they changed very many people’s minds given that most of those attending each debate were allied to one political party or another.
However, things appear to be changing.
I first noticed this when the then Conservative MP Ann Widdecombe and I toured the country’s regional theatres with our ‘In Conversation’ show, An Audience with Ann Widdecombe. We ‘played’ around sixty or seventy venues in front of good-sized audiences. They had each paid around £15 to come and hear La Widdecombe’s words of wisdom. I remember her remarking at the time that the secret to reviving the old-style political public meeting was to charge people to attend. She may have been joking, but her words turned out to be prophetic.
As an aside, on the first occasion I appeared on Radio 4’s Any Questions? programme, I was wracked with nerves and the host, Jonathan Dimbleby, finished introducing me by saying that I host the theatre show ‘A Night with Ann Widdecombe’. He mischievously looked at me and asked: ‘Is that a whole night?’ I rolled with the audience laughter and replied: ‘That’s for me to know and you to guess … A gentleman never tells.’ Cue more audience laughter. We were on our way and having got an audience reaction my nerves had gone. It was a good way for Jonathan to put me at my ease.
A new generation has grown up thirsting for information and political insight. They don’t see political parties as the only vehicles to make their views known. The age of the pressure group and interest group has arrived, and they exert far more influence on this generation than tribalistic political parties. That’s not to say political parties have become irrelevant, but they no longer enjoy the salience, relevance or impact that they once did. The problem for political parties has always been that they have very little to offer their members, apart from the chance to part with more money and the occasional opportunity to meet a political luminary. Given the increasing influence of the central party on local constituency parties, they often don’t even have a free hand in choosing their parliamentary candidates nowadays.
It is estimated by the House of Commons Library that only 1.7 per cent of the electorate belongs to a political party. Having said that, back in 2013 the figure was only 0.8 per cent. Since then, with the exception of UKIP, all political parties have increased their membership, with Labour seeing a rise from under 200,000 to a peak of nearly 600,000 in 2020. The Liberal Democrats have nearly tripled their membership in recent years, while the Conservatives have bounced back from a low of 124,000 a few years ago to nearly 200,000 at the time of writing.
Why has this happened? In part it is due to the two crises that have hit the United Kingdom over the last decade – the financial crash and Brexit. In times of crises, political tribes circle the wagons and people who had drifted away often return to the fold. Or in the case of the Labour Party, the election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader inspired the previously disparate groups on the far Left to join, and in some sense take over, the party. The Brexit Party attracted more than a hundred thousand registered supporters within weeks of being formed – all people who saw it as a vehicle to achieve more than a BRINO: Brexit in Name Only.
So the rise in party membership is partly about ‘circling the wagons’ and partly about being genuinely inspired, but there’s also a third, rather more negative reason, and that’s the fact that our politics is becoming increasingly polarised. On both sides of the political divide, people are on the defensive, so they retreat into their own political silos. They’re right, and everyone else is wrong, and never the twain shall meet.
But those who are not aligned to one cause or another often feel ignored as they struggle to come to terms with the events that are affecting them. They don’t trust the representatives of political parties to be honest, so they look elsewhere for their current-affairs appetites to be sated.
That in part explains the rise of the live political event, whether they be at literary festivals, regional theatres, big London venues or the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. These events tend to be conducted in a polite and respectful tone, free of the normal Westminster argy-bargy. They’re designed to be more discursive and enlightening and to enable those attending to leave the event feeling better informed than they were when they arrived. How many people can genuinely say that at the end of most TV political debates they have learned anything at all? The analysts often concentrate on the body language displayed by the participants rather than what they actually said.
In early 2019 Conservative backbencher and arch Eurosceptic Jacob Rees-Mogg sold out the 2,000-seater London Palladium. The Spectator panel debates between commentators and politicians regularly sell more than one thousand tickets. Intelligence Squared, which was formed in 2002, host Oxford Union-style debates and so popular have they been that the format has been licensed all over the world. In London they can attract audiences of up to two and half thousand, and they also broadcast most of their events on Facebook or YouTube and then release them as podcasts.
Literary festivals are now often populated with politicians or political commentators, even when they don’t have books to flog. The kind of people who attend these festivals are invariably politically interested and on the liberal left. The festivals tend to be somewhat unimaginative in who they invite and concentrate on ‘people like them’, who often preach to a rather tepid echo chamber. They’re the sort of events at which the Guardian’s Polly Toynbee goes down a storm, but where Rod Liddle or Douglas Murray would cause a riot – that’s if they were ever invited in the first place.
Conservative MP George Freeman launched a new Politics Festival in 2016, which was immediately dubbed Glastonbury for Politicos. It was initially invite-only and aimed at people on the Right who were interested in new ideas and new thinking. By 2019 it had widened its remit and was open to anyone. Judging from the guest list, which included former Labour ministers and self-confessed communist Ash Sarkar, it has become a very big tent indeed.
Having observed the increasing popularity of live political events, be they debates or interviews, I decided to try my own hand at it. In the summer of 2018, my agent introduced me to James Seabright, one of the leading promoters at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. We agreed we’d do an initial run of nine shows called ‘Iain Dale All Talk’ and James booked us in at one of the Fringe’s best venues, the Gilded Balloon. Nine shows rapidly turned into 12 and then 24. My guest line-up included politicians like Nicola Sturgeon, John McDonnell, Sadiq Khan, Jo Swinson and Nicholas Soames as well as media personalities such as Kate Adie, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, Kirsty Wark and Christiane Amanpour.
I did my own ‘flyering’ on the streets of Edinburgh and was amazed at the number of people who told me they were booking tickets and thought I’d got a great line-up.
I remember one chap coming up to me before a show brandishing the show flyer. ‘Are all these people really coming?’ he asked in disbelief. ‘Of course,’ I replied. ‘What, you mean Sadiq Khan is actually coming to Edinburgh – you mean the real Sadiq Khan?’ ‘Yes, I replied.’ He walked away and then immediately came back. ‘How on earth do you get all these people?’ he asked. ‘I have a good contacts book,’ I retorted. He seemed satisfied with that.
I reflected on this and decided that he reacted in this way because he thought that highfalutin politicians didn’t generally mix in his circles. In Edinburgh you see them up close and personal, and that was the whole point.
I wasn’t intending to do hard-hitting political interviews. I wanted to have a proper conversation and find out what makes them tick. Judging from the audience reaction, I think that was the right approach. They kept telling me that I had enabled them to see a side of the politicians they rarely ever glimpsed in the routine forensic and combative interviews they saw on TV or listened to on the radio. Word spread so far that I kept being asked if I would release recordings of each show so that people who weren’t able to go to Edinburgh could listen to them. Hence the Iain Dale All Talk podcast was born.
And I enjoyed the whole experience so much I hope to make it an annual event.
The interest in politics and current affairs is higher than it has ever been, and not just in the UK. Despite the sometimes appalling state of our discourse in the political field, more and more young people appear to be taking part in the conversation. The question remains, however, whether they will go one step further and progress from having an active interest to becoming active participants. That is why everyone active as a political thought leader, or politician, has a responsibility to moderate their language, avoid deliberately divisive rhetoric on public platforms and thereby encourage people to believe that pursuing an active interest in politics is a noble thing to do. The media has a responsibility here too, especially the social media companies. People need to know what the consequences are if they step beyond the borders of acceptable behaviour.
As you read this, you’re probably thinking ‘some hope’ or ‘fat chance’ or words to that effect. I have to remain optimistic about the possibility of this happening, albeit over a protracted period of time, otherwise I’d have to conclude that there is little hope for our liberal democracy.
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