There was a revealing moment during Gareth Southgate’s BBC Richard Dimbleby lecture on 19 March when the camera settled on the playwright James Graham, who was among the invited audience. Graham smiled knowingly as Southgate made a joke about the striker Ollie Watkins being acclaimed “an overnight sensation” after he scored the winning goal in the semi-final of last year’s Euros in Germany. Watkins had worked his way up from the lower divisions over many years. Southgate is not a natural joke-teller and at times during the lecture, as he spoke about the psychological anguish he endured after his harrowing penalty shoot-out miss against Germany at Euro 96, one had the curious sense that Southgate was doing more than a passable impression of Gareth Southgate as portrayed by Joseph Fiennes in Dear England, Graham’s stage play that is being adapted into a film. Fiennes-as-Southgate was more than a facsimile of the former England manager: he was part secular preacher, part self-help guru. Fiennes expertly captured Southgate’s mannerisms and speech patterns as he delivered his homilies about identity, resilience and belonging as if at a lectern. Premier Christianity magazine wrote approvingly that Southgate’s Dimbleby lecture had “the makings of a sermon” and not only because one of the lessons was about redemption. Has Southgate watched Fiennes-as-Southgate and learned from him? Has he read the script of Dear England? Or is it now impossible for Southgate watchers to see the man without also seeing Fiennes-as-Southgate? Small wonder Graham was smiling.
In the aftermath of the London bombings of 7 July 2005, I wrote that we were witnessing nothing less than the emergence of Ian McEwan as our national novelist. McEwan had, the morning after the attacks, reported from Bloomsbury where one of the suicide bombs had been activated. What I liked about his work, I wrote, was his “continuous, imaginative engagement with the people and events creating the history of our era”. After the publication of my piece, McEwan would be routinely described by the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Sunday Times and the Financial Times as Britain’s national novelist. Andrew Marr and Erica Wagner have since argued that the title more appropriately belongs to Ali Smith. Perhaps. At present, as the influence of the literary novel diminishes, I don’t think we have a national novelist, but we do have a national writer: James Graham.
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