Lucy Powell has already made herself at home by the time I arrive at Hallé St Peter’s, the new rehearsal rooms opened by one of Manchester’s great orchestras just before the pandemic hit. As well she might: the shadow culture secretary and MP for Manchester Central is on her own patch, and when I suggest we meet “somewhere cultural”, she has a whole list of suggestions from Hope Mill theatre, a fantastic fringe producing venue, to Home, the lovely arts complex in Tony Wilson Place.
It turns out she was at sixth-form college with the chap who runs Hallé St Peter’s, Martin Glynn. Later, I interrogate him: so what was she like at school? “A good sort!” he says. She was on the student council, and did stuff like demand better provision of tampons on campus – there were Catholic Xaverian brothers on the staff, he tells me, and they hadn’t quite caught up with the fact that it was a mixed sixth-form college, not a 1950s boys’ grammar. “She’s always been a doer.”
Still, she was “always up for a party”. Among her group of mates was the daughter of one of the Hacienda co-founders. “Yes,” she tells me afterwards, “we could always get on to the guest list when we were too young.” She was the designated driver (“I was probably quite sensible”) to take her pals to the Staffordshire club Shelley’s, which was famous on the rave scene. I was too busy being square and learning ancient Greek to go, despite living round the corner. Oh well: she’s cooler than both me and her boss Keir Starmer, who appeared on a hilarious 1989 episode of Kilroy about raves but had to admit that he hadn’t actually been to one.
But it’s very much her sensible side that Powell – black leather jacket, on-brand Mancunian bee earrings – displays as she slides into her seat at the Hallé St Peter’s cafe, orders her pot of tea and tells me what it’s like shadowing the bizarre figure that is Nadine Dorries. The culture secretary’s loyalty to the prime minister extended, at one of Johnson’s most perilous partygate moments last January, to chucking out a massive diversion in the form of tweeting that the BBC licence fee would be scrapped in 2027.
“It gives a bit more fun to it, I suppose, because she’s so terrible,” says Powell. “But in a way you want to be up against someone who can at least put forward half-decent arguments. But yeah, she’s been pretty terrible in parliament. So that’s definitely made my job easier.” She muses about Dorries’s attachment to the PM. “I don’t know if she’s kind of in love with him or not.”
I tell her that I am intrigued by the full-blooded defence of the BBC that Powell offered: after all, Labour hasn’t always been best friends with the corporation. Look at the row over the Iraq dossier affair. Or more recently at the many, sometimes well-founded, accusations that the BBC has tacked to the right under the Tories, which at times has exploded into ugly abuse of the BBC’s political editor Laura Kuenssberg from a minority.
“I’m as irritated as the next person with Nick Robinson’s latest interview, you know,” she says. “I’ll be throwing a cup of tea at my radio just as much as anybody else.” But, she says, “I don’t see it as my job to really have an editorial view about the BBC. And you could argue that the way in which the charter is renewed does subject it to more political interference than it really should have.”
She’s had colleagues come to her, taking issue with BBC coverage. But she’s not Labour’s director of comms, she points out. “As the culture secretary, my considerations should be to think about the structure, the funding, the governance, the relevance, the added value of the BBC. And actually, I think that’s partly a mistake that Nadine and the government are making, because they’re talking in the same breath about news coverage and impartiality, and the future of the licence fee.”
And what does she think of the licence fee? “You wouldn’t necessarily, at this point in time, try to invent it. But when you look at the broader value that it brings to our country, as the cornerstone of our creative economy, I can’t meet a single person in the independent production sector that doesn’t say that it’s absolutely critical to the future of the BBC.”
The licence fee, she says, “stacks up pretty well” in the context of “local radio – the last local newsroom standing in most places – children’s education, children’s programming, the World Service, all these things that in any kind of commercial world wouldn’t survive”.
Not that her kids – who are eight, 12 and 17 – ever switch on terrestrial TV, she adds. “They use a lot of BBC resources for schoolwork and things like that. And they do watch a lot of BBC content [when] they watch TV with me. So you know, there is a place for the BBC to continue to innovate. Which I think it’s doing a pretty good job on, to be fair.
“It’s the same for Channel 4. I don’t think the arguments really stack up for privatising it. It’s not that I come at it from a particularly ideological point of view. But the current funding arrangements stack up remarkably well, against the sort of tests I would apply. As opposed to, maybe, the tests the government might apply – but who knows what they are? That’s one of the things that I will be asking [Dorries] in the coming weeks and months. What will be the tests and how will that be evaluated and judged?”
I’d heard on the grapevine that Powell wasn’t necessarily delighted to have been appointed shadow culture secretary, ranking low as it does in the cabinet pecking order. “I wouldn’t say I was hoping for a different job; it’s just not a job I necessarily would have given myself,” she says. “There are other policy areas that I’ve done more in. I’ve done business, housing, education.”
It’s clear to see she’s put her back into it, though, and she seems a quick study; she talks about the awful situation the performing arts have been in throughout the pandemic, and it’s clear she’s listened to self-employed cultural workers who have been hit dreadfully hard. She looks horrified, though, when I suggest Labour might look into Ireland’s current pilot of a basic income for artists: “That’s way above my paygrade! [Shadow chancellor] Rachel Reeves is running a very tight ship on these things, as she should be.”
One of her team referred to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport as “a bit of a Cinderella ministry” when we were corresponding before the interview, maybe preaching to the wrong crowd. True, the department’s budget and heft have been much diminished by the Tories. But it has more public appointments in its remit than any other – an area that is highly politicised, as the government attempts to exclude all but diehard loyalists from significant roles in organisations such as Ofcom and national museums – and it covers broadcasting, 5G, the arts, heritage, sport and tourism. In other words, a whole lot of things that are important to England’s economy and to “levelling up”.
But the department is also right in the middle of how the nation sees itself and understands its own story, at a moment when the Tories have launched a culture war, using inflammatory language to stir up discord over contested heritage, the uses of history and the role of monuments in the public realm – a confected fight meant, apparently, to appeal to “red wall” voters.
Like her boss Starmer, though, the culture war seems an area Powell is pretty keen to skirt. Using a form of words she’s practised – she told the Telegraph the same – she says, “I definitely wouldn’t describe myself as being particularly woke or anti-woke. I hate the phrase, to be honest.”
She reckons, though, her party should have a bit of self-confidence over these issues. “I know our so-called red wall traditional voters really well. Look at the way Tory MPs were over the Euros last summer – they were totally on the wrong side of history and modern public opinion when it came to taking the knee and race. Or look at the Strictly Come Dancing final this year, and how that brought everyone together. Or the Queen’s platinum jubilee this year. I love the Queen – I have no problem with that. Far from it. And the Commonwealth Games. There’s a lot that does bind us together culturally, as a country.” (Talking of football, she’s met Gary Neville a few times, who recently joined Labour. “He’s good, a lot of strong opinions, which are usually sound. We need more of that.”)
What about, say, the statue of Edward Colston, toppled in Bristol in summer 2020? “Well, obviously, what Keir said on it at the time, which is it shouldn’t have been taken down in that way.” But the point about the Colston situation, surely, was that democracy had stuck; the toppling was a symptom of a mangled process that had gone wrong over decades. I wonder what she thinks, then, about the government’s “retain and explain” policy on monuments. “There’s something in that in a sense, because our history needs to be understood, and something that we learn from. And so, you’ve got to be able to show that in all its awful glory – well, it’s not glory at all. I don’t want to see all our museums emptied.”
I think she might have got snarled up here: if anything, the museums may be filling up a bit (in the sense that the Colston statue is in the care of Bristol Museum, and was on display until recently at the city’s M Shed). And anyway, the history of monuments has always been fluid. A prime example is very close to home for Powell: the statue of Friedrich Engels, once the centrepiece of a Ukrainian village, later toppled, then in 2017, brought to stand outside Home in the city in which the communist thinker wrote The Condition of the Working Class in England.
I also worry that by shying away from talking about issues such as the legacy of imperialism, the Labour party is ducking a part of the British story that needs to be properly confronted if the country is to make progress in figuring out its place in the world, and dealing with racism. Powell’s view on this is that most ordinary people have got other things to think about, which is undoubtedly true in this moment of rocketing energy bills and the cost of living crisis – “the sort of bread-and-butter issues, if you like, that perhaps they haven’t heard enough about from Labour”. But it’s not, I think, a zero-sum game.
At last, I tackle Powell with the traditional journalist’s question for any politician in her position: tell me about your own cultural life. “Ed told me to have an answer to this question!” She’s talking about Ed Miliband, to whom she’s close, having worked with him before she was an MP, and on his leadership campaign.
She went to see the Big Night of Musicals at Manchester Arena a couple of weeks before we meet – highlights from West End shows, lots of fun. She’s going to a Hallé concert in March, though it’s her husband, an A&E consultant, who’s the family pianist and an annoyingly good “crossword-type person”. (Powell posts her daily Wordle score on Twitter although she missed a game the day “Nadine Dorries decided to abolish the BBC”.)
She goes to Glastonbury every year with the same pals and attends a few things at Manchester international festival. Fiction’s for holidays; she likes a “a good page-turner that’s nothing to do with work”. And she watches “a lot of telly. Anything from Mastersinger to MasterChef.” What? Have you practised that? “No! I just thought it up!” she protests.
After a bit of to-and-fro, it turns out she’s not referring to Wagner’s great opera set in medieval Nuremberg. I’d actually misheard her saying The Masked Singer: “You know, on ITV on Saturday night!” Oh, sure, yeah. “I would say that I’m a pretty mainstream consumer of culture,” she says, unapologetically.
So she is. And that’s absolutely fine. The point for a politician is not to know the ballet repertoire inside out, but to listen, take the issues seriously – and be up for a fight. Luckily, she seems to be. The stakes – especially for the BBC – couldn’t be higher.
