As the literary novel fades from relevance, James Graham is the writer for our era

The author of Dear England has channelled the people and events that made modern Britain.

The playwright and screenwriter James Graham. Photo by Kirsty Wigglesworth / AP

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.

Consider the subjects Graham has reimagined and recast as drama: the gruelling final days of the Callaghan government (This House), the rise of Rupert Murdoch’s Sun newspaper (Ink), the 1984-85 miners’ strike (Sherwood), the Brexit referendum (Brexit: The Uncivil War), Southgate’s reinvention of the England football team (Dear England), the beginning of the end of the Thatcher era (Brian and Maggie). Here is a writer – the only one we have – who has a continuous, imaginative engagement with the people and events creating the history of our era.

As the international response to the Netflix dramas Adolescence and Baby Reindeer have demonstrated, the novel cannot compete for relevance in the age of streaming networks and the smartphone. Ours is increasingly a post-literate society: people can read well enough, but the number of serious readers is shrinking like the newspaper books sections. “Serious readers aren’t distracted by anything else,” Philip Roth said in an interview with Le Monde in 2013. “They put the kids to bed, and then they read. They don’t watch TV intermittently or stop off and on to shop online or to talk on the phone. There is, indisputably, a rapidly diminishing number of serious readers, certainly in America. Of course, the cause is something more than just the multitudinous distractions of contemporary life. One must acknowledge the triumph of the screen. Reading, whether serious or frivolous, doesn’t stand a chance against the screen: first, the movie screen, then the television screen, now the proliferating computer screen, one in your pocket, one on your desk, one in your hand, and soon one imbedded between your eyes.” Roth was correct about the triumph of the screen, which is one reason why Graham’s work for television is so influential. He writes about politics not as an activist or polemicist but as an observer of the complexities and dilemmas it creates, the great characters it throws up, and the storylines and narratives it provides.

Dominic Cummings, portrayed by Benedict Cumberbatch in Brexit: The Uncivil War, has been dining with Nigel Farage. They were once fierce antagonists, but they know the weakness of the Conservative Party presents an opportunity to create a new politics of the radical right. But can Reform UK attract elite talent, Cummings asks. Should Reform unite the right or seek to destroy the Tories, Farage asks. Both are committed to reforming the state and think Whitehall, or what Cummings calls the permanent bureaucracy, is broken.

A name to follow: Dr Lawrence Newport, an online campaigner (for some reason he uses the professional honorific). He is close to Cummings and led the campaign to ban XL Bully dogs. He is now campaigning on pro-growth and anti-crime platforms, and I was first alerted to him by one of what I call Labour’s new realists – those who recognise that the old progressivism to which many in the party cling is profoundly ill-suited to the threats and demands of these new times.

This column appears in the 28 March – 3 April 2025 issue of the New Statesman magazine