At the start of 2020, I was working on a piece about Question Time, and how it had transformed over time from being an ambling, rather niche discussion show into politics’ answer to Jeremy Kyle, with an audience of incredibly angry people trash-talking imaginary immigrants living in mansions with their 14 imaginary children. Oh, the spiral!
Some lefty would invent the term “gammons”, and then the Twitterati would have an even more vicious spin-off row about whether that word was itself more racist than the original racism. It was all quite hard to unpick. So, with what I now know to be a terrifying naivety, I remember thinking, when the pandemic hit: “Thank God; we’ll surely be right as dodgers in a month or two, but for those few weeks nobody will be wanting dispatches from this peculiar front of the culture war.”
