Copyright

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First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2020

FIRST EDITION

© Iain Dale 2020

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Dedication

For John,

whose love I have shared for 25 years

Epigraph

‘Now that every word is taken down and that the speaker knows that he is addressing not a private club, but a gathering that may embrace the whole nation … he must walk delicately and measure his paces; he cannot frisk and frolic in the flowery meads of rhetoric; he dare not “let himself go”.’

Lord Curzon, The Rede Lecture, University of Cambridge, 6 November 1913

‘Over the past two decades, national political and civil discourse has been characterized by “Truth Decay”, defined as a set of four interrelated trends: an increasing disagreement about facts and analytical interpretations of facts and data; a blurring of the line between opinion and fact; an increase in the relative volume, and resulting influence, of opinion and personal experience over fact; and lowered trust in formerly respected sources of factual information.’

World Economic Forum, 2018

Contents

1  Cover

2  Title Page

3  Copyright

4  Dedication

5  Epigraph

6  Contents

7  Prologue

8  Introduction: The Decline in Public Discourse

9  Part One: MEDIA

10  Chapter 1: Our Love/Hate Relationship with Social Media

11  Chapter 2: When Opposites Collide

12  Chapter 3: The Art of the Political Interview

13  Chapter 4: Thanks for your call, what would you like to say?

14  Chapter 5: Fake News, Bias and Spin

15  Part Two: POLITICS

16  Chapter 6: The Language of Politics and the Media

17  Chapter 7: The Political Virus

18  Chapter 8: Why Language Matters

19  Chapter 9: Changing Your Mind and the Art of the Apology

20  Part Three: ISSUES

21  Chapter 10: Brexit: The Angry People of Leave and Remain

22  Chapter 11: Why Racism Matters (and Immigration Is Good)

23  Chapter 12: Crime and Punishment

24  Chapter 13: The Opium of the People

25  Chapter 14: The Gay Thing

26  Chapter 15: The Language of Business

27  Chapter 16: Calling Occupants of Planetary Dogma

28  Chapter 17: The Fraudulent Debate about Poverty

29  Chapter 18: Do We Really Love the NHS?

30  Chapter 19: Last Night a DJ Saved My Life

31  Epilogue: 50 Ways to Improve Public Discourse

32  Acknowledgements

33  Epigraph

34  About the Publisher

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Prologue

Publication date was set for 28 May 2020. The publicity plan was in place. I was booked to appear at thirty or so different literary and political events during May, June and July. I was pumped. Ready for action. Why Can’t We All Just Get Along … was set to be the publishing sensation of the summer. OK, I exaggerate to make a point, but what could possibly have gone wrong? As Harold Macmillan would have said, ‘Events, dear boy, events.’ Or coronavirus, to be more precise.

And it’s because of coronavirus that this book is being published more than two months later than planned and why I’m writing a prologue.

In some ways the timing could not have been better, because the rows in the media and among some politicians have brilliantly illustrated many of the points I make in the following pages.

Nuance is a word you will read a lot over the coming 300 pages. In the debate about coronavirus it hardly featured. On social media some reckoned that Boris Johnson deliberately engineered policies to ensure tens of thousands of older people would die, which, given that it was the older generation who largely voted him into power, is a bit of a counterintuitive view to hold. Others clearly regarded him as the nation’s saviour, and how dare anyone question any aspect of the government’s response. It was yet another example of how social media divides and rules without seemingly caring a jot about the consequences for our public discourse.

There’s little doubt that the coronavirus crisis has deepened the disconnect between the media and the general public. Part of this growing mistrust comes from the daily press conferences, where a succession of journalists have seemed to delight in asking ‘gotcha’ questions; challenging the minister on duty to apologise for this, that or the other; or enquiring whether they were ‘ashamed’ of failures to deliver on promises. To the public, these questions were designed to generate headlines for the journalists themselves (or their organisation) rather than to scrutinise government actions or tease out more information and/or an explanation of policy.

There was little nuance or context. When health secretary Matt Hancock announced a target of 100,000 Covid-19 tests per day by 30 April, this target was gold-plated by the media into a pledge, from which he would not be allowed to resile.

I genuinely think it would have been impossible for Winston Churchill to have fought the Second World War with a twenty-four-hour news media in full cry. I saw a tweet the other day featuring a suggestion of how a lobby journalist in 1940 might have posed a question at Churchill’s daily press briefing …

Winston, under your leadership we’re out of Europe, which the BBC fought against. Immigrant workers are staying away. The army has no PPE and ran away at Dunkirk. Hospitals are underfunded. We have no allies in Europe. You failed to stop bombers attacking London. The shops are empty, the economy is devastated and you missed an opportunity to escape from a German-led Europe. Why do you not surrender and resign after your failures?

Many a true word spoken in jest.

When it fell to me to announce live on air that Boris Johnson had been taken into intensive care, I saw both the best and the worst of human nature. I received a lot of texts and tweets from diehard Labour voters and political opponents saying they wished the Prime Minister well; some were even moved to tears by the news. Others, however, saw fit to tweet their delight. Boris Derangement Syndrome took on a whole new form, as evidenced by thousands of despicable tweets that expressed the hope he would suffer as much as possible and even die.

This is not to excuse government. The daily press conferences were a mistake. There was an imperative to say something new, yet often there was little new to say. Tired mantras were repeated day after day. ‘We made the right decision at the right time.’ ‘We’re straining every sinew.’ ‘I’d like to pay tribute to …’ ‘We mustn’t forget that behind every death is an individual story.’ It seemed to many that the politicians lacked basic human empathy and automatically reverted to robotic answers.

While I certainly blame the media for getting it wrong in this crisis, politicians cannot escape blame either.

All the issues raised here are examined in great detail in this book, and although it was intensely irritating for its publication to be delayed, in a way the messages contained in it are even more relevant than when I started writing it in 2019. How we answer these questions will determine the kind and quality of media and public discourse we’ll be getting in the future.

It’s all summed up in something I tweeted on 23 April 2020, which was seen by 1.6 million people.

Every journalist/columnist/commentator (including me) in the broadcast and print media needs to look at themselves in the mirror and answer this question: how have I contributed to the fact that I am less trusted than the people I am supposed to hold to account? Discuss.

On the bright side, the country coming together each Thursday evening at 8 p.m. to applaud the NHS and key workers has been heart-warming to witness. When it first happened, I interviewed the then Labour Shadow Chancellor, John McDonnell, immediately afterwards. He had been out on his street clapping away and I had been watching it on my TV screen. We both became a bit emotional and turned into blubbering wrecks.

While the response to coronavirus has engendered some pretty big divisions, the whole lockdown has allowed people time to reflect on their life priorities and to rekindle old friendships, albeit virtually, and has encouraged neighbourliness and a more real sense of community spirit. Political enmities have often been cast aside in the national interest. The collective sense of national grief over the tens of thousands who have fallen victim to coronavirus has proved to me that the answer to the question posed in the title of this book is that, yes, we can get along if we really put our minds to it.

Introduction

The Decline in Public Discourse

‘So you’re a shock jock, then?’ is a question people often put to me when I say I work on a speech radio station. No. I’m not. I’m the very antithesis of a so-called ‘shock jock’, or at least I like to think I am. I am always up for a robust debate, but instead of causing division and hatred, I like to think I try to bring people together and give people a platform to argue a case I might not agree with, but I respect. Hence the title of this book.

Over the years, I have grown hugely frustrated and a little bit angry about the decline in the way we talk to and debate with each other. It doesn’t have to be this way, if only we could all exercise a little self-restraint and recognise the importance of politeness and mutual respect. It sounds so simple, doesn’t it? It really is. We don’t need to return to the days of deference, but it’s within us all to behave better both online and offline. I include myself in that.

How did we get here? Why has the internet, and social media in particular, exacerbated this growing trend towards rudeness and hatred? Those are two questions I want to explore in this book, as well as search for some answers.

This is not an intellectual book, mainly because I am not an intellectual and don’t pretend to be one. It’s written from experience and it’s written from the heart. It is about how we communicate with each other, but it’s also a book that uses my life experiences to illustrate the themes I address. It’s not an autobiography, but it is autobiographical.

I’ve divided the book into three sections – broadly, media, politics and issues. In some chapters I’ve adapted previous pieces of writing that I’ve done over the years and incorporated them into the narrative here.

Rather fittingly, the inspiration for this book was a tweet. It was just before Christmas in 2018, and I said this.

FYI I’m very happy to engage in polite debate on any issue. I probably respond more than most. However, if you call me a c**t, use profane language or insult me for no reason, I will mute/block you. No questions asked. You’d never dare say it to my face so don’t do it here.

I can’t remember what someone said to provoke that tweet but it was no doubt one of the usual insults I get from random strangers on social media on a daily basis. Someone at the Mail on Sunday noticed and asked if I would write an article for their New Year’s edition on the state of public discourse. And that’s how I spent Boxing Day 2018. I wrote that so far as political discourse was concerned, 2018 plumbed poisonous new depths of anger and abuse.

It was more than a year to forget. To borrow from a now familiar Brexit mantra, politics seemed to crash over a cliff and into the waves of intolerance.

It was a year that saw our then prime minister, Theresa May, told to ‘bring her own noose’ by one Tory MP, another warning that ‘the moment is coming when the knife gets heated, stuck in her front and twisted – she’ll be dead soon’. It was a year when Boris Johnson mocked Muslim women who wore burkas for ‘looking like letter-boxes’ or ‘bank robbers’.

And there was the sight of Labour MP Luciana Berger arriving at her party’s conference with a police escort for her own protection after being targeted by the sort of vile anti-Semitic abuse we thought had been consigned to history.

Yet what we heard and saw in public was mild compared with what went on behind the scenes – the private abuse our politicians reserved for each other and the sort of thing I’ve encountered all too frequently as a political pundit and broadcaster on television and radio.

Take the time I sat with a Remain-supporting minister in a TV studio, ahead of broadcast. As we chatted, he was spitting blood about the ‘fucking lunatic Brexiteers’, saying how he would personally ensure a special place in hell for them. Minutes later he was serenely explaining to the interviewer that the country must come together, while he and his colleagues were working in tandem to provide a united government.

The noted liberal historian Simon Schama seemed to have caught a bad case of Brexit Derangement Syndrome when, on the weekend following Boris Johnson becoming prime minister, he thought it appropriate to call him ‘fatso’ in a tweet objecting to a perfectly normal journalistic metaphor about the cabinet being put on a war footing:

Can someone please stand up and start shouting (it wont [sic] be the weasel Corbyn) ‘YOU ARE NOT CHURCHILL, fatso, and the EU is not the Third Reich. You do not have a war cabinet because THERE IS NO WAR. How DARE you invoke the sacrifices of those [who] fought one!’

It is difficult to imagine the great historians of the past indulging in such public venom. Would A. J. P. Taylor have deigned to insult Harold Macmillan in such a way? Would Thomas Babington Macaulay, perhaps Britain’s greatest nineteenth-century historian, have called Lord Palmerston a ‘bedswerver’ (a nineteenth-century word for ‘adulterer’)? Had Twitter existed in 1920, would G. M. Trevelyan have shouted to Lloyd George that he was a RANDY OLD GOAT?! Doubtful.

Brexit Derangement Syndrome (BDS), more recently replaced by Boris Derangement Syndrome, has driven normally sane people round the bend. Sufferers are obsessed by only one thing and lose all sense of perspective. Their normal calm empirical analysis and assessment is trumped by cries of righteous and illogical outrage.

Scroll forward to New Year’s Day 2020 and little seemed to have changed. Well, in Australia at any rate. Australian Green Party senator Mehreen Faruqi tweeted that Prime Minister Scott Morrison should ‘just fuck off’ over his refusal to provide more funds for firefighters to combat the terrible bush fires. An ABC journalist told a Twitter correspondent to ‘go fuck yourself’ and a Tasmanian Labor MP told a tweeter to ‘get a life, you loser’. All in a day’s politics …

Was it ever thus? To a degree, perhaps, but things are getting worse. The coarsening of public life has taken on a frightening new momentum – and it seems that people can no longer exchange opposing views without questioning their opponent’s parentage.

I gently chided the Labour candidate Faiza Shaheen for her tweet decrying Iain Duncan Smith’s knighthood in the New Year’s Honours List. I suggested that instead of ranting about how evil he was, it might have been more polite and deft for her to congratulate him, while still making clear her opposition to his policies. I didn’t expect to be thanked for my troubles, but even a grizzled old hack like me was quite shocked at the response. For two days afterwards I could barely look at my Twitter feed. It was infested with the hard-Left spitting their bile at me. All I had done was dole out some well-meant advice, from one electoral loser to another. Coming across as a bad loser is never a good look.

Yes, for all its undoubted benefits, social media is a big part of the problem. A minor disagreement can spiral out of control into a vituperative slanging match within seconds, and frequently does so.

Take the mild-mannered Labour MP for Bermondsey, Neil Coyle. Piers Morgan had made a comment about murdered Labour MP Jo Cox on early morning television. Responding immediately, Coyle tweeted this:

It’s early doors Piers but I say this hand on heart: go fuck yourself. You’re a waste of space, air and skin. Trying to use Jo against us whilst encouraging the fascists is shocking even for a scrote like you. You make me sick.

The tweet was later deleted and an apology issued.

The anonymity, spontaneity and instant nature of social media – especially Twitter – encourages people to say things and behave in a way they wouldn’t dream of doing in normal life. I know. I’ve been guilty of it myself on too many occasions.

As one of my followers put it: ‘On the radio, Iain Dale is nice, nice, nice. On Twitter he can be an absolute beast.’ And I could do nothing except admit that she was right.

Twitter has become a hateful place, an absolute sewer, and if I didn’t work as a pundit and commentator, I’d happily remove myself from its clutches. Upset the Cybernats (somewhat vicious online supporters of the Scottish National Party), the Corbynistas, adherents of Leave.eu or the pro-Europe #FBPE (Follow Back, Pro EU) cult and you enter a living Twitter-hell for days on end.

Just look at the response from Corbynites to anyone who was concerned that anti-Semitism was being tolerated in the Labour Party. Or imagine the reaction you’ll get from the so-called Cybernats if you dare to criticise Nicola Sturgeon.

As the columnist Suzanne Moore tweeted after a particularly bruising encounter with trans activists: ‘One thing Twitter has ruined for ever is the fantasy that Left-wing people are nice. What a bunch of b*******, spewing out nastiness …’ That’s not to say things are any better on the Right. They’re not.

Yet social media is not the sole cause of the problem – far from it. The problems are both wider and deeper. Political conversation itself is now, to be frank, debased. Political debate has become a binary world, with everything in black and white. Shades of grey have been driven out.

What, for example, should we make of those such as Labour’s Laura Pidcock, who proudly declared that she couldn’t possibly be friends with a Conservative? It was perhaps karma that she went on to lose her North West Durham seat in the December 2019 general election.

She, like a growing number of us, appears to live in an echo chamber, determined to reinforce existing views. God forbid that we should question our own side.

If you’re on the Left, you think Channel 4 News is the most balanced news programme on TV.

If you’re on the Right, you probably believe the BBC to be a hotbed of liberal Lefties. Whatever happened to research, to careful questioning, to open-minded debate. To nuance.

If we’re not willing to engage with people who hold different views, how on earth can we challenge ourselves – or those in power?

It was one of my 2019 New Year’s resolutions to play my own small part and aim at a little more civility in political exchanges, whether on Twitter or elsewhere. I told my (then) 125,000 followers that I would mute or block anyone who insulted me using four-letter words.

It’s not that I’m a snowflake, but that sort of abuse is plain wrong. Most people wouldn’t dream of calling me something obscene to my face, so why should I let them do so on Twitter?

Even children are now brought up to hate. Hate him, hate her, hate Manchester United, hate the Tories, hate the EU.

How much is the ‘B’ word responsible for this change in climate, for making foul-mouthed rants seem somehow normal? Has Brexit helped unleash and legitimise argument by insult?

It’s clear that the referendum and ongoing argument have opened a Pandora’s box of anger and rage. Yet that cannot be an excuse for descending into common abuse.

For example, as a Brexiteer, I believe Britain will be better off outside the EU. At the same time, I cannot prove it and must acknowledge the fact.

We need a sort of collective resolution – on the part of those in power and from the nation in general – to grow up. Yet, somehow, I doubt we’ll get it.

It surely comes to something when it was left to Her Majesty the Queen to ask the nation, politely, to behave with more civility, which she did in her 2018 Christmas message. ‘Even with the most deeply held differences, treating the other person with respect and as a fellow human being is always a good first step towards greater understanding.’

Despite this toxic political debate, there is massive demand for live political discussion and debates all around the country.

Last summer I hosted a run of 24 shows at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. I was also invited to Panmure House in Edinburgh, the home of Adam Smith, to take part in a panel with economist and comedian Dominic Frisby and Heather McGregor from Heriot-Watt University, who made it her mission to restore Panmure House to its former glory. We were each deputed to give our favourite Adam Smith quote and explain our reasons. This is the quote I chose:

There is no art which one government sooner learns of another than that of draining money from the pockets of the people.

A fascinating discussion on the merits and demerits of taxation ensued, and although I’m by no means an economic expert, I felt I more than held my own. Towards the end, the subject of Brexit came up and I explained why I thought Brexit offered many opportunities as well as posed some economic threats, and why we ought to talk more about the economic opportunities rather than just concentrate on the threats as most of the media loves to do. I said I thought that there were huge opportunities for British manufacturing to revive, which provoked a man in the front row to laugh derisively. I asked him why he was laughing, but instead of engaging me in argument he said: ‘Ninety per cent of what you have said is shit.’ There was a collective intake of breath from the one hundred people in the audience.

I told him he was incredibly rude, as did several members of the audience. A lady then asked a question about the decline of public discourse. I replied that it comes to something when someone thinks it is acceptable to come to an august building like Panmure House and be so rude to a guest speaker’s face. Still, at least he gave me some material to start this book with!

As children we are taught to respect our so-called ‘elders and betters’ and indulge in the centuries-long tradition of deference. We repress our natural instincts to speak our minds and instead often caveat or give nuance to our real thoughts and views. At least that’s what used to happen.

The internet has seen the erosion of deference to such an extent that within a generation we’ll be able to see its dead corpse twitching. The decline of deference has mirrored the rise of division and provocation, on display every day in the worlds of politics and the media. Some will say t’was ever thus, but they lack perspective.

As the age of deference disappears, we appear to be regressing to the ways we treated each other in bygone ages, not just in politics but in much of the rest of society. The themes of most of Hogarth’s cartoons could equally comprise the subject matter of modern-day political cartoonists like Martin Rowson and Steve Bell.

It is good that the internet has given the voiceless a voice. The existence of social media and the invention of blogging have been great advertisements for the advancement of democracy in that they enable people to participate in the debate in ways they couldn’t have done before. But all advances bring dangers, whether it is in the fields of technology, medicine, media or business. It is how we respond to these potential dangers that determines whether they turn out to be good for society or not.

In the end, we can regulate the internet all we like – assuming it’s even possible to do so without international buy-in – but it’s human nature that is in question here. We like to believe that as humans we are fundamentally good and motivated by the best of intentions. The trouble with the internet is that it gives equal opportunity to those with malign intentions and whose aim is to cause disharmony and conflict. Such people are difficult to edit out of the conversation because their voices tend to drown out the peacemakers.

This has been at the core of political philosophy down the centuries. Are human beings fundamentally ‘good’ or fundamentally flawed? The French philosopher Rousseau was a prime advocate of the view that all of us are born innocent and if we became bad it is because society made us so. If we all existed in a Nirvana-type land we would all develop into thoroughly nice, well-meaning, rounded members of society without a rude word spoken between us.

Rousseau saw hurt feelings and contempt as intrinsically bad characteristics. He believed that there should be no place for criticism, judgement, blame and comparison with others. In effect, he believed that human beings are by nature without sin and therefore society is entirely responsible if these same human beings veer off the path of righteousness.

Thomas Hobbes, the English philosopher who pre-existed Rousseau by a century or more, took the opposite point of view. He believed that human beings were programmed to relentlessly pursue their own self-interest, to pursue pleasure and avoid pain. Human nature was defined by the permanent conflict between fear and hope. Instead of Rousseau’s world where the land flows with the milk of human kindness, in the slightly dystopian world of Hobbes’ we all live in perpetual fear and suspicion of one another. The contract that society arrives at to sustain itself is largely formed out of fear, and is then enforced by fear. Roll forward 350 years and you can see this at work in any modern-day election campaign.

Look at the way we have been programmed to fear people from different backgrounds, social classes, sexualities and races, and Hobbes must be looking down in wonderment at his own foresight. However, it is possible to argue that this world of conflict and fear is being eroded as the generations change or die out. Racial and religious stereotypes are gradually disappearing because it is easier for us to meet and get to know people from different backgrounds. Travel, the media and the internet all facilitate this. Even in the last 20 years, in modern Western liberal democracies attitudes towards gay people have been transformed. The opposite may be true in parts of eastern Europe and Africa, but the trend is there for all to see.

Just as human nature evolves, so does the language we use. The shame of using certain swear-words in modern-day discourse seems to be on the wane. Our discussion of sex-related issues is on the increase. Twenty years ago the regulators would get involved if a woman’s breast was seen on our TV screens before 9 p.m. Today they seem completely unconcerned by programmes such as Channel 4’s Naked Attraction, which revels in sending people on dates after they have seen their potential partner stark naked. It seems to me a game-show panel that doesn’t feature one or more comedians using the work ‘fuck’ at least once is considered a rarity. It surely can’t be too long before our TV shows feature full naked sex, including penetration, and there are no bars on what people say at all. TV executives will argue it’s the only way to compete with audiences on the internet, and given the decline in TV viewing, you can see their point.

As we know, on the internet, anything goes. Reaction is instant. Nuance goes out the window. The need to express a view with little time for any considered thought is imperative. Rationality is trumped by shoutiness. Someone who inadvertently says something mistakenly is immediately dubbed a liar. Anyone who questions the wisdom of open borders must be a racist. Express a view a tad to the right of Tony Blair and you automatically become a fascist. Agree with nationalising the water industry? You must be a communist.

I am regularly called a fascist by people who clearly have no understanding of what the word actually means. This is how Wikipedia defines a ‘fascist’ philosophy:

Fascism is a form of far-right, authoritarian ultranationalism characterized by dictatorial power, forcible suppression of opposition, and strong regimentation of society and of the economy … Fascists believe that liberal democracy is obsolete and regard the complete mobilization of society under a totalitarian one-party state as necessary to prepare a nation for armed conflict and to respond effectively to economic difficulties.

I believe in none of those things. In fact, I am the antithesis of a fascist, given that I believe in a small state, the primacy of free markets, civil liberties, liberal democracy and racial equality, and I reject utterly any violence pursued in the furtherance of political objectives. No matter, the haters will always hate. It is perhaps just as well my skin grows thicker with each passing year. But should it have to?

There are people who fight against the sewer of abuse that exists on Twitter. The Guido Fawkes website launched an initiative called Positive Twitter Day in 2012 with the aim of encouraging people to engage in only positive exchanges. ‘Wouldn’t it be nice to encourage each other to be nice and civil in our tweets?’ the site says. It has involved mental health charities and even Twitter itself is now supporting the day. What a pity #PositiveTwitterDay is only in place for one day – the last Friday in August.

Kerry-Anne Mendoza is the editor of the far-Left website The Canary. Seven days before #PositiveTwitterDay in 2019 she tweeted this.

You can fuck all the way off. Then, just when you think you’ve fucked off as much as it’s possible to fuck off, I’m gonna need you to dig deep and fuck off a little bit more.

One suspects Ms Mendoza is the type of person who ought to observe #PositiveTwitterDay.

This sort of language is, however, nothing new, as Nick Robinson noted, writing in The Spectator:

Robust discourse long pre-dates the Johnson, Trump and even Twitter eras as I have been reminded as I savour Tombland, the latest in C.J. Sansom’s magnificent Shardlake series. It brings alive the story of the 1549 uprising of the people against the elite in the Kett rebellion. Gentlemen and their briefly liberated serfs exchange splendid insults. My favourites are ‘you dozzled spunk-stain’ and ‘you bezzled puttock’.

I must remember those two insults for my next Twitter spat. They might have slightly more impact than my new insult of choice – muppet. The language may stay the same, with one or two modifications, but the ability of people to broadcast this disrespect or abuse has increased exponentially.

PART ONE

MEDIA

Chapter 1

Our Love/Hate Relationship with Social Media

‘From the streets of Cairo and the Arab Spring, to Occupy Wall Street, from the busy political calendar to the aftermath of the tsunami in Japan, social media was not only sharing the news but driving it.’

Dan Rather

If you’re under 35 years of age you will have no recollection of a time without the internet, let alone social media. You probably can’t believe that mobile phones weren’t ‘a thing’ before the early 1990s. The height of modern technology then was possession of a fax machine and a Sky dish. Before 1989, Britain only had four TV channels. Before the mid-1980s, computers barely existed for most of the population.

Nowadays, most of us rely on technology to exist. We spend hours every day glued to our smart phones, which aren’t just used for phone-calls but to communicate with other people by email, text, Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, Snapchat or goodness knows what else. We share intimate aspects of our lives with perfect strangers. We have an online brand that we spend hours carefully nurturing and curating.

I first encountered a computer at university. I was studying German and Linguistics at the University of East Anglia. It was 1983 and as part of my Teaching English as a Foreign Language module I had to do a seminar in Computer Assisted Language Learning. Our task was to create lessons using BBC Basic, a computer language that might as well have been Swahili, so far as I was concerned. I had never had a very mathematical brain, and computer coding was beyond me. In the end I had to go to see my course tutor and ask that instead of computer coding a lesson, could I write an extra essay. Luckily, he agreed. And to think, 20 years later I would be regarded as an internet innovator. Hilarious. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Two years later I went to work for an MP in the House of Commons. I’m not going to lie, I was a glorified secretary. Nowadays, I’d award myself the title of chief of staff. I was the only staff. My employer, Norwich North MP Patrick Thompson, had an Apricot word-processing computer and a Brother printer. Virtually all of my contemporaries had to make do with typewriters. I learned how to do mail merging and we were one of the first to trial primitive forms of direct mail.

In my next job at the British Ports Association I also introduced computerisation into an organisation that seemed to have operated in the same way for decades. I built a database (once I’d worked out what the word meant) of press contacts and politicians.

In the early 1990s at the transport-related public affairs company The Waterfront Partnership I remember saying one day to my colleague David Young, ‘Dave, I read an article about something called email. Can you look into it and set it up for us please?’

A year or two later I had my own personal computer and was arranging dates – OK, less dates, more one-night stands – on Compuserve forums. Twenty-five years later I am still with my partner, who was the ex of one of my hook-ups.

I have related my computer history because for people of my generation it has completely revolutionised how we communicate with other people. For younger generations it’s changed nothing. It’s what they’ve always known. I learned in my Linguistics class at university that the optimum age to learn a language is seven years old. Young brains are also best able to absorb and comprehend new technology. Give your iPhone to a youngster to install and they’ll do it far more quickly than you could. That’s just the way things are.

So there I was, visiting a friend in Washington, DC in the spring of 2002, and he asked me if I had a blog. Er, no, I said, I didn’t, adding: ‘What’s a blog?’ His answer proved to be a revelation and it was one that in time was to change my life. Within ten minutes he had created a blog for me and off I went.

Up until then, unless you were a technical geek, it was quite cumbersome to update a website. Usually someone else had to do it for you. But blogs meant that you could update your own website in seconds, and tell the world what you were thinking in real time. But so what? I instantly understood what a blog could do, not just for me, but more generally. Different people use blogs in different ways, but essentially they are a hugely democratising force: blogging gives everyone a chance to have their say.

Up until the advent of blogging, Mrs Miggins from 32 Acacia Avenue, Scunthorpe, would have had precious little chance to make her views known. She might get a letter published in the local paper, possibly even a national one on the odd occasion. She could phone in to a radio show, but that was about it. With a blog, Mrs Miggins could have her say whenever she wanted. Now, she might not have attracted the hugest of audiences, but in a sense, that didn’t matter. No one sets out to blog with the aim of competing with the mainstream media. But the truth is that blogging started to eat a wedge into mainstream media influence. So much so that, having once viewed it as a pastime for sad geeks who tapped away at their keyboards in their bedrooms while wearing stripy pyjamas, mainstream media journalists started to embrace it – not just in politics, but across the gamut of journalism.

I decided early on that I wanted to make mine a very human blog. I wanted to write about my life, my experiences and my emotions, as well as providing political commentary and the odd dose of humour. It was a mix people seemed to like, and I always got a massive reaction whenever I wrote about anything in my personal life. I wrote about my dog dying. I wrote about delivering a eulogy at a funeral for the first time. I shared my feelings on my football team, West Ham, reaching the FA Cup final, only for their hopes to be dashed in the last minute. I wrote about my family, death, love and my civil partnership.

Writing a blog inevitably means becoming a bit of a hate figure, and writing about politics doubles your chances. I managed to make a lot of enemies along the way, but also a lot of friends and fans. Even now, people come up to me and tell me how much they miss the old incarnation of my blog.

The blog started as a personal diary, with little political content. Unfortunately, the original blog got deleted. In October 2003 I was selected as a Conservative candidate to fight the North Norfolk seat at the next general election. I decided to use my blog as an innovative way to have a dialogue with the electorate. Judging by the landslide result against me, it wasn’t a success! I then took a break from blogging for six months while I worked as chief of staff to David Davis during his leadership campaign. So my story really starts at the end of 2005 when I restarted the blog. It instantly attracted a sizeable readership due to a number of political news stories I broke on the blog. And it was the John Prescott affair with his Private Secretary, Tracey Temple, and Charles Kennedy’s toppling as Lib Dem leader, that really catapulted it into becoming a must-read in the Westminster Village.

At its peak, the blog was attracting 20,000 readers a day, and more than 150,000 unique users a month. Compared to national newspapers that’s not huge, but the circulation of the New Statesman was around 20,000 and The Spectator 70,000 so, in its niche, the blog did rather well. I never sought to monetise it, even though I could have. For me it was more of a marketing tool.

Blogs are a spin doctor’s worst nightmare come true. It would be understandable if political parties regarded them as uncontrolled, uncontrollable and sometimes downright troublesome. But if they did, they would be missing a huge opportunity to market their message without the filter of mainstream media reportage and comment. The political party that can harness social media, it is said, is the one that will prevail. Or maybe not. At the 2019 general election there is little doubt that Labour won the internet war. Their Facebook campaigns were more heavily viewed, and liked, and they had an army of Twitter users only too willing to do their bidding – most of whom seemed to have fewer than 20 followers. So successful were they that they even convinced me by polling day that we were heading for a hung parliament. If we ever needed proof that Twitter is not at all representative of the general public, this was it. Perhaps there’s a lesson to learn here when we discuss the coarseness of the language deployed on Twitter in later chapters.

Political party memberships are also not representative of the public at large, not least in age profile. Membership in all parties had been on the decline, in part because parties had no idea how to communicate with members. Mailshots are expensive, monthly magazines far too costly and, despite spending large amounts of money on websites, none of the parties had ever really ‘got’ interactivity. Party websites continued to speak ‘at’ people rather than to them, let alone with them. Even nowadays they haven’t learned how to have a conversation with people. In its heyday my blog would get more traffic than the official Tory Party and Labour Party websites. Guido Fawkes probably still does.

The trouble is most politicians see all the dangerous downsides of social media and blogging. They are seen by many as threats rather than opportunities. Some MPs, such as Lib Dem Lynne Featherstone, Labour’s Tom Watson and Tory Ed Vaizey, ‘got it’ right from the off, but even in 2020 the majority of politicians only do the bare minimum on social media. They have websites because everyone does. They’re on Twitter, but view the medium with suspicion and a degree of terror.

Writing the blog became a bit of a responsibility. People expected me to write at least five or six new blog posts every day. Fifty per cent of the people who read the blog returned three or more times every day. Their appetite demanded ever more content. I loved the interaction but, in the end, maintaining my prolific output proved too much. In September 2010 I achieved a lifetime’s ambition and was hired by LBC Radio to present their weeknight evening show. But I also had a day job running Biteback Publishing and Total Politics magazine. Effectively I was doing two full-time jobs, five days a week, and then also trying to write five stories a day on the blog. Something had to give. I knew that my writing was suffering and I wasn’t providing the readers with what they had been used to. So I took the decision to close down the blog. When I announced it in December 2010, it was the nearest thing I can think of to witnessing my own death. It even made the Today programme.

I could also see that blogging – at least as I had been doing it for the previous few years – was about to change. Once the mainstream media decided to start their own blogs, people like me couldn’t compete. In all honesty, I had also fallen out of love with blogging.

Blogging has been (or maybe was?) an immense force for good. It has uncovered major stories and held the media and politicians to account in a way that two decades ago would have been unthinkable. It’s given thousands of ordinary voters a voice.

Back in 2010, I could see that Twitter was about to eclipse blogging in terms of popularity. What I hadn’t bargained for was that Twitter paved the way to far higher levels of abuse and vituperation.

Blogging was a relatively spontaneous medium compared to how long it takes a newspaper article or broadcast report to be seen by the general public, but with the advent of Twitter, blogging became somewhat clunky and slow. A blogpost could be written in a few minutes. A reactive tweet took a matter of seconds.

I registered my Twitter name early on – in May 2007, but initially I couldn’t quite see the point of it. I remember taking part in a panel with someone who literally tweeted every two minutes of his life. Who on earth would be interested in that, I thought. Times journalist Rachel Sylvester seemed to agree, quoting psychologist Oliver James to prove her point:

Twittering stems from a lack of identity. It’s a constant update of who you are, what you are, where you are. Nobody would Twitter if they had a strong sense of identity.

Sylvester argued that everyone who tweets must have something missing in their lives. She may be right about some, but it’s also what MSM journalists used to say about blogging, which many of them chose to ignore or were forced to take up. She also maintained that ‘Twitter is reality TV without the pictures’. There is a small amount of truth in that, especially when you look at those who tweet obsessively. It was for that reason that I was a comparatively late developer on Twitter.

But having decided how I wanted to use it, and that I wouldn’t do it too often, I grew to enjoy it – at least until the last three or four years. For me, it complemented the blog brand and strengthened the feeling of community I tried to engender within the blog. When I joined LBC I used it to augment the marketing of my radio show and to drag in new listeners. That’s my prime aim nowadays.

Some people use Twitter purely as a broadcast mechanism. Some use it to describe their everyday lives, as if we should be interested in what time they go to bed, or put out the cat. I try to stick to tweeting about things I think – and I emphasise, the word, think – might be of interest either to my followers or blog readers. It’s mainly about events I am going to, media programmes I may be appearing on (it saves a blogpost), giving a bit of (hopefully insightful) political commentary, or saying something that I think might be vaguely funny. It’s as simple as that. Those who want to can dub it ‘narcissistic’ all they want, but is it any more narcissistic than writing a blog or a newspaper column in the belief that people might be interested in what you say? I don’t think so.

I still think that Twitter and Facebook are offering something positive in our public discourse. Friendships are formed, friendships are renewed. Last year I was sorting through some boxes from my time working in Germany in the 1980s and came across a diary date with a friend who was a teaching assistant in Hamburg at the time. All I knew was that his name was Ray. I tweeted this information and thanks to the research ability of some of my Twitter followers Ray and I were direct messaging each other within half an hour.

We soak up the information both platforms offer. We relish the spontaneity and instantaneousness. If there’s a breaking news story during my radio show, I rely on Twitter to tell me what’s going on. Yes, you have to curate it carefully and only rely on trusted sources, but I bring my listeners the news far more quickly that the BBC ever can with their cumbersome verification procedures.

In real breaking news situations Twitter can, as a presenter, be your best friend, During the London riots and the Egyptian revolution I was able to report things to my listeners more speedily than if I had relied on the normal news sources – Reuters, AP, PA, etc. But as well as being your best friend, Twitter can be your worst enemy. At around 6.15 p.m. on 23 April 2013 I noticed a tweet from the AP feed that read:

BREAKING: Two explosions in the White House. Barack Obama said to be injured.

Wow. Big story. If it were true. I looked at my Sky News screen. Nothing. I couldn’t see any other tweet referring to it. I have a general rule of thumb that I won’t announce anything on air unless I have double sourced it on Twitter, from two proper sources – not just random Twitter accounts. Boy was I tempted though. But a sixth sense kicked in and told me to bide my time. I clicked onto the AP feed and it looked fine. But there was something that set alarm bells ringing. Thank goodness, because a couple of minutes later I saw a tweet that explained the AP feed had been hacked.

So I wasn’t taken in, but the American stock market was. It plummeted in the minute after that tweet was sent. Wall Street turned out to be more gullible than me. There’s a message there somewhere!

I don’t pretend to be a journalist in the conventional sense of the word, but there are obviously journalistic aspects to what I do, and there are journalistic ethics, routines and conventions that I follow. When my blog was at its height of popularity, I’d break quite a few stories, and I got a kick out of being first to do so. It happened several times. But there was always the fear that you’d be scooped by someone else if you didn’t press SEND pretty damn quickly. Obviously, that has its dangers, in that if you do it too quickly you might not quite have checked it out properly and thus stand to get a lot of egg on your face.

Only once have I been caught out, when I failed to realise a Twitter account wasn’t actually the Daily Mail’s official one, but a fake. A listener pointed it out and I apologised immediately. That’s what you should always do.

I’ve been at the centre of a few Twitter storms in my time, mainly of my own making. As I relate in Chapter 6, when I was filmed in a sort of scuffle with an anti-nuclear protester on Brighton seafront during the Labour Party Conference, the incident was amplified on Twitter to the extent that I couldn’t look at it for several days. But that was seven years ago. If that happened in 2020 I have absolutely no doubt that the social media storm engendered would result in me being fired from my job. LBC stuck by me in 2013, but large companies nowadays tend to give in to the Twitterati at the first sign of trouble on social media. The veteran ITN newscaster Alastair Stewart would certainly pay testament to that. In January 2020 he was summarily sacked from the job he had held for 40 years after a somewhat unseemly spat with a political activist. Stewart had quoted Shakespeare at him, and the quoted passage ended with the word ‘ape’. The activist was mixed race and highlighted the use of the word. Even though the word ‘ape’ was being used to indicate mimicry and Stewart had also previously used the quote to a Caucasian correspondent, it didn’t matter to the Twitter mob. They got their man.

Politicians get it more than most on social media. Look at how many female Labour MPs were treated when they dared to stand up for British Jews who were under attack from some anti-Semitic Labour activists. But the abuse is directed at politicians from all parties and both genders.

I received an email not long ago from someone who clearly had a lot of time on their hands.

Dear Iain, has anyone ever remarked that your eyes are almost identical to the eyes of a wild rat. I first noticed this when I saw you on Sky News with Jacqui Smith.

Regards, C

Try as I might, I can’t work out the mentality of someone who would actually spend time typing an email like that and then actually sending it. What did they hope to achieve? I’ve always thought I had rather nice eyes!

It’s not just the political world that is affected by rudeness and horribleness on social media. A friend of mine, Deborah Slattery, who now lives in Spain, decided to join a Cat Lovers Facebook group hosted in America. A rather harmless thing to do you might think, where thousands of people share and comment online over cat pictures. You’d be wrong.

Deborah came across a picture of a black-and-white cat whose owner had shaved its fur to make it look like a poodle replete with a pompom at the end of its tail. You could see its body skin. She left a fairly innocuous comment to the effect that she didn’t like what the owner had done and felt that it had made a fool out of her cat. The response was immediate. ‘How dare you, you fucking bitch.’ Worse was to come. Another woman said. ‘You are obviously not a cat lover; how dare you make such judgmental remarks? I hope you die of cancer. In fact I hope you die a slow painful death from cancer you bitch!!’

A further commenter expressed the hope that Deborah’s own cats would die. The next day her cat, Sushi, was shot. She died a few weeks later.

In early 2020 a 25-year-old former Tory activist, Joshua Spencer, was jailed for online threats of violence towards the senior Labour MP Yvette Cooper. He had sent messages claiming to have paid ‘crackheads’ £100 to beat her up and warned her that ‘if you make peaceful revolution difficult you make a violent one inevitable’. He got nine weeks for his troubles.

The trouble is that violent threats don’t necessarily stay online. The threats are real.

Chapter 2

When Opposites Collide

‘A conversation in which the two parties have different beliefs should never begin with the intention of converting the other party to your own beliefs. Every worthwhile conversation’s goal should be to understand the other person’s opinions and help them understand your own.’

Emily Eskowich

Politicians of all colours will be used to hearing two things when they go canvassing. They’ll knock on the door of 32 Acacia Avenue and will be greeted by Mrs Miggins, who will berate them and accuse them of being all the same. She will question why she should bother to vote given there’s no real choice. Then she will slam the door, feeling a warm afterglow of giving a politician what for. The politician then moves on to number 34 and speaks to Mr Bloggs, who opens the door and explains that he thinks it would be wonderful if politicians could put all their interests aside in the national interest. ‘Why can’t you all just get along?’ he asks plaintively, not actually expecting a real answer.

These two views of the world are both perfectly understandable, and widely held. But they are mutually exclusive. While politicians will take every opportunity to be all things to all people, essentially they come in two breeds. Breed number 1 is the ideologically pure politician who is totally sure of his/her own views and creed, and won’t brook any kind of compromise. It’s a game of them and us. There’s a right and wrong, with few shades of grey.

Breed number 2 despises confrontation and recognises that the minority have a right to be represented, and politics is the art of compromise.

Breed 1 and Breed 2 do not understand each other. They therefore question each other’s motives, and in a world of hung parliaments stalemate ensues, often followed by a degree of personal acrimony and vituperation. Look at how MPs on both sides of the Brexit debate have acted in recent years, not just towards their political opponents, but towards each other too, even if they were ostensibly supposed to be taking the same party whip.

For many it’s deeply personal. Some Labour backbenchers loathed their leader, Jeremy Corbyn and they didn’t bother to hide it. There was similar acrimony on the Tory benches where some Remainers had no reservation about talking to the media in the most lurid terms about their leader, Boris Johnson.

Television and radio shows delight in putting opposites up against each other to create a row. It was ever thus in some ways but the priority of producers nowadays is to achieve a moment that can go viral on Facebook or YouTube and grab a page lead in the next day’s newspapers. All this is entirely understandable, but rather than enhancing the quality of public debate, it damages it.

I like to think that I’ve rarely gone down that road, and if I have there has been a good reason for it.

Each week I record an hour-long podcast with former Labour Home Secretary Jacqui Smith. It’s called ‘For the Many’. We gave it that title because we want it to appeal to people across the political spectrum. How do we do that? By being civil to each other and not deliberately having a row. In more than 150 episodes I don’t think we have ever raised our voices or shouted down the other. We talk about the political events of the week and try to interpret them for our audience, which is not just full of political geeks. People listen to us while cooking the dinner, working out in the gym or walking the dog. We do it with a light touch and provide a few laughs along the way.

Arguing respectfully and with humour is surely better than an hour of ding-dongs in which there may be a lot of drama but not a lot of nuance. And that’s why we have one of the highest rated UK political podcasts. Indeed, you look at some of the other good ones, such as Nick Robinson’s Political Thinking or Matt Forde’s Political Party or Paul Brand’s Acting Prime Minister, and you can see they have two things in common. They are at least 30 minutes in length and they are conversational. There is no battle of wills. No presenter trying to be the story rather than the person they are interviewing. If only more political TV and radio programmes had this approach.

Back in May 2017 I became part of a new weekly political discussion show on CNN International called CNNTalk. The format was very simple. One presenter, Max Foster, plus a panel of three – me, former Labour adviser Ayesha Hazarika, and economist and Telegraph columnist Liam Halligan. We would discuss one subject for half an hour. The chemistry between us was instant. Max knew when to intervene or just let us get on with it. He is a presenter who doesn’t think it’s all about him. Yes, from time to time we could have some feisty arguments, but because they didn’t happen every show, the audience realised they were genuine disagreements when they happened. After a while CNN asked if we’d do the show twice a week, then three times, and then it went daily. The audience loved it, and CNN HQ loved it. The theme of the show often revolved around Donald Trump’s latest antics, Brexit, terrorism, gun control or sometimes something more esoteric, such as whether 3D printers could make replica guns. We would never know the subject until three hours before it went on air, and there were many times when I walked into the studio wondering what on earth I could say, given I knew very little about what we were to talk about. What it taught me was that I can actually speak about any subject and sound authoritative and calm. I was like the proverbial swan – calm on the surface but feet paddling away under water.

It was a real sadness to us all when, after two years, the show was canned, for no other reason than CNN decided to go in a different direction.

Compare CNNTalk with the BBC’s Question Time and they are like chalk and cheese. One is all about calm, rational debate and hopefully informing its audience. The other used to have the same aims, yet currently has become a bearpit of political arm wrestling, and not just among the panellists – the audience now readily participate too. When the show started in September 1979 under the chairmanship of Sir Robin Day, there were four panellists. Nowadays there are five or sometimes six, which means each panellist has to compete for the stage. In the early years each participant would speak when they were asked to. They treated each other with respect. Today it is very different, with many panellists often being openly contemptuous of the others. The word ‘liar’ is thrown around with impunity. Other insults are commonplace. The audience thinks nothing of totally disrespecting the guests or even each other.

I’ve appeared on the programme twice, with very contrasting experiences. In April 2018 I made my debut. I was half excited and half filled with dread. Why dread? Well, quite a few people have made complete arses of themselves on Question Time, in a way that’s more difficult to do on its radio equivalent, Any Questions? There’s that constant fear of gulping like a goldfish when you get a question that completely throws you. Or you have a row with another panellist and come off worst. However, I talk for three hours every day about subjects I may know very little about or am not interested in personally, so over the years you develop an ability and a confidence to talk reasonably fluently about anything that’s put to you. But you do have to have some self-knowledge. For instance, although I could be reasonably confident of doing OK on Question Time, I would certainly not have the confidence to do a show like Have I Got News for You. I’ve learned over the years that although I am capable of being funny, I’m not half as funny as I like to think I am!

My first appearance was in Chesterfield. The other panellists were Vince Cable, Liz Truss, Emily Thornberry and Guardian columnist Nesrine Malik. It was also Nesrine’s first time.

I arrived around 6 p.m. and there then followed an hour of chit-chat, briefing from the producers and make-up. David Dimbleby swept into the room at around 7.50 and made a great effort to sit down and talk to Nesrine and I individually. He was incredibly charming, put us at our ease and encouraged us to interact with the audience and the other panellists, and not to be shy to interject.

‘Do you know the questions in advance?’ is the second most frequent question I’ve had and I can categorically say no. However, let’s face it, you have to be a bit of a dunce if you can’t predict the subject areas of at least two or three questions.

By the time we were called to go into the auditorium I had exactly the same feeling as I always have before Any Questions? I become a nervous wreck, convinced that I am totally underprepared and won’t have a thought in my head to express when David Dimbleby calls on me.

Some panellists go on stage with no notes, others have reams. Nesrine didn’t have any notes, which I rather admired. I just took on small cue cards with five bullet points on each subject. I also had a newspaper article that I would have used against Vince Cable had Brexit come up. But it didn’t. The notes were a safety valve. In the end I didn’t look at them very often. Someone I know who was on Question Time recently looked over at his fellow panellists’ notes and saw that virtually every potential answer on every conceivable subject was more or less scripted.

And so the time came. We all stood in the wings waiting to be called in by David Dimbleby. I was first, as I was seated on the far side of the stage. I walked in and smiled at the audience before taking my seat. All the others then took theirs. Emily Thornberry got a very loud cheer, which made me think it would be a very pro-Labour audience. In fact, it was a very fair audience and devoid of some of the usual frothing-at-the-mouthers that there have been on the programme in recent years. The whole set is much smaller and more intimate than it seems when watching on TV. You’re much closer to the audience than the TV pictures show.

The warm-up question was a complete surprise. ‘Was the Derbyshire Chief Constable right to order the Police Male Voice Choir to change its name and include women?’ I always think the thing to do in a warm-up question is to make the audience laugh, which I tried to do, although I now can’t remember what I said. In fact, to be honest, the audience members gave far better responses than any of the panel. Anyway, with that, we were off. David Dimbleby pressed his stop-watch, turned to face the camera and introduced the panel.

I didn’t go in with any pre-prepared lines because I think it rarely ever works. One bit of advice Piers Morgan gave me in advance was to make sure you give a direct answer to the question. He reckoned too many people skirt around the original question, forget what it was within thirty seconds, and then go on a tour of the whole subject. It was good advice and I think I did answer every question directly.

The biggest dilemma is to know when to interrupt another panellist. On a debut show you don’t want to be too much of a shrinking violet, but then again you don’t want to appear too dominating. I know from previous experience of being on a panel that I always come off the stage thinking I didn’t have enough of a say, and yet when I watch it back I’ve probably spoken more than anyone else. Sometimes less is more. If you ramble, you know you’ll be cut off. I adopted a policy of only interrupting when I really had something to say.

I’m long enough in the tooth to know when I’ve performed well on a programme and when I haven’t. I knew when I came off stage I’d done better than I thought I would, so I was quite content.

On my second appearance, in September 2019, it was all rather different. David Dimbleby had retired and Fiona Bruce had taken over the presenter’s role. It was the first show of the programme’s autumn run, and the government and country were in a meltdown over the prospect of a no-deal Brexit. Unusually it was broadcast live, which meant I could present my evening radio show, then get a cab over to the venue in Westminster. I arrived just a few minutes before we went on stage for the warm-up question, so didn’t have a lot of time to chat to the five, yes five, other panellists. Again Emily Thornberry, Labour’s Shadow Foreign Secretary, was on the show, along with government minister Kwasi Kwarteng, the SNP Westminster leader Ian Blackford, Liberal Democrat MP Layla Moran and Brexit Party MEP Richard Tice.

In 15 years of political TV punditry it had never occurred to me to walk out of a show, live on air. But it nearly happened on this show. The thought flitted through my mind as yet again the other panellists talked over each other and I was barely allowed to get a sentence out without being interrupted.

As SNP Westminster leader Ian Blackford interrupted me for the third time, after I had barely uttered a word, I threw up my hands and blustered: ‘What on earth is the point of debating if this is what you’re going to do?’

Don’t get me wrong, interrupting is all part of the cut and thrust of political debate. It has its place, but we all know the rules of the game. With the exception of the Liberal Democrat Layla Moran, all of the other panellists took interrupting to an extreme, which made large parts of the programme unwatchable.

In the three days following the show I received around four hundred emails, and gained an extra ten thousand Twitter followers. There had been widespread outrage at the lamentable standard of debate on the show, and how it was handled.

The truth is that Question Time is not alone in suffering from this. On this and other shows, politicians think it is quite acceptable to call each other ‘liars’ on TV, and Emily Thornberry did this within half a minute in her first answer.

There are ways of calling out mendacious politicians without actually calling them ‘liars’. Fiona Bruce didn’t see fit to pick her up on that, yet did challenge Tory MP Kwasi Kwarteng later in the show, asking him: ‘Are you calling Emily dishonest?’

Question Time has become a bear pit where the audience behaves in a way it would never have done ten years ago. I’m not seeking to hark back to an age of deference, but the bear-baiting and insults that go from audience to panel and back are rendering such programmes almost unwatchable for many.

I well remember the golden days of the show when the likes of Dr David Starkey, Clare Short, Shirley Williams and Norman Tebbit would debate robustly but with respect for each other and the rules of the show. Perhaps we need to take a leaf out of the Norwegian political TV show Einig, where panellists are obliged to be polite to each other, not interrupt, and to listen and then engage. It could happen here if we had a broadcaster brave enough to embrace the format. The recently retired BBC Director General Lord Hall made a speech in early 2020 in which he said: ‘I’m a great believer in the long-form political interview where you can explore at length, not in soundbites, the real policy decisions that politicians are making.’ He’s right.

In some ways I can’t blame the Question Time audience for being angry. They have been let down by a generation of politicians, most of whom don’t even acknowledge the fact.

Over the last few years Brexiteers have rightly complained about the imbalance of panels on political TV shows like Newsnight, Politics Live and Question Time. I once refused to appear on a panel to discuss Brexit when I was outnumbered three to one. It’s not that I can’t look after myself, but producers who think it is OK to put together a panel like that shouldn’t be in the job.

Because of the political events of the week, it was clear that Brexit would dominate the show, so the Question Time producers decided to have a panel of three Brexit supporters and three Remainers. But with six panellists rather than the usual five, it was clear that everyone would struggle to make themselves heard.

In retrospect it would have been better to go with four panellists and allow a more meaningful debate to take place. But it could still have worked with six panellists had each of the panellists played the game. Instead, it became the Emily Thornberry show. However, it was me who was upbraided for having the temerity to try to engage with an audience member, and was reprimanded by Fiona Bruce with a curt: ‘This is not the Iain Dale show.’

She was dead right. I spoke for precisely 4 minutes 33 seconds in a total of eight interventions, whereas Emily Thornberry spoke for 10 minutes 34 seconds in 15 interventions, two of which were more than two minutes long.

The Brexiteers on the panel spoke for a total of 15 minutes 22 seconds, while the Remainers spoke for 23 minutes 48 seconds. The audience got 7 minutes 46 seconds, of which Brexit-supporting audience members spoke for all of 2 minutes 34 seconds.

Having said all that, while Richard Tice, the Brexit Party MEP, and I spoke the least of all the six panellists, only speaking when you have something to say can have its merits. I deliberately tried not to take part in the orgy of talking over other people. I may not have always succeeded but at least I made the effort.

I would suggest that the Question Time producers go back to having only four panellists from time to time. I suspect the audience would prefer it and there would be a little more light shed on issues, and perhaps a little less heat. They would probably respond: ‘Nice idea, but it wouldn’t make great TV.’

In decades, or even centuries gone by, crowds of tens of thousands would gather to listen to the politicians of the day make grand speeches, even if they couldn’t actually hear a word that was said. In the pre-microphone age, word was passed to the back of the audience explaining what the speaker was saying. As the radio and television age progressed, the appetite for live political debate switched from the church hall to the radio set in the corner of the living room or, later, to the ‘gogglebox’.

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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