Fourteen years ago, when David Cameron defeated Gordon Brown to usher in the new British age of chaotic, wayward Conservatism, I was still in my thirties. Watching first a sequence of divisions sewn into the country, on issues of genuine political consequence, then the factious, petty culture wars that nagged in their wake, reflected a more internal turmoil for me. How to be middle-aged.
This election, I face an impending reversal of political weather well into my fifties. Most of my concerns about the forthcoming election are personal, not ideological, a part of older age I hadn’t factored in. I’ve been in the same relationship since Blair was PM and sober for several years. I run a business. My priority exciting thoughts outside work rotate around if, how and when I’ll be able to retire.
Just because I now look back at my own youth as a fruitlessly fun search for absent utopias doesn’t mean I haven’t noticed how under-represented young people have been so far in the election coverage. When the media circus arrived in Clacton this week to gawp at Nigel Farage at close range, they were not looking for 23-year-olds to probe on him. Ingenues on all sides are no longer fresh. Angela Rayner is a grandmother. Owen Jones is almost 40.
I was thinking about young adulthood a lot while enraptured by Oisín McKenna’s Evenings and Weekends, pictured far right, for me this year’s great London novel. During the first few chapters, I took the fact that all the characters over 50 were either dead, dying or going doolally as a personal affront. As I settled into the novel, a precise and wise treatise on being late twenties in the capital, it struck me as a smart deliberate device. To nail a generation, you must obfuscate the one before it. That’s how ideas for change percolate.
If you’re going to attempt a big London temperature gauge, explore the little stuff nobody else writes about. That’s what art is for
McKenna’s book centres on a group of friends, a party, a shaky tenancy, one relationship ending, another beginning. The life that consumes you as a young adult, when everything has yet to take full shape, possibilities yet to turn into inevitabilities. It first startled me into reader submission by confecting an early plot around a cottaging incident at Liverpool Street station toilets. Just the ticket. If you’re going to attempt a big London temperature gauge, explore the little stuff nobody else writes about. That’s what art is for.
The author’s cast list are engine room Londoners, 10 years into their trip here. They’re waitresses, cycle couriers, people with degrees that landed nowhere, suburban parents confused by metropolitan offspring conversations. Westfield Stratford makes an unusually poignant cameo. There’s one posh character, who is mostly dismissed as an embryonic assembly of his privileges.
The weekend of the book’s title is in summer 2019, another deft decision, the last political moment that engaged a solid block of British young adulthood, as crowds gathered in public spaces to set a politician’s name to a White Stripes song. Jeremy Corbyn is only named three or four times in 350 pages. His political ghost is everywhere, far and ineffective enough away now to be sentimentalised. McKenna’s characters are a generation entranced by him.
The 2024 election has no Corbyn character galvanizing young adulthood. Both Rishi Sunak and Sir Keir Starmer have pointedly chosen to ignore or deflect from the climate catastrophe and Palestine, rendering both the major political parties vaguely terrified of youth. Mental health, the gig economy and preposterous rents are all off the table thus far; schools only on it in so far as they affect the tiny percentage who go private.
Evenings and Weekends reminded me, with some pertinent timing, that when you lose the optimistic ideologies of young adulthood, you lose a free-floating flavour of hope circulating the political atmosphere, too. That breathes into everyday operations.
In the ITV debate this week between Sunak and Sir Keir, you could see it stifling any meaningful resolve toward solving real problems. What resulted was a shouty scene from a BBC Radio 4 drama, two harassed middle managers bickering over the garden fence about what day the bins are put out.
Like Andy Burnham in Manchester, Corbyn was as much pop star as politician, a symbol onto whom youthful dreams of ideological change could hang. I’m not saying he was always right. But he had that hopeful capacity. Now we have grim reality. Neither side can claim the buzzword of the election, “change”, if their only messaging is to rearrange the table settings of a busted status quo. Without young involvement, this election will age us all.
