Few things became Alan Clark less than retirement. “My mind races,” the Thatcher-era Tory junior minister raged into his diaries. “I am hungry for news and gossip, resentful at John Major … how could they? Although, of course, the cruelty of politics is its attraction.”
If only he’d hung on for the arrival of podcasts. Today, Clark would be a cert to host his own politics one, sweeping the crumbs from Westminster tablecloths into a regular 50 minutes of audio content: reminiscence, gossip and crisp, chilled cruelty – Who’s down? Who’s out? – all generously sponsored by a manufacturer of probiotic yoghurt.
It has become SW1’s premier cottage industry, providing gainful employment for disused ministers and ersatz advisers. Another diarist, Alastair Campbell, fronts The Rest is Politics with Rory Stewart, a show so popular it tours theatres. Soon their competitors will number George Osborne and Ed Balls, who are about to launch an economics show.
A format is fast emerging: two big names (all the better for advertisers to see you with), almost always men, season current events with some inside-the-room recollections of Vladimir’s body language or Tony’s office management. It is informed yet accessible and, as a report this month from the Reuters Institute shows, it draws an audience very different from the wider public: younger, more educated and, crucially, richer.
Central to the format is that the silverbacks come from either side of a political divide spanning no more than two inches. They cannot be too left or too right. They must disagree, but agreeably. Osborne last week described Balls as a former “bitter foe” turned “firm friend”.
Reading those words, a memory came back to me from seven years ago. In the spring of 2016, I sat in a small front room in a cramped terrace house. Opposite were Paul and Lisa Chapman – and the story they had to tell, in all its routine awfulness, explained the brokenness of British politics.
They had lived and worked in the Northamptonshire town of Irthlingborough for decades, until Paul started to suffer tremors, shakes, sudden falls. He’d got Parkinson’s. Once the fastest postie in town, he found that his body would no longer do what his brain wanted. Lisa gave up her cleaning job to care for him, and now the couple had to rely on social security. But there was no security, not six years into Osborne’s spending cuts, which research showed hurt people with severe disabilities 19 times worse than the average.
For the Chapmans, this meant undergoing an assessment that claimed he was far healthier than the reality – and being robbed of benefits that were rightfully theirs. In front of me, Paul recalled what he’d told Lisa: “You go round your mum’s. I’ll clear off and I won’t take my tablets or my insulin. And it’ll be over then. I won’t be here.”
What rings in my ears even now is the confusion in his voice: he’d never expected this illness, this foreclosed life or this official sadism.
Whenever he is wheeled into another studio as an elder statesman, Osborne is never asked about people such as the Chapmans, or scientists’ research that shows 300,000 extra deaths were caused by his austerity programme. Nor do I expect it to be a major feature of his podcast – not when Balls himself went along with so much of the austerity agenda. Perhaps there’ll be some light ribbing about the former chancellor’s career after Westminster. How many jobs are we up to now?
In 2003, Campbell was a salesman for an illegal war prosecuted on dodgy evidence that killed between 280,000 and 315,000 Iraqis, according to the estimates of Brown University in the US. On the 20th anniversary of the start of the Iraq war, he was interrogated on his podcast not by a relative of one of those killed, or by a maimed soldier or by one of the million Britons who marched in opposition – but by Stewart, who after the invasion became a latter-day colonial administrator in the shattered country. It is fair to say their conversation on the matter was less heated than it gets on the iniquities of Brexit.
Light entertainment is the great launderer of political reputations. A few years ago, TV quiz shows turned Boris Johnson into the serial liar you could have a pint with. Cookery and bad dancing transformed Balls from an economist into a household name. The pretence is that they’ve shed the Westminster carapace and are now on civvy street. Yet long after he left Blair’s court, Campbell continued to help run election campaigns, while as editor of the London Evening Standard Osborne would run front pages to help Matt Hancock, his former chief of staff-turned-health secretary.
This time round, the great redeemer is the podcast boom, fuelled by venture capital. It is a giant speech bubble, which middle-aged politicos will use to rehabilitate their tarnished names. Perhaps the public will learn to love Osborne, who has always struck me as far more personable than that deluded Sloane David Cameron.
A few months after I wrote about the Chapmans came the vote for Brexit – and with it a newfound desire by the political classes to listen to voters and to arguments they had long ago tuned out. Post-Brexit, post-Corbyn, post-Johnson, that era is now over. In vogue today is a room-temperature liberalism, defined by cosy agreement and willing blindness to those unpleasant facts and those unfortunate people who don’t fit. But they haven’t gone away.
I spoke to the Chapmans this week. Paul’s Parkinson’s has got much worse and their benefits aren’t enough for the rising costs of food and fuel. Last winter, they didn’t put on the central heating and Lisa went over to her mum’s for a few hours of warmth a day. Paul broke his little finger in December but was so numb with cold that he only felt the pain in February. As well as borrowing from relatives, they’ve started selling off things: his model cars and fish tank, her CDs and DVDs. Now they plan to sell that terrace house.
Lisa said: “We done it right; we both worked, we bought our own place.” Who did she blame? “All of them in Westminster: liars.” What did Paul make of Osborne’s latest gig? “All those jobs are like awards for him. He’s top of the pile.” What did that make him and Lisa? “Oh, we’re bottom of the heap.”
These two need no lessons in the cruelty of politics. Someone should give them a podcast.
Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist
