W hen I was a boy, my parents used to listen to Any Questions? on the wireless, as we then called it. I would sit through the programme in a state of consummate boredom, aware that this was grown-up business, and that the chance of there being a car crash or a gunfight in it – apart from a metaphorical one – was non-existent. When I was a teenager, I would listen with a slightly larger understanding, though now with a kind of amazement that people could talk so fluently, know so much, argue so lucidly. A question would be proposed, answers would flow effortlessly from the panellists, applause would follow. Now, more than grown up, I sometimes watch Question Time on television with much the same appalled admiration. No one stops for breath, no one doubts. And most of all – I’ve come to realise – no one ever changes their mind, or has their mind changed. No panellist is ever convinced by another’s argument. No one ever says, “Oh, now I see, of course you’re right and I was wrong.” Opinions, whether expressed by a male or female panellist, are like virility symbols, not to be surrendered.
Some people are brought up in families where politics is openly and noisily discussed, and where tribalism is as deeply rooted as support for a football team. I grew up in the sort of quiet, middle-class English family in which politics, like religion and sex, was almost never mentioned. Not that my relatives didn’t have political views. My maternal grandmother, for instance, was a Methodist who morphed into a socialist, and then a communist, and then – most original of all, especially in leafy Buckinghamshire – one who supported the Chinese rather than the Russians when the great Sino-Soviet split happened. Meanwhile, my grandfather was resolutely Tory. When I went to stay with them, Grandma would sit in her chair – in the red corner – tut-tutting over her Daily Worker, which exposed the fiendish iniquities of capitalism, while my grandfather sat in his chair – in the blue corner – reading the Daily Express and tut-tutting over the fiendish threats of communism. But they never argued – a truce had long since been called. As for my parents: my mother was, as she liked to put it, “true blue”, while my father’s beliefs, as far as I could divine them, were more liberal. My brother used to be a theoretical anarchist “of the Godwin/Spooner/Kropotkin sort”, but tells me he hasn’t thought about politics for decades and hasn’t voted in England since 1970.
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