I suppose you could say that I really started working on this book when I was eight years old.
It was then that I began getting up early so that I could be the first one to read the newspaper. Rather to the bemusement of my parents, who had absolutely no interest in sport, I’d become a football fan, and I wanted to read the match reports and the scores before my dad came downstairs to make breakfast. After that, the paper was his.
So as soon as it arrived I would skip to the front door, lay The Times out on the hall rug, and, starting with the back pages, read whatever football news there was. Which wasn’t much, to be honest.
After I’d been doing this each day for a couple of years, it occurred to me that the paper seemed to contain a lot of other stuff and maybe it was interesting. So when I had completed my survey of the football coverage, I turned the paper over and began again at the front.
It was at about this time that the burglars were caught in the Watergate complex. I was soon hooked on the stories of the President and his men. And on the other political battles that made the mid-1970s such a fascinating political time.
It made me rather an odd child, though. I obtained the autographs of Norman St John-Stevas and Ray Buckton (google them). I collected Times Guides to the House of Commons and memorised the size of majorities of MPs. When Giscard d’Estaing became President of France, my French teacher told the class about it and announced that he had until then been defence minister. I responded that in fact Giscard had been finance minister. I was, at that point, eleven.
And so I first became attached to three of the great passions of my life: football, politics and The Times. And much as I imagined I might grow out of one or the other of them, I never have.
My parents couldn’t talk to me much about football, although they did try. My father, a bookish professor, even took me to Hendon games. Sitting in the freezing cold at half time in a recent Hendon home match I heard over the tannoy: ‘Elsewhere in the league it’s Billericay nil, Bognor Regis nil’, and I thought, my goodness, my dad must have loved me very much.
But politics was a different matter. I wouldn’t say either of them was excessively political and they were both less-than-usually argumentative people. But they did think public affairs mattered a great deal and they were thrilled that I did too.
So, over breakfast each day we would talk about what was in the news. Other things came up. Philosophy a little, mathematics a fair bit and religion too (more out of intellectual interest than devotion). But mostly it was politics.
Around the time I first became interested, 1970 or so, my parents were both Labour voters. Dad, especially, really liked Harold Wilson. As an engineer (a measurement theorist to be precise), my father felt that modern systems and planning were the way to organise a society. The talk of forging a new Britain in the white heat of technology was very attractive to him.
As I write later in this book, he was also an immigrant who had lived on welfare benefits, made his way through night school and worked in the coal mines. He found the Conservative Party of Macmillan an alien thing and suspected the feeling was mutual.
He did have one problem with Labour, however. As a child he had been deported to Siberia along with his mother, and his father had been arrested and sentenced to hard labour as a capitalist and democratic civic leader. As a result of this, my father did not trust the MPs to Wilson’s left, but this rather increased his support for Wilson himself.
My mother – a maths teacher and as much a believer in scientific progress as Dad – shared this concern about extremists, but for a reason that was both different and not so different. She was a survivor of Belsen concentration camp. She was always pretty wary politically of anybody – how shall I put this – overexcitable.
By the end of the 1970s, my dad had come to the conclusion that planning the economy didn’t work, and both of them became concerned about the Left. Thus began the shift that saw them vote SDP in the 1980s and Conservative after that, though very much of the Major/Cameron kind.
So this was the environment I grew up in. A generally progressive household, but a Times-reading one rather than a Guardian-reading one. Rationalist and pro-science, firmly on the American side of the Cold War, socially liberal on race and women’s equality, for the welfare state and public services, for free speech and the rule of law and, above all other things, for moderation, a sense of proportion and generosity to other people.
Whether it is nature or nurture – a bit of both I think – this isn’t a bad description of my own politics all these years later. My mum often used to use the phrase ‘Everything in Moderation’. She mostly applied it to portion size and her willingness to try anything once, but it could pretty much be our family political slogan.
All of these hobbies and instincts I brought with me when I joined The Times properly in 2001. Plus one other thing: a lot of political experience.
By the age of twenty-four, I had already run for Parliament. I was the SDP’s candidate against Ken Livingstone in Brent East in 1987. I was far too young. I hadn’t had a proper job yet, I lived at home and I couldn’t drive. I’ve a letter from the local Citizen’s Advice Bureau somewhere that reads: ‘Dear Mr Finkelstein, it was so nice to meet you, and your mother.’
But I’d become close to the party leader David Owen and he’d become a mentor. Actually he still is. I did a lot of growing up when I worked with David. During the 1987 election we had breakfast every day before his press conference. He said he found it helpful and I believe him, because he doesn’t dissemble, even to your face. But I suspect it was me that found it more useful.
I learned a lot from David about national politics, fighting by his side on the party’s national committee. I also learned a great deal about how to maintain your integrity and independence, how to think things through for yourself and ensure you never let being moderate make you go soft altogether.
Ultimately, of course, we were unsuccessful: the party collapsed, and I rather surprised myself by what I did next. I joined the Conservative Party.
My politics had certainly shifted a bit since my teens. I’d become quite a lot more convinced of the benefits of a capitalist market economy, quite a bit more fiscally conservative and a little more sceptical about government intervention. But what changed most was my view of political alliances.
Experience had made me appreciate that you can’t build a broad enough political movement if you only worked with people who shared your views and your background completely. The world isn’t full of Jewish sons of refugees or people from Hendon Central with Master’s degrees in computing.
The miners’ strike, the argument over CND and the obvious fact that many of Mrs Thatcher’s reforms had been necessary also made me realise that I was trying to be right wing on the left. So the Tories it was.
Within about three years of joining the party I found myself round the Cabinet table briefing the Prime Minister as his head of research. It was the tail end of an eighteen-year government and politically it was very tough. But it was hard not to respect John Major or be proud of serving him. I wasn’t too surprised, however, when we suffered a huge defeat.
What followed was sometimes hilariously difficult. I became a close adviser to William Hague and convinced I was supporting someone who deserved to be prime minister. He was incisive, calm, witty and kind. His qualifications seemed to me obvious. But it was difficult to get anyone to agree. These days there are lots of takers for that proposition, but at the time nothing we did made any difference. Maybe that is because some of it wasn’t very good, but then again, even when it was brilliant – Prime Minister’s Questions for instance – it made no difference.
It was partly as a result of this I began to grasp something very important. Something I’m embarrassed I didn’t get earlier. People aren’t following politics. To what is really an astonishingly great degree. What moves politics are much deeper things – demographics, how the economy is changing, instinctive and hard-to-move reactions to the party leaders. Grasping this was my first step to real understanding. I don’t think there is one column in this book that isn’t touched by this awakening.
It was also during this period I appreciated properly how serious the Conservative Party’s problems had become. I am quite an optimistic person and sometimes I’d persuade myself that things weren’t as bad as they looked. Andrew Cooper was there to put me right. I’d met him in college and he had become a hugely successful pollster as well as one of my best friends. He didn’t share my Pollyannaish tendency, being instead a pitiless empiricist. And he was almost invariably correct.
I started to meet up with others over pizza to discuss how the party could become more moderate, modern and liberal. There’d be four or five of us each time. One of them was George Osborne (also a close friend) and another was David Cameron. We shared frustration, but in David’s mind the idea of what to do next began to take shape.
So anyway, all that is a long way of saying that in 2001, when I joined The Times after being defeated in Harrow West in the election, I brought with me years of working on the inside. But also the complication that I had publicly known political views, an agenda and friends and allies active in politics.
The stakes became higher when one of those friends became the prime minister and another the chancellor of the exchequer.
I took the view that I couldn’t escape this, and I shouldn’t deny it. So the best thing to do was to give readers the benefit of the understanding I gained, the insight I had, while being honest about who I was. I was an opinion writer and not a news reporter. I hope (and think) readers felt I struck the right balance.
I’ve read The Times every day since those first encounters with it on the rug, rarely missing an edition. It has always suited my temperament and mostly suited my politics too.
And that may be what accounted for the feeling I had sitting in reception at the paper, waiting for a meeting with Peter Stothard, the editor. I had a number of different job offers and they all seemed very interesting and to offer good prospects. But in the reception of The Times I felt a sense of excitement and also one of belonging.
I proposed to Peter a sort of online think tank: basically a blog in the days before such things existed. He was mildly interested in that, but more interested in me joining as a leader writer.
It wasn’t long before I started writing columns for the paper. And three things were, I think, particularly important in the columns I ended up writing.
The first is a piece of advice I received when I first started writing a regular column for the main comment pages (or op-eds as they are known, as this sort of article initially appeared opposite the editorials).
The first columns I wrote appeared in the features pages, where I was asked to stand in for the historian and journalist Anthony Howard while he wrote a book. The appropriate style for such a column was informal, relaxed and personal. I would bring in anecdotes and talk of my own experiences.
Then Michael Gove, one of the paper’s most prominent and popular writers, was selected as a parliamentary candidate and it was decided to move his column to features and that I would take over his op-ed slot.
Just before I made the move the features editor Sandra Parsons told me I should take care not to change too much. Keep it informal, keep it personal. Don’t feel the op-ed pages require you to be stiff or pompous. It was wise counsel. Where stiffness and pomposity remained, it was at least my own personal stiffness and pomposity rather than being put on for the occasion.
Also important was inspiration from my brother. I have always lived surrounded by books. My grandfather (my mother’s father) had been the archivist of the German anti-Nazi movement and established a library, one of the largest collections of material about fascism in the world.
Quite apart from the library, he bought so many books of his own that he was driven out of his flat above the ice-skating rink in Queensway into a house in Golders Green, in order to have enough shelf space. He devoted three entire rooms of this house to books, although he was frustrated when a structural engineer put a limit on the number of volumes he could store. Apparently the engineer was concerned that the floors would collapse under the weight.
My father then also bought many thousands of books of his own, some hundreds having been given to him by his father-in-law as an engagement present. The overwhelming majority of these were on Judaism, which was my father’s intellectual hobby. And I, like Dad, started by being quite focused in my reading. Politics and history, history and politics.
My brother, by contrast, though distinguished in his field (software engineering) has always been amazingly eclectic in his reading. If you introduced someone to him and said they were an expert in the history of Chinese piracy, Anthony would invariably remark: ‘How interesting, I’ve just been reading a book on that.’
It rubbed off on me eventually. I began to experiment more. Social science, social history, books about murders and about baseball, random books that just looked a bit interesting and might take me off on an interesting tangent. And I’d often share what I learned with readers.
Sometimes people ask me how I have managed to read so much and I’ve never been sure of the answer. I’m not particularly speedy. But I am pretty dedicated. Whenever I am not doing anything else, which turns out to be a lot of the time, I’m reading.
From this inspiration I had an insight. There was a huge amount of social and political science that could cast light on the news and it wasn’t necessarily appearing in other people’s columns. Game theory, for instance, and social psychology. And at one point in my first couple of years at The Times I stumbled into statistics.
During the World Cup in 2002 I began to write a column on football, using statistical analysis to illuminate the game. These columns don’t appear in this book, but their influence does. I began to think about issues in a different way, understanding how concepts like reversion to the mean might aid my understanding of politics and social affairs.
Armed with all this, I settled in to write a weekly column that has appeared, and still appears, on Wednesday every week since 2005. And there hasn’t been a single week in that entire period when I didn’t wake up nervous on a Tuesday morning, wondering if this week’s column was really going to work when you started writing it for real.
But it’s got to work. It’s appearing in The Times, after all.
Actually, Tuesday’s nerves are only part of it. The most difficult part of producing a column isn’t writing it. It’s having the idea. From the moment a column appears, I start to worry about what on earth I am going to put in the next one. And the fear grows until an idea comes.
I might have been reading the paper and articles and books all week and be completely blank. And then, emptying the dishwasher, a column will appear to me while I’m putting away the teaspoons. Sometimes it is just the very basic argument, other times it’s the whole thing.
Once it does, though, I may (in fact almost always do) need to do quite a bit of reading. I might want to use an academic study or tell a historical story or write about someone who has just died. I am fanatical about getting this stuff right and ensuring that even the most expert reader would accept that I know what I’m talking about. Because one thing I can be sure of, working on The Times, is that even the most obscure points will come to the attention of the expert on the subject.
Once I have the idea I have to agree it with the Comment Page Editor. Often I will give them more than one potential column and they will pick. Sometimes they – or very occasionally the editor through them – will tell me that the paper has already run too many columns on this idea and I should come back to it another time. But it’s a matter of pride not to propose such ideas if I can help it.
I have often been asked whether I am told what position to take and I can honestly say that this has never happened. Well, OK, once I wanted to write a column telling Sir John Chilcot to take as long as he wanted to complete his report on the Iraq war. I unwittingly timed this for the day on which the paper was launching a series of news reports which suggested he needed to get on with it. I was politely but firmly asked if I might pick another topic and I gladly agreed. But apart from that, never.
Once I’ve been given the go-ahead I’ll settle in and start writing. I try not to schedule any distractions for Tuesdays so that the column in my head is the one I get down on paper. How long does a column take? Well it’s 1150 words and it takes usually between two and three hours to write down. But in reality it has taken me somewhere between three hours and the entirety of my life since I was eight years old.
Finally, a word about this book.
I’ve written something like 700 columns for The Times and had room in this volume for about 110 of them. The earliest column in this volume was written in 2003, the latest on the day Theresa May announced she was leaving office in March 2019 (which seemed a reasonable place to stop).
When I read them all again, obviously I was looking for the best ones, but just as important was that they should still seem relevant and interesting now. For instance, I wrote a column on gay rights which I was pleased with, but a lot of it dealt with the religious opinions of Ruth Kelly, a Blair-era cabinet minister. I thought this material would mystify readers who had forgotten the details of this political row.
Equally there were some columns which predicted exactly what was going to happen next. I am rather proud of them, but once the predicted events had happened, I concluded that the article might be more interesting to me than to readers of this book.
In some places context is necessary to enjoy the column properly, and I’ve added a short couple of sentences of explanation before the column begins. But in many cases they should be immediately understandable without notes.
I decided early on to group the articles together by theme rather than chronology. Where useful – in my articles on the big political battles of my time as a columnist for instance – the sections do follow a chronological order. Elsewhere – the section on great contemporary figures – it does not.
I grouped together some political columns on the issues of the day that I think elucidate basic rules of politics. And I have also included a lecture, very much inspired by the columns in The Times, that has not yet been published.
There are some issues I care about that are missing and one or two columns are excluded because, while they were quite good, I’ve repented of the views in them (such as a horrible column suggesting that I didn’t really care about Scottish independence, which I passionately do).
I haven’t altered the ones that are included, even when a phrase or idea or prediction makes me wince. The only changes I have made are a few tiny excisions when I have repeated a word or when the sentence reads particularly poorly or I have made an observation more than once in the book. I have also, in one or two places, removed a reference to an event that might have meant something to the reader in the week it was written but is now just distracting. When making such a change I have been particularly careful to avoid altering the sense of anything I’ve said.
I’ve also kept the headlines from the original articles in most cases.
So here they are. My wife always observes that op-ed columns are either obvious or rubbish. I hope you will find more of the former than the latter. And perhaps one or two that aren’t either.