On the Isle of Bute, the build up to Scotland’s biggest ever World Cup game is reaching fever-pitch. Even the ferry from Wemyss Bay on the mainland to Rothesay is covered in blue and white bunting, emblazoned with the cross of St Andrew.

At Brandanes barbers, across from the island ferry port, Zakarya Fasi and his son Abdul are discussing the once-in-a-lifetime Scotland-Brazil game.

“What do you think the score will be?” 22-year-old Abdul asks 16-year-old customer Cammy.

“Probably three-nil to Brazil,” Cammy says.

“Be positive!” Abdul laughs.

As the Fasis plan the dinner menu for tonight’s game – Syrian biscuits and Irn Bru – their customers talk about which of the island’s pubs will have the best atmosphere. Cammy is a Brandane – one of few remaining islanders who were born on Bute. Zak’s barbershop carries the same name, even though his family were born in Damascus, in Syria.

“We genuinely love it here,” Zak, 54, says. “We are so happy and at peace. Bute people are very kind – and they always offer you a smile.”

We went to meet the Fasis to film the latest in the Mirror’s award-winning ‘Island of Strangers’ video series, made with film-maker John Domokos – which tells the stories of how communities overcome divides. The Fasis arrived in Bute just over a decade ago, one family of 12 million Syrians forced to leave their homes when armed conflict in the country intensified, killing over 600,000 people.

When Damascus was destroyed, Zak – who learned the art of barbering from the age of ten – lost the family home, and the business he had built up over 35 years in a single moment. When the family fled, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) resettled them to Bute, a tiny Scottish island of 6,500 residents, 40 miles from Glasgow.

“We had not heard of Bute before,” Zak says. “We just knew England and Scotland were part of the UK and that it was a great country.”

When they arrived in Scotland, Abdul was just 10 years old. His siblings Enaam and Yayha were 19 and 16, and his eldest brother Mo was 20.

‘SENSELESS’ screamed one tabloid headline, asking “why Syrian refugees are being foisted on a remote Scottish island with high unemployment and poverty?” Other articles suggested the families didn’t like living there. While far right commentator Katie Hopkins reported – in a now deleted tweet – on a “recent disturbing trend” of crimes on ‘Scotland’s migrant island’.

The reality, Abdul says, was quite different. “The welcome we got here was unreal,” he says. “They didn’t even know us, but people were smiling at us.”

Abbie Cameron, now 22, was in Year 7 when the Syrian kids arrived at her school in Rothesay, the same age as Abdul. “Hearing that refugees were coming to the island – that was really the first experience we’d had with people from different countries,” Abbie says. “On the island, every day is kind of the same, so I thought it was exciting, to be honest.

“I remember when they first arrived and they came into school and couldn’t speak any English – we just found a way to communicate with them.”

For Abdul and his siblings it was a tough time. “It was brutal to be honest,” Abdul says. “We started at school, learning A, B, C, D – it was hard. But we kept trying.”

Abdul and his brother Yahya are both talented footballers. “I would say football was probably a language that we used to speak with them,” Abbie remembers. “That’s how I ended up meeting them. I went up to them, I said, “Do you like Messi or Ronaldo better?”

Abdul laughs. “Ronaldo,” he says, emphatically. “Messi is a great player, but Ronaldo works harder. He built himself.”

Abdul and Abbie became friends, and today they are engaged. “We went to prom together and I asked her for the first dance, so, aye, that was good,” Abdul remembers. “We’ve just bought a house together and hope to get married in two years time. When there is love, culture and language don’t get in the way.”

While the Fasis speak English with a broad Scottish accent, Abbie has been learning Syrian Arabic. “I’ve been teaching her our Damascus accent,” Zak says. “We’ve taught her Syrian food and she’s taught us Scottish food.” Abbie has even been trying to teach her future brother-in-law Yahya the bagpipes.

Zak and his wife Mona, 48, have given the young people their blessing.““I don’t care if my children get partners from different cultures, when there is love, culture doesn’t matter,” Zak says, in Arabic. “Mona and I got married within 15 days of meeting. Look where we are 30 years later. I tell you, real treasure isn’t money.”

All the family speak of sacrifices made. Yayha gave up his hopes of being a professional footballer when he became a refugee. “I chose my family over my dream,” he says. “In Syria, I was a child, but the first day I left, I became an adult. In one day, I had three jobs, Mount Stuart (a Victorian tourist attraction) in the morning, Co-op in afternoon, hotel in the night… learning English, go to college.

“My dad used to go and do free haircuts for older people during Covid, and mum volunteered with Oxfam and Oasis charity shop. We didn’t sit at home. We didn’t wait to be on a benefit. When we came to Scotland, I said, ‘If I work hard, I will build my future’.”

A decade after 24 Syrian families settled on the Isle of Bute, the Fasis are one of the only families left. Others left for work in Glasgow, and some have been able to return to Syria. Today, 26-year-old Yahya is the owner of Tazza cafe on Bute, where Abbie works. He also plays for a football club in Greenock, across the water.

Ahead of the big game, Tazza regulars Hugh Reed, 65, and David Miles-Hanschell, 82, drop in for a Syrian breakfast. Hugh has just finished recording a new song ‘Fitba’s Comin Hame’ with his band Hugh Reed and the Velvet Underpants.

“People did say to me, ‘Why did you move to the island?’, Hugh says. “And I said, ‘So that I could still feel young’.” He laughs. “When the refugees first arrived, there was some trepidation on the island, and a horrible article. A committee was set up to oppose it.”

Hugh and David were two of the Bute islanders who helped teach the Syrian arrivals to speak English. “I suppose Scottish identity is changing,” Hugh says. “It’s like every country – new ideas come from other places. In Scotland we have this idea of ‘New Scots’.”

Yahya says: “Being a New Scot is to belong here and I felt that from the first day – that I belong to Scotland. It encouraged me to work hard, work on my accent and to belong to this culture. We’re all human.”

That night, as the island basks in a rare heatwave, the family gather at Zak and Mona’s terraced home to watch Scotland-Brazil – scarves on, and Saltire flags at the ready. The commentary on TV says: “Scotland’s heroes are 90 minutes from immortality”. Abbie smiles. “If Scotland win, I’ll play the bagpipes at the shop tomorrow,” she says.

Hugh and his friends head to Bute Yard, a new venture in Rothesay set up by the Marquis of Bute – which showcases local craft beers, gorse gin, smoked fish, and Polish chef Pawel’s food. It’s a festival of kilts, blue and white face paint, Bute Beer and big screens, on which Brazil dance their way around Scotland to the sound of the Scots’ chant ‘No Scotland, No Party’.

In the early hours of the morning, Cammy’s prophecy comes true, and Scotland lose 3-0 to Brazil. “We taught the Brazilians football, and that’s the thanks we get,” Hugh jokes. He adds ruefully: “Being Scottish has always been so close, but yet so far.”

As Brazil celebrates, Abbie reflects. “We keep dreaming,” she says. “Being Scottish isn’t where you are from or where you’re born, it is the love you have for that country, it is inside your heart – the pride you feel to belong to this country.”

Watch our brand new #IslandOfStrangers film here
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOw74sREIO8

This story first appeared in the Daily Mirror

Winning things is always nice. This time it felt like being seen.

A lot of the work we do feels like it’s going uphill, against the grain of where journalism is heading, against economic imperatives, against algorithms. So it was a lovely moment when the Chair of Judges, Philip Collins, seemed to genuinely understand why we asked four communities across the UK to let us film with them to try to tell a different story about our country.

The editor of Prospect said:

Judge Abby Jitendra, Policy Director at Think Labour, called the films “a balm for the soul”.

When our team – me, the film-maker John Domokos, and journalist Claire Donnelly – accepted the prize, we’d literally just arrived from making the latest in the film series on the Isle of Bute.

They called out our names at Bloomsbury Theatre, moments after we’d burst in from a delayed 13-hour journey on the very worst day of the heatwave from the West of Scotland.

Having not expected to win, I tried to say something through the uniquely sticky kind of sweat that comes from a broken Avanti train air-con, and mostly tried not to faint on stage into the lap of George Orwell’s son, Richard Blair, in the front row.

I definitely did not thank the four amazing communities we worked in nearly enough. So I’d like to do that now – thank you to the amazing people of St Mellons in Cardiff, Speke and Toxteth in Liverpool, Unity Gym in Rotherham, and the Flowerpatch volunteers in Middlesbrough and Stockton. We could not have made the films without you.

It was a surprise to win partly because, in the popular world of populists, telling complicated truths is currently extremely unfashionable.

It’s not just the problem we face as journalists. It’s one of the biggest problems facing our world’s future. And it’s also facing Andy Burnham on the Avanti train of government, as he comes down from his Makerfield high.

A couple of weeks ago now, on the eve of the historic by-election (and, perhaps more importantly, the night of the England-Croatia game) I spoke at an event at UCL hosted by the Orwell Prizes about ‘Englishness, Britishness and the populist challenge’.

Asked to reflect on Orwell’s brilliant essay, The Lion and the Unicorn – in a week when refugee families had been hunted down in modern-day pogroms in Belfast, hurt in Glasgow and terrified in Southampton; and Restore UK, a party to the right of the British National Party, was polling at around 13 per cent in Makerfield – I argued that any progressive sense of Englishness, at the present moment, is in peril.

The Island of Strangers series actually pre-dates the dog-whistle phrase one of Sir Keir Starmer’s aides wrote for him in an utterly misguided attempt to be out-fox Reform. When we set out to make the films, our series was provisionally called ‘After The Riots’. But Island of Strangers seemed to beautifully sum up a dangerous moment – as well as provide the canvas on which to show up a poetic lie.

The argument of our films has always been that since the Southport riots and beyond, we have allowed a small minority of Britons – as well as powerful voices from abroad – to loudly define who we are as a nation.

As if, at last, two summers ago our country took its shirt off, stuck a flare up its arse and revealed its real self to the world. Caught in the headlights, our leaders have repeatedly ceded ground to the Far Right and the siren voices of Reform UK.

But here’s the thing. Our work at the Daily Mirror takes us into communities every week. In my own experience of the country, even at its grimiest, grubbiest margins, that vision is simply untrue.

If anything, it’s perfectly clear to me that England, and by extension Britain, is an island of neighbours, as imperfect and difficult as that relationship can be.

Having just been on the Isle of Bute contemplating what it means to be Scottish during the Scotland-Brazil game, this weekend, as time ticks towards the England-Mexico game, I’m thinking about Englishness again.

There is no doubt that Englishness is now a contested space. And something porous. And something filled with overlapping identities.

Orwell understood this when he wrote in the Lion and the Unicorn, “what have you in common with the child of five whose photograph your mother keeps on the mantel- piece? Nothing, except that you happen to be the same person.”

But a contested space needs contesting.

If we don’t take part, there are others more than willing to make the Lion and the Unicorn do their bidding. And to persuade others that setting fire to someone’s house is patriotism.

Our Merseyside film follows what happens after a refugee sanctuary building was targeted in 2014, during riots that followed misinformation spread in the wake of the horrific murder of three little girls in Southport.

The people seeking help at Asylum Link Merseyside had nothing to do with the horrific murder 20 miles north, but they became the focus of public anger all the same. People were spat at, called names and attacked.

But something incredible happened.

As staff were boarding up the windows, they looked out and saw thousands of people converging on the building – not with flaming torches or hate-filled chants, but with placards declaring love and support.

Thousands of ordinary people came together city to protect the building – as a symbol that refugees are welcome in Liverpool.

It is my argument that we need to start seeing the courage of those people who came out in defiance of the Far Right – and the quiet dignity of those who came out across the country to sweep up broken glass, rebuild walls and offer people a bed for the night – matched by the resolve of our politicians.

I’m not going to suggest that all is well in our country. Too many post-industrial, coastal and inner-city communities are in trouble.

Spending time in some of Britain’s poorest places makes it easy to understand people’s anger, and lack of faith in politicians – as the broken carcasses of their once proud industries loom over their lack of progress in modern times.

But deep down, I think we all know – even the angry people outside the asylum hotels – that stopping the boats will not, in the end, make a single bit of material difference to anyone’s day-to-day life.

As Orwell writes: “England has got to be true to herself. She is not being true to herself while the refugees who have sought our shores are penned up in concentration camps..”

It’s my belief that only returning power meaningfully to communities can truly extinguish the hot flames of populism. But it’s also being able to offer a vision of a different Britain - where patriotism isn’t wrapping yourself in a Union Jack, or scaring elderly people on the way home from the mosque, or driving families out onto the street.

This quiet kind of patriotism isn’t weak or saccharine. And importantly, it also contains a lot of humour. Orwell said the “goose-step” could not be used in England… “because the people in the street would laugh”.

He pointed out that unlike in foreign countries, the only battles English people remember in poems and songs are usually “a tale of disasters and retreats…”

Battle poems like ‘It’s Coming Home’ – a piss-take of our endearing belief our football team can win the gleaming Jules Rimet. Or maybe the great literary poem that always for me evokes our Albion – ‘Vindaloo’.

Orwell described England as a “nation of stamp-collectors, pigeon-fanciers, amateur carpenters, coupon-snippers, darts-players, crossword-puzzle fans”…. And wrote that our culture revolved around “the pub, the football match, the back garden, the fireside and the ‘nice cup of tea’.”

This is the country that I see on my own travels. A nation of problematic, annoying, endearing, kind, funny, petty, silly, surprising neighbours.

But nations need building.

Orwell talks of a patriotism that “runs like a connecting thread” - “an everlasting animal stretching into the future and the past”.

He talks about “moments when the whole nation suddenly swings together and does the same thing, like a herd of cattle facing a wolf.”

Or “like the awakening of a giant”.

Now is such a moment.

After all, as the Dear England playwright James Graham so eloquently says: England is really only the story that we tell about ourselves.

Flanked by embroidery machines, buttons and pieces of fabric, the MissPlaces women’s group are chatting about an election which has brought a cavalcade of canvassers, campaigners and TV crews to their once quiet corner of England.

Regardless of their political views, they all agree on one thing. The Reform candidate, Robert Kenyon – who has refused to apologise for misogynist social media posts, and once admitted to being a sexist – is giving the men of Makerfield a bad name.

“My husband passed away a true gentleman,” says Theresa Robinson, 57, who lost her beloved Alan last year. “He would never have behaved like that. I’ve got three sons and they wouldn’t behave like that – and I wouldn’t want my daughter going out with someone like him either.”

Reform’s unofficial social media campaign has tried to paint Kenyon as “handsome Rob, the plucky plumber”, but locally women refer to him as ‘Sexist Rob’ after remarks he made about Carol Vorderman and other women.

As well as endorsing a highly offensive post about the lynchpin of the Mirror’s Pride of Britain Awards - “he’s only saying what we’re all thinking”, accompanied by a thumbs-up and laughing emojis – other social media posts from Kenyon include his view that “women can’t ref, can’t drive or give directions”, women pundits on Sky “are not up to the job”, and crude comments about women rugby league.

[Image by Chris Neill, courtesy of Daily Mirror]

Kenyon has also made vile comments about women who have abortions – “don’t dole out ‘what if someone is raped by their brother’ – and said “English women just walk around with their fat bellies and odd shapes pushing a pram in their PJs”.

But what seems to have annoyed local women even more is his refusal to apologise when given the opportunity on BBC Question Time – and Reform’s insistence that “Rob is an ordinary man, saying ordinary things”.

Four miles across the constituency in Worsley Mesnes, Amy Madden, 28, says she is “disgusted” and “heartbroken” at Kenyon’s sexism and his refusal to apologise. And she was keen to emphasise he does not represent the working class men of Makerfield.

“What do I think of him? Disgusting,” Amy, the founder of Wigan’s All Ears mental health charity, says. “I find it frightening and heartbreaking to be honest. We’ve fought so hard as women and it feels like he wants to take us backwards.

“I don’t want someone who thinks those kind of comments are okay to represent me – to represent vulnerable people, women, children, anyone.

“It’s insulting to say he’s just a regular bloke from Wigan. None of the men in my life are like that. It’s doing the men of Makerfield a massive disservice.

“I am voting for Andy Burnham, and so are most of the women I know.

I’ve seen what he’s done and how he’s done it. I think Rob Kenyon’s attitude to women will have cost him a lot of votes.”

The latest Survation poll agrees, showing a decisive lead for Andy Burnham among Makerfield’s women, while among men he remains neck and neck with Kenyon. Support for Reform amongst women is running at 29 per cent, significantly below men’s support at 35 per cent. Support for Burnham was at 42 for women, versus 37 for men.

Back at the club at Bickershaw Village, which once served the miners who worked the deep coal seams of the Lancashire Coalfield via Bickershaw Colliery, and is now known for weddings, wakes and Northern Soul nights, Amanda Robinson says it’s not just his comments, but Reform’s policies which make this a dangerous moment for women in the constituency – and beyond.

“When I look at what they are hoping to do, repealing the maternity and reproductive rights we have fought for decades upon decades for – and saying they would take away PIP for mental health, that would affect most of the women here,” Amanda, the founder of MissPlaces, says.

“Rob Kenyon described his own views as ‘crass’ on Question Time but he wouldn’t apologise. How can a woman watch that and think I want to align myself with those views? They must be brainwashed. It scares me.”

In a tight-knit community of big families in which mums still rule, Kenyon’s claim that the only time his sexist comments come up on the doorstep “is when female voters have said ‘take no notice, they are just trying to smear you’,” would seem to be misguided.

Another woman who attends the group, Julie Mulhern, was surprised to receive one of Carol Vorderman’s letters to women voters through her letterbox last week, when the broadcaster intervened to ask women in the constituency for a chat “woman to woman”.

Recounting his “nasty” posts, Vorderman said she wanted to make it clear that Kenyon is not a one-off but “Reform’s pattern”.

The former Countdown host concluded: “Right now, the women of Makerfield have real power.. you can decide if Rob Kenyon is the person you wish to represent you.”

Julie said Kenyon had himself knocked at her door only a few days before. She said she remains undecided about her vote, after feeling disappointed that Josh Simons had stood down as their Labour MP.

In Makerfield, it’s not just women who are horrified by Kenyon’s views. At Platt Bridge Community Centre, Dave Baxter is shaking his head. “What worries me,” says the 47-year-old community worker, and son of a miner, “is that Nigel Farage looked at Rob Kenyon and thought he’s the bloke for me. What made him think that? He’s looked at the constituency and what they will go for, and he’s come up with that.”

Dave is born and bred in Platt Bridge, a grafter known locally for his role in transforming a block of disused flats on Ribble Road into a thriving community hub.

“Putting Rob Kenyon up here as the candidate shows me Reform have completely got the wrong end of the stick about Makerfield, if they think that’s what people around here will go towards,” he says.

“They thought a self-employed plumber with those views would work. But that’s a small minority of people. The rest of us, and especially people of my dad’s age, don’t think like that about women.

“What Reform don’t seem to understand is that this is a place with a lot of strong female leaders. They dropped the ball when they put him front of stage.”

This week, the legendary BBC Manchester broadcaster Mike Sweeney spoke for many Makerfield men as he hauled Kenyon over the coals on his ever-popular radio show.

“People are going to look back over comments you’ve made a year, two years ago, and say, do I really want this guy as my MP, representing me, my mam, my daughters?” the former miner and docker told him. “Do I want him to be an MP?”

In less than a week’s time, these 12 square miles of England have the chance to make history. As Burnham himself says, “People here will write the script for change.”

Right now, as Carol Vorderman says, the women of Makerfield have real power. On Thursday, a pivotal moment in British political history may well be decided by Makerfield’s mums and matriarchs – the Queens of the North.

[This article first appeared in Saturday’s Daily Mirror. With thanks to Claire Donnelly for help with reporting]

A series of dark blue signs line the grass verge by the Tesco Superstore, promoting new political party, ‘Great Yarmouth First’. On one side of the road, is the Gate public house, as decked with England flags as the home end at Wembley. On the other is Caister Barbers, where Bahez Abas and Sirwan Slhian are hard at work with their clippers, executing perfect fades.

From the pavement, the Iranian-owned barbers appears surrounded. But inside, 29-year-old Bahez is smiling. “Take a look at our gowns,” he says. “We’ve had them for years, long before the flags.” Bahez’ clients are robed in Union Jack hairdressing gowns. “Why not?” he shrugs. “Yes, I am born in Kurdish Iran. But I am British now. I love England. I love Britain.”

Picture by Paul Marriott

Bahez pulls out his mobile phone. “This is ‘Flag Man’,” he says, showing us the Instagram account of ‘Flagman UK’, a figure who conceals his identity but is believed to come from nearby Lowestoft. Flagman has claimed the Caister flags on Facebook.

“Flagman puts the flags up, and then a few days or weeks later, another man in a balaclava – also English – takes them all down. Flag Man puts them up again, they come down again. This has all happened three or four times. Sometimes Union Jacks, sometimes England flags.

“When the man came to take them down the first time, I said to him ‘you’re English, this is your flag. You’re crazy!’”

The first time Flag Man came to Caister, Bahez says he offered him a Union Jack to put in his window. “I said, yes of course, I have no problem,” he says. “I put it in my window. But then other guy in the balaclava, the one who takes the flags down, came to me and said, ‘if you don’t take that flag down, I’ll put your window in’.

“I don’t want any trouble.”

As local elections day arrives, Great Yarmouth – better known for its award-winning pier and wide, yellow bucket-and-spade beach – finds itself on the frontlines of Britain’s search for identity.

One of Britain’s most easterly towns, Yarmouth rarely finds itself at the centre of things, but in this election, it is at the heart of a niche right-wing power struggle – between Nigel Farage’s Reform Party and Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain.

In this battle for the heart of the Far Right – and the largesse of funders like Elon Musk – the two multi-millionaire former bankers both want desperately to win.

Tempers frayed after Musk anointed Lowe as a future leader of the Reform party. Then Lowe was kicked out of Reform a year ago following allegations of threats of violence towards party chairman Zia Yusuf, although the Crown Prosecution Service dropped an investigation due to insufficient evidence.

Now Lowe has created a new party in time for the elections – ‘Great Yarmouth First’ –which is affiliated to Restore Britain nationally, although posters we saw did not reflect this. Lowe has said ‘GYF’ will act as a “pilot project”.

Walking along the town’s ‘Golden Mile’ sands in last week’s spring heatwave, it was clear that despite struggling with coastal deprivation, Great Yarmouth is far from ‘left behind’. Millions in regeneration money have built a new leisure centre, and the iconic Palmers building has had a £17m refurb.

A further £18m is pledged for transforming the famous Winter Gardens, while there are plans for a multi-screen cinema, hotel and shops on North Quay, a £10m investment in a new port terminal – and even the beloved Iron Duke pub is due to reopen later this year after a £2m restoration.

To crown it all, a fortnight ago, after a £2m refurbishment, the town’s Britannia Pier was given the honour of being named national ‘Pier of the Year’.

The Pier is also where banker-turned-Cotswolds-farmer Rupert Lowe chose to launch ‘Great Yarmouth First’ in February, in a theatre advertising Gareth Gates and Jason Manford.

On a pier flanked by a Thai takeaway and Turkish restaurant, Lowe launched his far-right revolution. “Millions will have to go,” the MP said as he pledged a policy of mass deportations to rapturous applause and foot stamping.

Lowe’s party makes Nigel Farage look like Zac Polanski. The anti-Far Right organisation, HOPE not Hate this week published a special report that claimed a “litany of extremists resurfacing in Restore Britain, including figures who have spent decades immersed in fascist groups such as the BNP, Blood & Honour and much else.”

Yet in Yarmouth last week, many people told us how impressed they have been by their leaflets on local issues – doctor’s surgeries, traffic calming measures and, inevitably, potholes.

Eating 99 Flakes in the sunshine, were Maggie and Steve (who asked not to give their surname). Steve, 66, a retired submariner, said they were still deciding who to vote for in the local elections. “We’re both very interested in this new party, Great Yarmouth First,” he said. “We’ve seen a few posters and signs around today, and we’ve said when we get home, we’ll look them up, see what they’re all about. We like the sound of them.”

By the donkey rides hut, with its sign “please do not be offended if we ask to weigh your child”, another couple were less welcoming. “I’ll vote Reform or Great Yarmouth First, haven’t decided,” the man said. “Now get back to your city.”

As the Pier blasted out ear-splitting EuroHouse to pensioners in the April sunshine, a woman strolling by told us her husband had been radicalised by Facebook. “He’s always on his screen,” she says. “He’s even started going on Tommy Robinson marches. We’ve just had to stop talking about politics in our house. It’s banned at the dinner table.”

Dr Joe Mulhall, an expert on the Far Right who works for HOPE not Hate claims some Great Yarmouth First voters may think they are only voting for a local party. “Restore Britain may stand for election on local issues like doctors’ surgeries and potholes, but Great Yarmouth First is part of the most extreme political party to gain traction since the BNP,” Dr Mulhall claims. “Despite the image they are presenting to voters, local people should be aware of the true extremism at the core of the party.”

Restore Britain were contacted for comment.

In our straw poll, two young people walking their dogs along the seafront were the lone voices for the Conservatives. Lucy Hammond, 59, said that, for her, next week’s vote will be between Green and Labour. “I can tell you who I won’t be voting for,” she said. “Nigel Farage.”

“Reform have got so many ex-Tories they are just Conservatives 2.0,” said Charlie Bircham, 55, who works at the longstanding fishing shop, Pownalls. “I’m happy to support Rupert Lowe,” he said. “He’s the only politician who does what it says on the tin.”

In a warning for Yarmouth voters that things are not always what they seem, last summer, Lowe spotted a small boat coming into Great Yarmouth. “Dinghies coming into Great Yarmouth, RIGHT NOW,” he posted on his X account. “Authorities alerted!”

The vessel was actually a rowing boat manned by a team of four – including a former Royal Marine – on a charity row to raise funds for research into motor neurone disease.

Along a coast waving with flags, Caister even has its own – Caister Men Never Turn Back, which remembers the lifeboat disaster during the Great Storm of 1901. As Britain votes this week, the extreme east of England finds itself all at sea.

[This story originally appeared in yesterday’s Daily Mirror - https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/england-flag-war-town-pensioners-37100182]

“This is great-uncle Nye,” she says. She shows us a photograph of her father, also Aneurin, named after his uncle. “Do you think he looks like him?” she laughs.

Today, as she says heavily, “Great Uncle Nye would be turning in his grave, and my dad too.” Mary is about to break a family tradition. “I’m not voting Labour this time,” she says, as Nye looks on sternly from the mantlepiece. “I can’t do it. I’m sorry.”

Next to her on the settee, her husband Gareth, a former member of the National Union of Mineworkers, is shaking his head.

“People think just because you are born and brought up in Wales you have to swallow it,” Mary says. “You have a right to change. My problem is there’s no party I’d like to change to. So, I won’t vote. Not this time. And I tell you I fear for Wales, and I fear for the Valleys because Nigel Farage is going to get in.”

The mention of the Reform leader’s name is too much for Gareth. “You mean, the devil incarnate!” he said, in his Welsh baritone. “The man who will privatise Nye Bevan’s NHS!”

You don’t need to be steeped in the history of the Labour Party to know there’s a problem when Nye Bevan’s great-niece can’t bring herself to vote Labour. Tredegar is the beating, emotional heart of a party as born from and shaped by this landscape as the Valleys themselves.

At the other end of the motorway, in London, another famous son of Tredegar, Lord Kinnock – the party’s talismanic former leader – knows it too. If the M4 were a metaphor, it would be a thread unravelling between the people of Wales and the government at Westminster.

Years of his nation being “plundered” by Tory governments have had a “corrosive effect”, Kinnock tells me when we meet at the House of Lords. “The sense of being left behind gets into the soul. Despite the amazing community spirit which is still there in Wales, it crushes hopes and ambitions and confidence.”

He looks across at bookshelves heavy with Welsh history. “There are good reasons for Wales feeling left behind. It started off with Thatcher, there was an easing of it in the Blair-Brown years, and then it was battered again by 14 years of Tory austerity rule. This is not propaganda, it is just mathematics.

“For years, we were caught on the leash of underfunding and neglect from Westminster. Now a Labour government at either end of the M4 is bringing change – but reconstruction is always slower than destruction. It’s asking a hell of a lot of the people of Wales to have patience, but it has already started.”

This week, Wales will vote for an expanded and changed Senedd – a confusing re-imagining of the Welsh democratic landscape that Mary and others dismiss as a “gravy train”. The abandonment of ‘first past the post’ voting has heightened Reform and Plaid Cymru’s chances of slaying the Labour dragon.

The place where Labour and the NHS were founded, might be both of their undoing. A nation steeped in the traditions of solidarity has propped up the Labour vote since it collapsed in Scotland. Meanwhile, Farage has said the NHS “isn’t working anymore” and needs “fundamental” re-thinking.

In a microcosm of the conversations happening across Wales, in Tredegar, families, neighbours and even former comrades are divided. At the Coach and Horses – which features a giant Nye Bevan mural on its gabled side – every one of the bar staff is voting a different way.

While landlady Amanda Burrows, 60, says she won’t vote, and barman Shaun Carriff, 65 is sticking with Labour, the pub’s co-owner is prepared to commit heresy.

“I admire what Nye and his mentor Walter Conway started here when they founded Tredegar Medical Aid, but I wouldn’t vote for Labour now,” Simon Griffiths says, against the clink of snooker balls on the television. “I used to get in trouble here for admiring Margaret Thatcher. Now I think Farage seems the best of a bad bunch.” He shrugs. “It’s caused some terrible fights in here, but they still drink my beer.”

Bevan called himself “a projectile from the Welsh valleys” that spread ideas across the world. In town, signs welcome visitors “to the birthplace of the NHS”. One man tells me, “I am going to close my eyes, mark a cross and as long it doesn’t hit Labour, I’ll be happy.” Others say they will stick with a party they have voted for all their lives.

Up at the Bevan Stones, off the A465 above Tredegar, “where Nye Bevan addressed his constituents and the world”, Kinnock’s words from the day before in London are ringing in my ears. “The people and movements of the past, of socialism and the Labour Party in Wales should be the source of enormous pride,” he said. “From sheer bravery and determination, came ideas that changed not only Wales but the world.

“But we don’t live there anymore. It is not a great address for the future. Our laser attention has to be on the realities of now and the possibilities of the future, rooted in the courage and determination of the past.”

Kinnock joined the Labour Party at 14 in his hometown, Tredegar. “I joined the Labour Party 70 years ago, because I knew if things needed to be done, they would be done best if we got organised,” he says. “I saw that the generations that had sod-all security, care, housing, opportunities, made it for themselves with collective action, guts, community spirit and care others that has never been equalled.

“That is a genuine Welsh heritage. It is our job to nourish the embers that are still there and make it the future.”

Kinnock says Eluned Morgan is the right woman to tend the flame. “We have a phrase in Wales – chwarae teg, which means ‘fair play’,” he says. “Eluned is chwarae teg on legs. This is a leadership that won’t take second best from Westminster.

“I understand that voting for Reform or Plaid feels like poking the establishment in the eye with a sharp stick. But people should ask themselves why do Plaid Cymru refer even less to independence and separation than Reform talk about the benefits of Brexit?

“The only good thing to say about both of them is they have got a more practiced sidestep than most outside halves. Dig a bit behind their impassioned sentiments and ask, can they make my country better? And the true answer is, neither of them can.”

The last time I interviewed Kinnock was on the 40^th anniversary of his ‘I warn you’ speech which predicted the years of Tory government. Does have a warning now?

“I warn you if you we don’t have a Labour government in Wales there will be standstill, and Wales can’t afford any pause,” he says. “I warn you that a positive future for Wales depends on sustaining the purpose and principles that ground Eluned Morgan’s Labour Party.

“I warn you that Reform is an expression of grievance that will generate division, and nationalism turns its back on tomorrow, and we cannot afford to be split or delayed.”

For those vultures circling South Wales waiting for Labour’s heart to bleed out, the patient is not yet dead. “Look at what we have done,” Kinnock says, addressing Mary and those who falter. “From workers’ rights to the highest-ever minimum wage, the green energy jobs revolution to ending the two-child limit… We are fighting back – and we will get there, as long as people are willing to stick it out.”

[This article appeared in yesterday’s Daily Mirror newspaper]

This was partly an objection to elitism, public school networking, and the kind of people who spent time there – and partly because if you didn’t have much time between the library, paid jobs and the city’s 94 (!) pubs, it felt better spent on the Oxford University Student Union doing actual things that challenged that elitism and made some sort of difference to student life.

But the main reason I boycotted it, also turned out to be the reason I went there last week.

Maff Potts, the inspirational founder of Camerados, invited me to speak at an event at the Sidebar - a ‘fringe’ to Skoll Week 2026 called ‘The Art of Disagreement: What it takes to sustain democracy in divided times’. In the run up to the elections, he had also invited two local councillors, Lucy Lee, Labour Councillor, Barking and Dagenham, and ​Hao Du, a Reform UK councillor for Didcot South.

At first I laughed at the idea of hosting such a discussion in such a place. But then I realised it was Maff’s joke, to bring us to the ground zero of furious, hostile, pontificating, binary debate to make a different argument about arguing.

The Oxford Union is, of course, in many senses exactly the diagnosis of what is wrong with dialogue in our country – not least because too many recent Prime Ministers honed their skills between its illustrious walls.

It’s a place of false binaries. Where people are rewarded for arguing black is white and white is black. Where winning an argument is more important than being right – and being right is more important that being together.

So being there felt deeply uncomfortable, even under the direction of Maff, a man who invented ‘public living rooms’ that are the very opposite of elite space.

But being back in the beautiful city of dreaming spires also resonated with me for another reason. It’s a time of year I always find difficult, the cold sunshine, a football tournament coming up, and a run up to a spring election.

It was 10 years ago this month, that I first had the unsettling sense that Britain was starting to fall apart.

On February 20 2016, Prime Minister David Cameron – once a member of the Oxford Union – had announced the referendum on whether Britain should remain in the European Union. His sworn opponents, on the other side, including Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, were Union members too - and now engaged in politics of theatre, our nation little more than scenery for the settling of old scores.

It was a bad-tempered referendum, in which untruths were flung about like custard pies. And by April that year, with two months to go, it struck me our politics was becoming untethered.

My job – travelling lesser-heard communities around the UK as the Daily Mirror’s Real Britain columnist – gave me a unique window on how the country was feeling about the referendum.

After a particularly unpleasant afternoon spent being shouted at in a shopping centre in Stoke-on-Trent doing some vox pops, I realised something was going badly wrong.

People who hadn’t cared less about being in or out of the EU five minutes earlier, were suddenly vitriolic Leavers – prepared to fall out with their neighbours and family members over the issue, and certainly berate reporters.

This anger wasn’t just apparent in Stoke-on-Trent. It was starting to infect my own friends and neighbours in London, where Leave voters were othered as stupid, uneducated, racist and deserving of everything Brexit would wreak upon them.

Then, on June 16 2016, I was watching the England-Wales game at home in London when I noticed a news story break on the ticker tape at the bottom of the screen. The MP for Batley and Spen had been attacked in her constituency.

I took a phone call from my editor, Peter Willis, shortly afterwards. He knew Jo was my friend, and wanted to let me know she had died.

Jo went to Cambridge from Heckmondwike Grammar School, but she was known to many people in Oxford because of her work at Oxfam, and for her tireless work to make the world listen to people in Darfur, South Sudan and Syria, and other conflicts around the world.

I always think of her when the coach swings into Oxford from Headington, near the old Oxfam offices.

When Jo was murdered, it was a moment many of us came to question many things about ourselves and about the world. But that the toxicity of political discourse could have led to a young mother’s murder, also made me question my own role as a journalist and my own presence online.

It wasn’t enough to understand – as became clear during the Brexit campaign – that hate was being monetised, and turbo-charged via the devices we all now carried in our pockets and held in our hands.

There were personal questions attached: if hate is being monetised, how do I take myself out of the loop? And how do I force myself out of the warm bubble bath of self-righteous clever opinions and into the cold shower of difficult, uncomfortable, bracing opposite views?

Around this time, a Mirror colleague, Ann Gripper, told me she’d heard about an amazing project run by a news organisation in Berlin – Zeit Online – called ‘My Country Talks’, which was using algorithms in a different way.

Their software fired a series of questions at people, rated them on a polarisation index and matched them to someone with an opposite view. (Germany at that time was heavily polarised over large scale immigration coming from the conflict in Syria.)

Conversations had taken place not just in Berlin but all over the country, where people had actually stopped shouting and talked.

We brought Britain Talks to the UK in 2019, with subsequent iterations during Covid and after Covid (as we now understand time).

We learned a lot of things running Britain Talks. But one of the most fascinating things was how quickly people found things in common, even though they were matched as opposites.

That when we meet someone in person or even one-to-one online – we are almost weighted by human nature to look for the good in someone, or the interesting, or the places where we intersect.

But fast-forward to Denton and Gorton 10 years on from Jo’s murder, and it’s the other algorithms – the ones that make the money for tech billionaires and corrupt political networks – that are running the show.

I was lucky to spend a few days there for the recent by-election, and it was clear to me that no-one really won that election, certainly not politics and certainly not the electorate. Never have so many doors been knocked and so few people listened to.

A woman called Beth from a group called Local Voices told me: “At times we’ve felt like pawns in a game that was never really about us…. It’s like we’re tapping on the glass.’

10 years on from Brexit, and we have learned so little. And time is running out.

I try to political stories from the inside out – from the communities who experience it happening to them – but when I do occasionally go into the reporters’ gallery at the House of Commons, I always look for Jo’s plaque, sitting where it does above members of Parliament as they debate in the chamber.

The heraldic shield is given to those MPs in a poignant club; those who are murdered while in office. Designed by her kids, it features rivers and mountains which Jo loved, the colours of the suffragettes, and red and white roses for Labour and for Yorkshire.

It also has three words: ‘More In Common’.

What’s sometimes missed about these three words, is that people think that depolarisation work is about being centrist.

For me it’s actually the opposite – the political emergency that we are living through demands that we listen to each other. The strength of my political views mean that I also understand that shouting at people is not persuading anyone to my viewpoint.

The challenges we face in the future are hurtling towards us thick and fast. Climate breakdown is coming. AI is changing the face of the world in ways we can’t comprehend. We face having to adapt ourselves to a future world we don’t yet understand.

The fundamental point for me is that if we can’t speak to each other how will we be able to rise to any of these challenges in the future?

In that sense, the future is in all of our hands.

And that’s why when Maff asked me if I’d speak at his event at the Oxford Union alongside a councillor from Reform and a councillor from Labour, I ended a 30 year boycott to say yes.

“Humanity has once again shown what we are capable of,” astronaut Jeremy Hansen tells the world on the Nasa live stream.

46,000 miles down below, humanity’s ants carry out minuscule atrocities.

It’s a time to hold on to earthly stories about the good ants.

Over the last few days, I’ve been lucky to meet thousands of these good ants all across our country – on the rain-drenched streets of Grimsby, along the wind-lashed cobbles of Rotherham, and weaving my way through half a million hopeful protesters on the streets of London to end this week among the modern-day tenements of the East End.

There – looking for crypt of St-George-in-the-East – I found myself momentarily lost and staring up at the giant mural commemorating the Battle of Cable Street, with the chants of Saturday’s ‘ No Pasaran!’ protest still ringing in my ears.

It’s going to take a while to unpack these experiences – let alone properly write them up – but what threads them together is yet more evidence that our country is the one I have always thought it was.

In Grimsby, even the light is defiant. The kind of defiance places have when they’ve been written off and risen again, like local football team the Mariners. I was there to speak to homeless people, which should have been depressing on a rainy day on the edge of the North Sea, but was made hopeful by the thought and kindness of our hosts.

From there, I went from there to Rotherham for a community screening of the first in our Island of Strangers films about Unity Boxing, which inhabits the old industrial shell of the steelworks. We got to see the film on the actual Big Screen, where it looked perfect thanks to John Domokos’ incredible cinematography, and the lovely faces of the people at the gym.

Then, back to London for the pre-launch of a ‘Million Acts of Hope’ – an incredible campaign from a coalition of 150+ charities and organisations determined to drown out hate and despair with simple acts of kindness.

A different kind of Cable Street – and the one that asks us to contribute a different part of ourselves to fighting fascism.

The next day, I stood for hours with friends in a massive crowd along Hyde Park – so big that it took hours for us to move off – to join the ‘Singing Resistance’, a gathering of choirs and singers inspired by Singing Resistance Minneapolis – who had been learning protest songs for weeks in advance of the Together Alliance march, in choirs across the land.

The songs have been learned from the United States where brave anti-ICE protesters risk their lives to stand with their immigrant neighbours – songs sung in minus 20 degrees and sung outside detention centres where they creep through open windows to the ears of detainees.

“I believe that one fine day,” the London crowds sang, “the power of love will rise above the love of power”.

While the endless column of marchers moved through London, America was waking up to what the biggest every march in American history – more than 3,000 No Kings events in 50 states.

Since Artemis II left our planet, I have thought so much about the incredible book about astronauts, Orbital by Samantha Harvey, and the fragility of our world.

What would they look like from the moon, these protestors on two continents? These millions of acts of hope?

One of them, in London, a little girl in a pink and green stripy bobble hat on her dad’s shoulders with a placard with hand-picked daisies sellotaped to the front and back.

And the carefully scrawled message:

‘Be Nice, Don’t Fight’.

I was 26, and in my first proper job as a feature writer. I’d read all about the “arsenic murderer” who had killed an upstanding member of the Bradford Asian community out of greed. Then, the activist group, Southall Black Sisters, approached me with a different story. Zoora, they said, had killed her rapist in self-defence, and to save her daughters.

That February, I went to Holloway Prison under a pretext with Hannana Siddique of SBS and a tape recorder somehow missed by the vigorous prison searches. In the visitors’ room, other inmates whispered loudly and nudged each other as the clearly notorious Zoora was brought in.

The arsenic murderer sat in front of us – a tiny, shivering woman with a hollowed-out face, wiping away tears with her headscarf. Hidden deep in their sockets, her eyes were full of pain – but also a kind of defiance I have never forgotten. Over the rest of the visit, her terrible story came tumbling out, translated by Hannana, recorded by my hidden device, as the warders looked on.

Zoora told me about the man she had murdered, Mohammed Azam. About the rapes and the still births that followed the beatings. One detail I have never forgotten was that she said Azam had punished her by taking her to the cemetery where her stillborn children were buried and raping her there.

When Zoora became convinced Azam intended to rape her daughters, she said she was told by a relative in Pakistan that arsenic in small amounts could make a man temporarily impotent.

Putting tiny amounts in Azam’s food gave her a month’s freedom from being raped, she said, but his impotence had caused him to beat her so badly she was hospitalised. She upped the dose of arsenic. “I didn’t care whether he lived or died,” she said.

Zoora’s three children – daughters Naseem and Foz, and their brother Imy – gave a statement for the piece, that ended, “We love her.”

My editor Rosie Boycott – founder of the feminist magazine Spare Rib – ran the story on the front page of the Independent on Sunday magazine. It brought fresh attention to the case, although it still took another two years of campaigning by her children and SBS, for then Home Secretary Jack Straw to reduce Zoora’s 20-year tariff to twelve years.

Fast-forward almost 30 years, and I’m sitting in Parliament with one of Zoora’s children - her eldest daughter, Naz. Despite every single possible disadvantage in life, and the heaviest imaginable trauma, Naz Shah is today the Labour MP for Bradford West, a journey that could have been written by Hollywood.

For years, I’ve wanted to write to Naz to tell her about the interview I did with her mother. But I don’t know whether she understands the full details of her mum’s horrific story, or if she is able to withstand them. I don’t want her to have to open an email that brings her family trauma back.

But this week, Naz published an extraordinary book – Honoured: Survival, Strength and My Path to Politics – about her mum’s imprisonment and how her family survived it. All these years later, she has finally felt able to confront her past – a process which she says has taken her years. She started the book in 2017.

So, I wrote to her, and we are sitting in her little wooden office in Portcullis House with the traffic passing outside like it’s a normal day.

Naz Shah and her sister Foz during the campaign to free their mum, Zoora (credit: Naz Shah)

In person, Naz is tiny like Zoora. But she has the same flash of defiance in her eyes. What she went through as Zoora’s daughter is in itself straight from a script – sent to Pakistan at 12 for a forced marriage, living on a dog’s mattress in a crack den, from packing crisps in a factory to the corridors of power.

But, despite two suicide attempts in her early life, she is very much alive, and so is her mother. Zoora, she tells me is still on ‘licence’ so can’t be interviewed, but she is in good health and able to be there for her grandchildren in a way she never could be for her own children.

It feels like something has come right in a broken world.

My interview with Naz Shah for International Women’s Day (#IWD) is in the Sunday Mirror today (link in the comments).

A man in a dark van winds down his window and shoves his phone out. “I am very, very angry is what I am,” he says. “Look at this.” His phone is playing an Instagram video that features Hannah Spencer, the newly-minted Green MP for the area. The text is in Urdu.

“What are they saying on there?” he says. “We just don’t know, do we? Speak English. That’s what I’m angry about.”

As he drives off, he shouts out of the window. “I want my country back!”

It’s the morning after the Gorton and Denton by-election, and after weeks where Reform voters dominated the town square with their opinions, they are suddenly in short supply. In their place, come Green voters grinning ear to ear, who finally feel able to say they voted for Hannah the Plumber in a town that has voted Labour since the Second World War.

Outside Morrisons, Emily Woolley, 34, says she didn’t tell anyone she was voting Green. “Because you know what it’s like with politics and family.” But she adds: “I wish I had spoken about it now. Maybe there are lots of us?”

Hurrying to work, 42-year-old accountant Clare Macfarlane says she and teenage daughter, Freya, are “absolutely delighted” with the Green’s victory. Dorian Crowley, 78, a retired nurse, says she stuck with Labour because they hadn’t had enough time yet to deal with the “terrible mess the Tories left us all in. We need to give them more time.”

But Reform candidate Matt Goodwin’s graceless loss – which he blamed on “Islamists and woke progressives” and “a dangerous Muslim sectarianism” – has set a tone echoed by some of his party’s followers.

Straight from the Trump playbook of undermining electoral integrity, Goodwin’s boss Nigel Farage called the election “a victory for sectarian voting and cheating”. Locally, this is already being echoed as “a stitch up”, and fury that boundary changes allowed more ‘multicultural’ wards into the constituency.

When I ask a plumber if today is a victory for plumbers, he is less than impressed. “Is she a plumber, tho?” he asks. When I say Spencer has published the certificates online and tacked them to the wall of the campaign office, he says, “that’s just certificates, not being a plumber.” He’s “very, very angry”, he says, about the result.

It in Denton that Labour MP Andrew Gwynne’s ‘Trigger Me Timbers’ whatsapp group leaked vile bile about local constituents – referring to local people as ‘crackpots, morons and Grade-A w***ers’ – and it is Denton that has ended up punishing Labour.

Meanwhile, a volatile, rain-soaked and, at times, toxic election has done nothing to improve Dentonian or Gortonians views of a politics that views them with contempt.

This week’s victory has not been for politics. Rarely have so many doors been knocked and so few people listened to. One man in Denton suggests a ‘blue bins’ protest “where every person drags their blue bin out into the square because it’s so full of hundreds of leaflets – we’ve been under a deluge!”

On the eve of the election in Levenshulme, a metropolitan, multicultural, student-friendly part of the constituency, I met residents wondering what it had all been for.

“At times we’ve felt like pawns in a game that was never really about us,” Beth Powell, 36, a youth and community worker, told me. “Despite all this attention, it’s like we’re tapping on the glass saying ‘hello, remember us? It is supposed to be about us. Every vote is actually a real person, a human being who has a life.

“It does feel a lot like we’re just being messed with, ever since Trigger Me Timbers – and then Andy Burnham not being allowed to stand. There’s a feeling that Westminster is laughing at us. There’s been this game happening behind closed doors, we are not included and it has nothing to do with local issues.”

Before the election was called, fed up with having no representation or accountability in Parliament – Gwynne was off on sick leave for months – Beth and a group of local dog-walkers formed a community group called Local Voices as way of bringing residents together to call for change.

The group has given her optimism where local politics, she says, is letting people down. “So much has been made about the differences in this constituency, but, in the end, we all want so many of the same things – housing, affordable lives, decent income, better parks, solidarity,” she says.

While party activists have flooded the zone with thousands of leaflets – with some people complaining of a tidal wave of flyers on their doormats – the Local Voices group picked 23 bags of litter over Valentine’s weekend. Now they are planning a neighbourhood assembly on 11^th April in attempt to actually hear from local residents.

“We’re just people who want to be able to influence the decisions that affect us,” Beth says. “And that means more than a vote every four years.”

Within three minutes’ walk of where we were chatting last night at a bar called Overdraught, is Jabaneez – a Pakistani bridal dress store – Gaijin Dumpling House, a halal supermarket, and an evangelical ‘Hope Chapel’, all of which have narrowly missed being represented by a man who would have arguably been Britain’s most Far Right MP.

Bean Sharp, 33, an academic and researcher, says: “I’m thrilled with the result – but the fact so many in our constituency voted for a Far Right party peddling racist, sexist and transphobic rhetoric in this campaign, means we still have a way to go in terms of bringing communities together and finding common ground. With groups like Local Voices, this work is already underway.”

Beth says the election “has left local democracy in a very precarious position. So, we need to think, how do we turn this situation on its head and put power back in residents’ hands? We’re looking forward to working with Hannah Spencer to do this.

“I’m incredibly proud of my neighbours for rejecting hatred. But this isn’t about election politics anymore. This is about neighbours. This isn’t over, the work is about to start.”

As droves of imported door-knockers from all parties from across the UK depart from Manchester Piccadilly train station this lunchtime, they will pass posters just outside the station for ‘The Battle’, a new theatre comedy charting the bitter rivalry between 90s Britpop bands Oasis and Blur.

In this election battle, at times Labour have felt like the anthemic northern working-class Oasis – with She’s Electric blaring from campaign events – while the Greens have felt more like middle class indie pretenders Blur. Reform’s one-man tribute band with new backing singers recruited from the Tories came a comfortable second. But this Morning’s Glory belongs to the Greens.

This article first appeared in today’s Daily Mirror

Perhaps those who watched it in 2018, when it first ran at Southwark Playhouse, already felt their blood run cold, and hot tears spring into their eyes. But this week, you didn’t need to be – like me – just returned from the by-election in Denton and Gorton to understand the moment we were in; not just inside the wood-panelled universe of the Marylebone Theatre, but in the storm raging literally and metaphorically outside.

Turning the 1936 Battle of Cable Street – when Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists marched on East London – into a musical is a brilliant conceit. Waves of migration into the East End take us on a journey from Jewish folk rhythms through Irish ballads, Caribbean calypso and hip-hop street verse, building up to the moment when one hundred thousand Jews, Irish workers and communists unite to blockade the road against fascist violence and hatred.

But for all the skilful song-writing, and, at times extraordinarily beautiful, singing, the script was discordant, not with itself but with new history unfolding outside. Antisemitic abuse of Jewish characters was made more painful by the fact it should have been confined to a repulsive past; and watching characters struggling with poverty drawn in by a siren call tuned to blaming migrants, left me struggling with what we have learned in the nine decades since the Blackshirts marched on Stepney.

What I realised, sat in an Irish pub after, thinking of the moment the Irish dockers of the East End brought their brawn to help stop what would have been London’s Kristallnacht, was that my generation have been waiting for ‘our’ Cable Street in the wrong places.

As if the lightning bolt insignia of the Blackshirts would strike twice, in the same way.

Mark Twain said that “history never repeats but it often rhymes’. For me, sitting in the dark of the theatre, it wasn’t a rhyme I heard, but an unbearable resonance. A sense of a trip wire triggered in the far distance. That moment in the war film where the birds flee the telegraph wires from the thunder of guns and bombs too distant for the human ear.

With two grandfathers who fought in World War II in the infantry and in the air, and a grandmother who drove ambulances, I knew from a young age the moment would come for our generation to choose courage or cowardice – the way my granddad Harry, a farmhand, signed up at 17 for the RAF.

But perhaps, raised on Steve McQueen and the Sound of Music, we have looked for it in the wrong places. We want our moment of confrontation to be simple. Black and white. We want to build a barricade and take a bloody nose. That’s the history of struggle we grew up on.

But of course today’s fascists don’t come dressed in black shirts with a lightning bolt armband. They come with a big smile, a pint of Greene King IPA, and two million Facebook followers. The lightning bolt is striking thirteen unseen across a million social media interactions a second.

It made me think of a prose poem I once read by Terry Ehret, the one time poet laureate of Sonoma County in California, called ‘How Fascism Will Come’. Written in 2011 (and yet so prescient about the big hair).

“When fascism comes, it will greet us with a smile. It will get down on its knees to pray. It will praise Main Street and Wall Street. It will cheer for the home team….

… “When fascism comes, it will sit down for tea with the governor of Texas. It will pee in the mosques from California to Tennessee, chanting, ‘Wake up America, the enemy is here’.…

… “It will be interviewed, lovingly, on talk radio. It’ll have talking points, and a Facebook page and a disdain for big words or hard consonants. It won’t bother to read. It will shred all its books. It will lambast the teachers and outlaw the unions. When fascism comes, it will look good. It will have big hair, pressed suits, lapel pins. It will control all the channels. It will ride in on Swift Boats. It will sit on the Supreme Court. It will court us with fear. It will woo us with hope...”

Whatever I felt in the Marylebone Theatre – rhyme, echo or resonance – and whatever that moment is, it is happening now. This is not a rehearsal.

It’s the night before the Battle of Cable Street when the Jewish community leaders, the Irish dockers, the Caribbean mothers and the political agitators must agree to work together to defeat fascism. This, after all, was a community-led revolution where police and politicians were at best indifferent. Communities are where we will fight the new war, in a battle for hearts and minds.

Unlike so many of our neighbouring European countries, which fell to fascist ideas and tyranny, Britain never embraced fascism. Cable Street was the start of Oswald Moseley’s failure to convert Britain to fascist ideas. Ideas defeated by ordinary people understanding their own power to resist them.

Three years to fascism, and this is our fork in the road. It’s time to drag the furniture, the wardrobes and the pianos, into the street.

“I feel a bit sorry for Starmer, if I’m honest,” Mike Mathews, who rescued five-year-old Frankie as a puppy, confides. “We had 14 years of corrupt PPE contracts, Partygate, Michelle Mone, and somebody bought him some glasses. Hardly the same, is it?”

Mike hasn’t decided who he will vote for in the upcoming by-election in the Greater Manchester constituency, now less than two weeks away. “I’m waiting to see who can best keep Reform out,” the 58-year-old public sector worker says. “I don’t know why people can’t see what they are.”

A string of Labour big-hitters have flooded the seat determined to convince Mike and others the answer to that question is them, and that Labour’s roots run deep under the city region.

“I’m sympathetic,” Mike says. “A campaigner from Labour knocked on my door the other day and I told him, ‘keep going, brother’.”

It’s rare that Denton, a town in Tameside once famous for hat-making, makes national headlines. Back in 2006, there was Les and Beryl Lailey who ate a tin of Buxted chicken given to them in a wedding hamper in 1956. And last year Denton held the title of ‘least-used railway station in Britain’ – but it has been pushed to fourth in 2026.

So, now the cameras of the world are trained on the constituency for a by-election that could determine Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s future, some residents are making the most of it.

“I don’t like my country anymore,” shouts Catherine Gates, 50, who is head-to-toe in Man Utd kit, with dyed red hair to match. “It’s not British anymore. There are homeless veterans all over our streets and migrants in hotels. It’s disgusting.”

Labour’s new election pledge to hook Denton’s tumbleweed station up to the tram network, may breathe new life into a town used to hard times. But Catherine waves away our camera. “I’ve lived all my life in Denton. They promise you this, they promise you that – and it never, ever happens.”

Less than two weeks until the critical by-election, if Denton was the only part of the constituency, you wouldn’t need esteemed pollster John Curtice to tell you Labour were in trouble.

But other parts of the constituency like Longsight, Gorton, Levenshulme and Burnage still have long-established Irish communities, and are now in parts very diverse – with third-generation Asian populations as well as students from all over the world. Here, Labour’s hopes are vulnerable to an insurgent Green Party, and its candidate Hannah Spencer, a local councillor, plumber and trainee plasterer.

When I meet Labour’s bright and energetic candidate Angeliki Stogia in Cha Cha Chai in Longsight, on a street selling elaborate desserts and salwar kameez, she says the by-election is a perilous moment.

“This by-election is a very dangerous moment, and could have consequences across the country,” she says. “Reform don’t care about the people of Gorton and Denton – they just want to use them to spread hatred.”

Reform’s candidate Matt Goodwin – endorsed by Tommy Robinson – is extreme even by the hard right party’s standards. He frequently echoes ‘Great Replacement’ conspiracy theories around “white people” being “replaced by 2063” and has even argued that UK-born people from diverse backgrounds are not necessarily British. “It takes more than a piece of paper to make somebody ‘British’,” he has said.

Born in Arta in north-west Greece, the daughter of a nursery teacher and a trade unionist, 47-year-old Stogia has one of Goodwin’s “pieces of paper” that make her British. She is also staunchly Mancunian.

Having come to the city in 1995 to study at Manchester Metropolitan University, the young football fan worked as a steward at “the best football team in the world” – she won’t say if it’s red or blue – to support herself as a student. Over 30 years later, she is passionate about the city that welcomed her.

“I take Reform very personally and very seriously,” Stogia says. “The idea that some UK-born people from diverse background can’t be British is insulting a lot of constituents. Many, many people are very worried.

“I had a mum on the doorstep, who had come from Bangladesh when she was four years old, crying her eyes out. She said she was building an extension on her house. She said, ‘why am I building it, if I have to go back to Bangladesh? I don’t know anyone there’.

“I don’t think they will ever realise how diverse this constituency is, because they don’t care. What they care about is the politics of division. They don’t care about a mum who needs repairs on her home.”

In Denton, where Reform’s message is targeted – Goodwin once researched Far Right activity in Tameside as an academic – local residents have been made vulnerable to division by events outside Stogia’s control.

Some are angry about the ‘Trigger Me Timbers’ whatsapp group scandal involving former Labour MP Andrew Gwynne, and the fact Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham was barred from standing in the constituency. Political scars over winter fuel and disability cuts cut deep, and Peter Mandelson’s lies are long beyond the final straw.

At the big ALDI in Denton’s shiny Crownpoint North shopping centre, over the dizzying flyover, veteran Tom Sanderson, 69, who served in the Kings Regiment, and his wife Irene, 66 who went from machinist to McDonalds, put down their bags for life. “At least Boris looked you in the face and lied,” Tom says.

Matt Goodwin likes to tell audiences that “Manchester made me”. He says his grandfather worked at a steel factory in the city while his mother worked for the University of Salford, which he later attended.

But the question is whether he and Reform’s backers can break a community that has come together against division not just once, and not only in the worst possible of circumstances, but again, and again, and again.

In contrast, Stogia describes the city as a tapestry. “I think Reform don’t understand the place or the people,” she says. “What makes Manchester work. When tragedy strikes, Manchester pulls together – every community, however many months or years they have lived in the city. Whether it was the IRA bomb in 1996, the Heaton Park tragedy last year, or the Manchester Arena Attack in 2017, people come together and support each other.”

At the Hide Out Youth Zone on Hyde Road where Stogia meets Labour Secretary of State Lisa Nandy for a tour, there is a wall of flags drawn in bright felt tip that hint at the roots of the young people who use it – Ivory coast, Ireland, Angola, Jamaica, Burundi, Pakistan, South Africa, Nigeria, Barbados, Nigeria, Bahamas, Romania and Trinidad and Tobago.

Stogia looks up at the wall, and the diverse bunch of kids playing pool and five-a-side, and doing their homework. “Should these kids not be here?” she asks.

Alongside the hand-drawn flags is a black and yellow drawing of the Manchester bee – a 150-year-old emblem that symbolises the city’s industry, work ethic, and became a powerful symbol of unity, resilience, and community strength following the arena attack.

A week on Thursday, Greater Manchester’s unity will be tested once again. Labour’s candidate believes it will rise to the challenge. “This city knows Labour has got its back,” Stogia says. “We need to go faster and harder, and I hope people give me the chance to do that.”

This article appeared in the ‘Real Britain’ column in Friday’s Daily Mirror

Anyone who spends time speaking to people where they live is used to hearing these phrases slip off the tongue in towns and cities across our country. In cafes, in garages, in the smoking shelters outside the hospital. In pubs and supermarkets. On the doorstep of people’s homes.

A plague on all your houses.

Since the Iraq War and the MPs expenses scandal, the lie of Levelling Up and the sick up the walls at the Covid parties, and all the scandals in the time before that, politicians have understood that their greatest enemy is not the opposition party, but public contempt and hatred, the belief ‘all politicians are the same’.

Since conspiracy theories became an online currency, these views have curdled further into a kind of hardened vomit outside the Wetherspoons of democracy. The sunlight of disinfectant never reaches it, because it never stops raining.

But then, this week, a new Shakespearian tragedy that has finally made worms-meat of democracy.

After years of the Far Right telling people a shadowy paedophile network with boundless wealth and corrupted political power is manipulating the daily agenda of our tired, frazzled lives, it really looked quite a lot like that if you clicked on the words ‘Epstein Files’.

How stupid must you be to think you could control the corrupted genie? To not see the enslaved spirit wasn’t them, but you.

The longer I spend writing about politics from the places people experience politics, the more I’ve come to understand that distance from power is both a problem and the biggest strength communities have.

This week, while the effluent pipe of political sewage poured out more filth each day, in the 17^th most deprived ward in the country, a giant Yorkshireman with a white beard was turning the strip lighting on each day, with a brew in his hand and enough hope for all of us.

I first met Chris Keene many years ago, when he was organising cricket matches between his own estate, the Stoops in Burnley, where most kids were white, and the neighbouring estate where most kids were Asian.

He didn’t need a brilliant, dashing, political strategist to pull out some graphs. His thinking was, ‘they all like cricket’.

Chris is a legendary youth and community worker. But during the Austerity years the community centre lost its funding. So now he works for free, doing the same job 40 hours a week.

In an appalling week like this one, his integrity, decency and kindness – so very far from corrupted power – make me want to weep. Even the comparison with how those at the darkest heart of Westminster is too cheap.

But at this bleakest of political moments, I want to tell you about Chris. Because the darkest times are, of course, the time we most need a lighted candle in the window.

In yesterday’s Daily Mirror we were proud to launch ‘A Million Acts of Hope’ – a new initiative from an impressive coalition of charities, faith groups, civil society organisations and community groups across Britain. And Chris was at the reluctant heart of the launch story.

The premise is simple. Millions of hopeful things are happening every single day, yet they are being drowned out hate and division. The campaign will amplify, connect and inspire hopeful and kind acts across the nation.

Building back hope in our communities and in ourselves, is the only answer. Fixing our foundations will only come from a new rooted politics that flourishes in real places.

How bitterly ironic then that the hard-fought for extension to the ‘Pride in Place’ community fund the Prime Minister was supposed to be launching in Hastings this week was overshadowed by questions about a corrupt politician and a serial paedophile.

Still. We go on.

https://amillionactsofhope.org.uk/

A young man called Mark Wood, whose terrible, tragic death I had written about in my Daily Mirror column, Real Britain, was sitting on a bench in a brown T-shirt and grey beanie hat, with a sheet and a sleeping bag thrown over his legs, and bin bags of his possessions strewn across the floor.

I found myself sitting down on the bench next to him, completely overwhelmed. A life-sized hologram of Mark – played by an actor, appearing via a Virtual Reality headset a theatre attendant had handed to me – looked anxiously across at me.

Over the headset, the voice of his wonderful mum Jill was playing, telling Mark’s heartbreaking story. How her gentle artist son, who had complex mental health problems, starved to death under Tory austerity aged 44, weighing just 5st 8lb.

The Museum of Austerity, a co-production between the English Touring Theatre, Trial and Error Studio and the National Theatre which came to a close this month, is a 35-minute multi-reality experience that comes nearest to the truth of anything I have seen or read about the Conservative Austerity years.

From 2013-2024, Real Britain often felt like a coroner’s report, as we investigated one Austerity death after another – the people starved, damaged and driven to suicide by a brutalised system designed to vilify and impoverish people who needed the support of the welfare state.

And here, in this small white room was a moment to reflect on lives lost. Having told Mark story so many times, I wasn’t prepared for how moving it would be to sit next to him.

Walking towards each hologram, the audience is confronted with the trite, falsely indignant, mendacious statements of the politicians who condemned them. But among the clips of a braying Boris Johnson and slick austerity salesman David Cameron grandstanding in Parliament, we also heard the voice of Debbie Abrahams, the Labour MP who tirelessly spoke up for the casualties of welfare reform.

Approaching each of eight virtual figures triggers testimony told by their relatives, curated by Disability News Service’s veteran campaigner John Pring, bringing each person to life. So many of them voices I’ve spoken to over the years and knew without waiting for their names.

Testimonies have been given by the mighty battler Joy Dove, whose daughter Jodey, 42, took her own life in 2017 as her mental health collapsed after her disability benefits were stopped.

By Imogen Day, who never stopped fighting for her 27-year-old sister Philippa, who battled a string of mental health conditions including Borderline Personality Disorder, and died after collapsing at home in 2019, next to a letter from the DWP.

There, leaning against a wall, next to his empty fridge, was David Clapson, a vulnerable former soldier who had diabetes. I can still remember breaking the story of David’s heartbreaking death, and I must have spoken to his amazing sister Gill – whose voice was coming through the audio – a hundred times.

David was looking for work when he died – a pile of CVs was found next to his body. But he had been sanctioned by the Job Centre for a single missed meeting, leaving him no money for food or put credit on his electricity card.

As a result, the fridge – where he kept his insulin – was off. David died three weeks after he was sanctioned, from diabetic ketoacidosis, caused by a severe lack of insulin.

A few yards from David, lying on a plinth with a duvet pulled over him was Errol Graham, who weighed just four and a half stone when bailiffs discovered his body after breaking into his Nottingham council flat to evict him.

He died with a letter in neat handwriting next to him that pleaded with the DWP to “please judge me fairly”.

A couple of details about Errol have always remained in my mind. He had an ‘Anfield’ cubby hole full of Liverpool memorabilia, and the only food in his cupboards were two tins of fish, both of which were four years out of date.

When Errol’s daughter-in-law, Alison Turner told me about the fish, I remembered that when he died, David Clapson had only a tin of pilchards in his cupboard.

The Museum of Austerity is not just a virtual reality mausoleum to the dead. It’s a tribute to all those relatives who refused to let the faceless Department for Work and Pensions escape responsibility for the deaths of their loved ones.

Their courage in bereavement is on a parallel with the Hillsborough families, the Grenfell survivors and bereaved, and the Covid Bereaved Families, all of whom have spent years battling the state and vested interests – in this case the companies like ATOS, Maximus and Capita employed to carry out state duties at arm’s length.

As I stood there, the words of Errol’s daughter-in-law, Alison Turner, an extraordinary campaigner, herself disabled, rang in my ears. Not from the exhibition but from an interview we did together.

“The public pay for that department,” she said. “We own that department. We pay our taxes, and they should answer to the people. If we demand answers we are entitled to know. My kids can’t see Granddad anymore because someone made a bad decision.”

The Conservative architects of welfare reform are long gone now. Former Tory Chancellor George Osborne works for big tech. Former Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg has just left Meta. Ex-PM David Cameron is a life peer who advises investment companies. But the families of those who lost their lives cannot move on.

A museum is supposed to be a collection of things from the past. But, far from being assigned to the history books, the war on welfare lives on.

So, when I heard this week that a Downing Street weakened by backbench Labour MP’s rebellions over welfare may now back down altogether over further cuts – with no new legislation coming, after all, in the King’s Speech – I thought of those battling families and the MPs who have stood up for them.

The Museum of Austerity closed its doors a few days ago at the Young Vic, but it deserves to tour until our broken welfare system is fixed and fair. Not just as a reminder of lives lost to ideology, but as a living reminder that political actions have consequences. Good and bad.

It should be compulsory viewing for all MPs, and especially anyone who takes up a ministerial or civil service role in the DWP.

This is a show that must go on.

James has the extraordinary gift of being able to turn stories about profound moments in our national psyche into gripping drama that feels rooted in communities and his own working-class background.

His Olivier award-winning play ‘Dear England’ both interrogated our national identity crisis and made the unlikely figure of Gareth Southgate into a modern-day Jesus; while the deeply atmospheric ‘Sherwood’ somehow manages to be both a riff on Thatcherism and the miners’ strike and riveting TV crime drama.

I’ve loved all James’ work since seeing ‘Ink’ at the Almeida a few years ago. The origin story of the Sun newspaper’s rivalry with my own paper, The Mirror, the writing is so good that for a while you find yourself rooting for Murdoch. (Succession arrived on our screens a year later).

James worked with Elton John and Jake Shears on the musical Tammy Faye, and is currently filming Ink with Danny Boyle… and, look, obviously the gig of talking about storytelling in front of one of the master storytellers alive in Britain today is not an enviable one.

So, I decided to start with a personal story, at the risk of embarrassing James a little.

Last year, my teenage son abruptly stopped playing football.

This was unusual. He has kicked a ball since he could stand up, and played for local teams since the age of eight. He was very shy growing up, so football has been his language in the playground. It has shaped his gaming life through FIFA and many of his friendships.

But last March, he announced he was leaving his football team. He stopped playing FIFA. He became distressed when it was time to go to training. He seemed to miss shots he’d easily put away in the past.

I don’t want to intrude too much on his privacy, but for various reasons – some of them to do with the hyper-masculine world in which teenage boys are currently trapped – he told his coach he was not going back.

Last April, we took the drastic action of dragging a theatre-resistant teenage boy to the theatre to see some other lads who’d missed penalties.

The play was ‘Dear England’, by a certain Mr James Graham. A play about how the England football team keep losing on penalties, until their manager Gareth Southgate (whose own backstory includes missing a crucial penalty) decides to change the national football team’s story, his own story and in the process the nation’s story too.

We watched the play together. My son said nothing much throughout. He drank his Pepsi and shrugged that it was alright.

A few days later, I heard the roar of FIFA again back on the X-box. When it came time to play the final games for his club, he said he’d changed his mind.

His team didn’t win the league last season. But in one of the final games of the season, the cup final, my son asked to take a penalty in the final shoot out.

And – I’m not making this up – he scored one of the winning penalties that won his team the cup – in a scene straight out of Dear England.

Which was meta even for me. Art imitating life imitating art imitating life. (Of course, I can’t know if theatre was the catalyst, but I believe it helped the juggernaut begin to turn.)

Maybe that’s enough of a vote of confidence for storytelling. But we were at the UCL event to talk very specifically about political storytelling – and where that is going right and wrong for people with progressive views.

I think my (long-winded) point is that facts and argument can only take us so far as human beings. We are emotional beings. The story is what we feel it to be. Vibes matter. The writer and academic Jonathan Gottschall – who writes about storytelling and evolution – goes so far as to say that “stories are what make our societies possible.”

Gottschall argues that stories help us navigate life’s complex social problems—just as flight simulators prepare pilots for difficult situations. He says, “Storytelling has evolved, like other behaviours, to ensure our survival”. In other words, it’s not art imitating life or life imitating art – art *shapes* life.

But Gottschall’s new book The Story Paradox, also carries a warning. That stories can and do bind people together, but they are also the force that is pulling people apart. He says societies rise or fail depending on how they manage these tensions. In other words – we are not the only storytellers in town.

It’s actually even worse than this – the storytellers from the other side are getting better, and louder, and the algorithms are showering them like nuclear rain all over the world. So, it’s not enough anymore to keep diagnosing a failure of storytelling in government. We need to change where we are telling them from – from the heart, not the head; and from places people recognise – like the stories James tells.

The founder of the Forgiveness Project Marina Cantacuzino says: “I have come to believe the stories we tell today create the world we live in tomorrow.” In other words – the stories we tell now will dictate our future.

For me that has always meant working in the space between the stories told about Britain - and the ones people actually live. That’s what I try to do each week in the Mirror’s ‘Real Britain’ column, and with our ‘Island of Strangers’ video series, and in other storytelling like the ‘Wigan Pier Project’.

One of the sources of the storytelling crisis I think we are currently in, is the consequence of what happens when a nation stops recognising itself in the stories told about it by journalists, by politicians, by the people in the centre of things.

We talk about Britain as though it’s one thing, but the truth is that it’s many places, many versions of itself, and most of them go unseen.

The story of Britain depends on who gets to tell it. Everyday people need a story that sees them in it. We need to root our stories in real people’s lives

For a multitude of reasons, many of them algorithmic, we’ve heard a lot over the last two summers from angry people outside asylum hotels, and their organ-grinders, and not enough from people who show up; who keep services running; who quietly look after their neighbours and make life livable in the margins.

These acts are not peripheral – they are the foundational stories that hold a nation together.

The oldest stories were co-creations and collaborations, honed by every storyteller who told them. To tell truthful tales about our who we are as a country, and who we could be in the future, we will need to co-write them – like Gareth Southgate did – with the people who literally have skin in the game.

The Cherry Stone Age

My first visit to the Daily Mirror offices was as a 21-year-old idealist who had applied for the graduate trainee scheme.

I wore borrowed shoes that pinched, an Oxfam suit jacket, and had a bulging cuttings book garnered mainly of clippings from the Oxford Mail under my arm

As I rode the toy town Docklands Light Railway train (then the only way on and off the Isle of Dogs by public transport) on the high line into Canary Wharf, I looked down at the battered estates of the island and its tapestry of fluttering England flags and Bangladeshi washing.

Then the gleaming wharf itself appeared. A lost citadel of shiny self-aggrandising buildings, it shone like a capitalist paradise superimposed on the poorest part of London.

I took the lift to the 21^st floor, where the vertiginous views made my palms sweat. A receptionist showed me to a glass office where the windows fell floor to ceiling, London spilling dizzily below along the glittering river.

My interviewer was Mirror Group MD Charles (Charlie) Wilson, a Glaswegian with a pugilist’s flat nose and gruff voice, once married to Anne (Annie) Robinson, former features editor and future host of ‘The Weakest Link’.

His expensively-socked feet were crossed on the desk, next to an impossibly-sized bowl of red cherries as shiny as his discarded shoes. As I nervously said hello, a cherry stone flew from his mouth to the side of me.

Startled, I dodged to the side. Wilson spat another to the other side, to make clear this had not been an accident.

He threw my CV in the bin.

“Why did you get into Oxford when my daughter didn’t?” he asked, spitting another pip, this time into the bin. “Was it your double-barrelled fucking name?”

I said it was a genuine mystery to most people. I can’t remember if I tried to explain about lots of Welsh people having double-barrelled names.

“So, you think you’re pretty fucking clever?”

I shook my head and offered my cuttings book. Wilson declined to look at it. I dodged more cherry stones.

“Why do you want to be a trainee at the Daily Fucking Mirror?”

What was wrong with me? Why did I say it? “I want to change the world. You know, like John Pilger and Paul Foot. They wrote for the Mirror.”

“Well, you can fuck off, we don’t have people with double-barrelled names in here. John Pilger and Paul Foot didn’t have fucking double-barrelled names, did they?”

It began to dawn on me that I’d just been brought in to be humiliated, already regretting the money I’d spent on the train fares.

“If you’re not going to look at my cuttings book, it’s a bit pointless being here,” I said, collecting the book along with the tiny shred of dignity I had left, and turning on those tight, squeaky shoes. It wasn’t a very dramatic exit, as I still had to wait ages for the lift, and then travel 21 interminable floors down with the receptionist.

A few weeks later, just before Christmas, someone called Eugene Duffy, the Mirror news editor, rang me and told me to get my arse to Newcastle by January 2^nd.

“Find yourself somewhere to live,” he said. “Training starts on the 3^rd at the Chronicle, and lasts six months. And get yourself some marmalade droppers while you’re there.”

A few things have changed in newspaper journalism since the Cherry Stone Age.

I hope no Daily Mirror trainees get things spat at them during their interviews. HR eventually happened to newspapers. The internet came and changed everything, and now AI is already doing the same.

As Scottish raver Michael Gove once said, the time for experts is over. We’re all journalists now.

Charlie Wilson, who was later kind to me despite his Private Eye nickname ‘Gorbals’, passed away in 2022. His ex-wife Annie, also kind to me, became a household name thanks to the global success of The Weakest Link. Their daughter, Oxford’s loss, has gone on to a stellar radio career.

I’ve had an on-off relationship with the Mirror all my working life and all over the world from Rwanda to Rotherham and Darfur to Dagenham. I work there now, writing the Real Britain column, which stands up for our readers and reports politics from the margins. I also run multimedia social justice campaigns of which I hope Paul Foot would be proud.

The way we tell stories is changing, but also stays the same.

Meanwhile, storytelling is more important than ever. It is how our species always escaped the wolves and bears, and there are a lot of wolves and bears out there right now.

Storytelling will be how we counter the fairytales of the Far Right, and learn to cooperate to cope with the climate emergency, and plot a future through a world set on fire by maniacs who throw hot jam at the algorithms every other second to see what sticks.

As Marina Cantacuzino MBE, the Founder of the Forgiveness Project says: “the stories we tell today create the world we live in tomorrow.”

I don’t write many marmalade droppers. The odd one gets through. This substack is an attempt to write about the toast as it falls, before you know whether it’s going to land face down or face up on the kitchen lino.

Thanks for joining me as I continue to dodge the cherry stones of outrageous fortune.

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