“In twenty-five years of self-employment, I’ve been a writer, a stand-up comedian, a TV and radio presenter, a poet, a columnist, an editor, a lecturer, a club promoter, a tour guide, an actor, a DJ, a kids’ party entertainer, an office clerk and – inevitably – several times a barman. In the general election of May 2015, I came three thousand votes short of adding ‘Member of Parliament’ to the list.
This was not quite the severe career swerve it might at first seem. In almost everything I’ve done, politics has been drizzled through it. Writing and broadcasting from a sense of place has been my mainstay, and it seems to me impossible to do that without a strong political antenna. Power, money, class, land ownership, patronage, exploitation and corruption have shaped our landscape as thoroughly as they have moulded our imperfect democracy.
Just how imperfect is that democracy? Decades of activism had brought me to the suspicion that our political system is irretrievably broken, corrupted beyond repair by a self-serving elite busily tightening their grip. Challenges to that, such as rows over MPs’ expenses, phone-hacking or dodgy honours, created acres of furious headlines, but seemed to deal only with the symptoms of the malaise rather than its causes. I wanted to find out for myself if things were as bad as I feared.”
“This was not quite the severe career swerve it might at first seem. In almost everything I’ve done, politics has been drizzled through it.”