Over the past five years or so, one aspect of talking to the public about politics has become more and more pronounced. In the wake of some story or other, I will be dispatched to determine people’s views about it. For a while, the conversations will largely be pretty straightforward, touching on politics and power, people’s lives and the relationship – or lack of it – between them. And then, without warning, somebody will tip the conversation into altogether more exotic territory, centred on a conspiracy theory.
Not long after the death of Queen Elizabeth II, I was in the South Yorkshire village of Grimethorpe, listening to a somewhat earnest young man’s views about how the deceased monarch had been fond of drinking babies’ blood. On a visit to Birmingham in 2022, I listened to two loquacious pensioners talking about how Covid-19 was a fiction invented by the world’s rulers, and global death figures had largely been made up – opinions that blurred into a general sense that a lot of people still did not believe a word of what they had been told about the pandemic. The previous year, in fact, I had reported from parts of the city where community organisations were trying to get people to be vaccinated, in the face of large-scale public scepticism and hostility.
