The art of political storytelling with James Graham

This interview originally appeared in the UCL Policy Lab magazine. 

 In your show Brexit: The Uncivil War, it felt like you went to the heart of how the Leave campaign crafted and delivered a message which ultimately led to the UK leaving the EU. Does the idea of political storytelling offer you a way to write about the world? 

I’m obsessed by how they find the language and the storytelling in politics. I’m interested in how you communicate these often difficult and complex ideas. On a personal level, this is what hurt me about the referendum. The Vote Leave side were such good storytellers in a way that the Remain side wasn’t. The Leave side had a straightforward story to tell. “Democracy! We make our laws!” It was a simple and effective idea. And of course, multilateral, global decision-making is a harder story to tell. Mainly because we haven’t found the words, the characters, or the structure. You can’t start from nowhere and have it done in six weeks. The ideas won’t seep down, will they?

It did feel like the story the Leave campaign successfully told began long before the formal campaign.

I remember speaking to Craig Oliver from the Remain campaign. Going into the campaign, he thought there would be a moment with a starting pistol where both sides set off at the same time. But in fact, he soon realised that the other side had been telling their story for 25 years. 

Your work has looked at some of the most contentious moments in political history, be it the ideological battles portrayed in This House, or the racial divisions of the United States in the 1960s in Best of Enemies. The UCL Policy Lab is launching at what feels like another moment of growing uncertainty. How bad is today’s political and economic situation?

I think it’s really bad. And I say this as a perpetual optimist, who is often criticised for the work that I do, which is more empathetic or tolerant of political systems. I try to be sympathetic to politicians, representing them as flawed but ultimately decent people — and I’ve believed that for as long as I can remember. But that view is being really challenged at the moment. We’re at a low point, intellectually and philosophically, even spiritually and morally. We are simultaneously facing some of the biggest social challenges in modern history, I’d say as equivalent to the 1960s in the United States with the civil rights movement, or the industrial collapse in the 1970s. Yet unlike those moments in history, there is not the intellectual force to meet this one. There are not the big ideas; the alternative or competing visions of the path out of these problems. Whatever you think of the democratic socialism of labour in the 1970s or the Thatcherism of the Tories — there was at least a choice. I loved writing This House because it felt like the prequels to Star Wars. Where depending on your politics, you turn to the light side or the dark side. There were two vivid and striking competing visions of what a country should be economically, culturally and socially — and you see none of that now. Those oppositions don’t existst.

You could argue that’s what Corbynism tried to provoke. But even then a lot of that in its tone, in its leading characters, felt like something from the past. Thinking of the intellectual stagnation of the past 12 years, I don’t think it’s just a Conservative problem or a coalition problem. You could take any post-war decade in recent history and say, “I know what happened in the 50s,” whether it’s house building, or rebuilding the economy, or getting the welfare state up and running. I can define the 60s and 70s. And yet I just don’t know what has happened in the past 12 years that I, as a writer, can describe as changed or improved. Except Brexit, which is not an inherently inspiring thing, as it is just bringing us back to the status quo of the 1970s again.

We have the first generation that will be worse off than their parents, which is such a breaking of the social contract. People should be saying: “that can’t happen, we need to have a radical reformist agenda.”

What do you think makes our politicians incapable of putting forward a vision stronger than the status quo?

A combination of factors. The media landscape has changed, so the way that political ideas are communicated to us has changed. Everyone blames social media for everything and so I won’t fall into that trap. But there is something about the rhythm with which we receive information that has changed.

I know from a drama point of view that sometimes nothing makes sense moment to moment, until you put it in a frame and give it space, time and perspective. So I wonder if our politicians and our “ideas people” just don’t have time to form a nuanced, detailed and complicated answer to these questions? They are always reacting to the moment with these things, rather than thinking of a long term five-year, 10-year or national plan. And within this culture, there is no benefit to these long term ways of thinking about solutions. One of the obvious policies that could have slowed down our current intergenerational inequality would have been house building. But if that takes six, seven or eight years, and you’re a politician who is reacting to Twitter that day — you don’t get political capital from planting seeds that you won’t see grow into a tree.  

But maybe we just don’t have the new idea yet. Maybe it hasn’t emerged. I feel that in most periods of history there is always a reset after 30 to 40 years. The Berlin Wall comes down, the Second World War ends, and now we keep trying to reset but seem unable. The financial crisis happens, and we say “right, we’ve had this consensus, we’re going to pivot to something else.” But it didn’t happen. Then we had the pandemic. In a drama, it would be such a cliché that it takes people being locked in their homes for six months, and for society to literally shut down, to wake it up from its inertia. The pandemic exposed the underfunding of the health service, the inequality. But then the world opens up and we crack on, and we go back to normal?

We often say that the UK is now a country divided. Specifically there is London and not London. You grew up in Ashfield in the Midlands. Do you think the UK is a necessarily conflicted nation?

I just don’t know how real the culture wars are. I know they are currently being waged on social media and comment threads and shock jock radio stations. I always thought that London was a different world when I was growing up, but I didn’t hate it; I didn’t think of it as a threat to my existence, and vice versa. There was a sense of humour about it. They had fancy restaurants and ate really late, and we had tea at 5pm. It was the stuff of stand-up comics. But now it’s framed as an existential threat to our society. My experience in Ashfield is that people are generally getting on with their lives. Yes, those lives are vastly different from 30 years ago. Without romanticising it – because going down the pit was awful – the social structure we have lost was important. Working men’s clubs, the miner’s welfare, the collective elements that gave people a physical sense of their own togetherness and identity. That’s all gone. The fact that most pubs can’t survive in their communities is really telling. I don’t know how you recognise yourself as a group, when you are not together as much as you once were. There has been a shrinking of the public realm. Yet the desire to be an actual community in the physical sense still exists.

In London, although there is massive inequality and deprivation, people still come together. There are spaces for communal joy or celebration. And what went with de-industrialisation elsewhere wasn’t just jobs, but also the places we could come together. Is that right?

Absolutely. It’s always been on a trajectory. But it has been accelerated by austerity and exacerbated by the pandemic. In all this talk of levelling up, Michael Gove listed transport as one of his 12 points. I couldn’t help but think, “yeah, fine, build a tram — but what’s on the other end of the tram when I get off it?” And this is where I really believe culture plays such an important role. Culture within these communities was crucial in providing a space to get together. A place to assemble and discuss the issues of the day in an empathetic and reasonable way. I believe that one of the most significant ways you could revive the social and mental health of my community would be to revive the club circuit of musicians going around on Friday and Saturday nights. Or bingo, live entertainment, cinema, and, yes, amateur and professional theatre.

A lot of your work is about translating complex political ideas and making them accessible — even entertaining! How do you do it?

I don’t know if it’s conscious or intuitive. I think we intuitively know what makes a good story. I think what’s surprising and what I’m grateful for is that for 15 years, the assumption was that people weren’t interested in how political institutions worked. That it was too niche. For example, the Whip’s office and how it operated in the 1970s (This House) or how a newspaper operates (Ink). Or a referendum campaign — what is it, how does it work, where do you put the desks, who funds it, how do you come up with a message, and how do you sell that message? But in reality there is an audience, people enjoy opening up that Swiss clock of it, and understanding how the cogs work.

Being given the opportunity to walk in the footsteps of people you probably disagree with, certain problematic characters like Rupert Murdoch or Dominic Cummings — I think that’s the value of drama in that space. Theatre has always done that. Taken villains, warriors, kings and queens, and tried to understand them emotionally – what they want, what’s driving them – and then created empathy.

What makes you hopeful for the future?

History tells us that even if things feel lost, they are not lost forever. Everything changes, everything turns. There will be moments that feel more hopeful, positive and achievable than today. There is also a generation of younger people. For all we are told about snowflakes, trigger warnings and safe spaces, and being intellectually uncurious and inflexible — my experience is that this is not the case. Their general compassion and awareness of the complexities of life, the damages of social media, and the seriousness of the climate crisis gives us hope.