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Landin in Scotland Novelist’s anti-Corbyn outburst speaks volumes

BLASTS from the past are unexpected by definition. But when I discovered the young adult novelist William Sutcliffe had been in the Edinburgh International Book Festival tent alongside me to hear from Jeremy Corbyn and Yanis Varoufakis this week, I was still taken aback.

Sutcliffe’s book Bad Influence was foisted upon us in my third year of secondary school. It’s the tale of Ben and Olly, two innocent middle-class kids whose world is turned upside-down by the arrival of an older boy, Carl — who goes to, or bunks off from, “the unit” rather than normal school and whose mum has nothing in her kitchen cupboards.

It was not exactly a great work of literature, but it did deliver a few thrills, including a vicious card game called “knuckles” and our hapless English teacher, an ex-BBC man, having to say the S-word while reading to the class.

On the train home from Edinburgh, I found that Sutcliffe had gone viral with a tweet describing Corbyn as “flat, uninspiring, repetitive, dreary, inarticulate and vague.” 

His outburst continued: “I honestly don’t know why so much effort and ingenuity has gone into smearing him, when the best way to make the guy look bad is just to hand him a microphone.”

Never mind the fact that when he was simply handed a microphone — when broadcasting rules kicked in during last year’s general election campaign — his popularity soared and he secured Labour’s largest vote increase since 1945.

For as many insulting adjectives as Sutcliffe could summon up, and as much as he might protest that he joined the audience to give Corbyn a chance, his verdict reflects a massive incuriosity apparent across much of the British liberal chatterati. 

Commentators who spent years filling their columns with pleas for politics to be less professional and more straightforward now judge Corbyn by the political standards they rightly decried in the ages of New Labour and the Cameroons.

They can apparently only see the new kid on the block like Carl in Bad Influence — a disruption to the sterile but familiar business-as-usual.

In another session this week, which the likes of Sutcliffe would probably compare favourably to the Corbyn chat, Nicola Sturgeon took on the role of interviewer rather than subject, and teased answers out of the novelist Ali Smith. Unsurprisingly for a politician well at ease with society engagements, she shone in a situation that Corbyn may well have struggled with.

Smith made much of the novelist’s role in understanding the world, which comes with a responsibility to be curious about the changing scenery around us. 

It’s arguable her current quartet of books (two written, two to come) named after the seasons is doing exactly this.

It’s certainly so that those specifically employed to help us understand current affairs are doing us a disservice. I imagine the London Ambulance Service had to cancel all annual leave this week, given the state of journalists’ defensive responses to Corbyn’s Alternative MacTaggart Lecture at the Edinburgh TV festival — in which he argued journalism was too posh and needed an injection of democracy. You could call the ranks of Fleet Street thin-skinned if it wasn’t bizarre to take personal offence at a systemic critique. Did they never learn you’re not supposed to become the story?

Smith argued that the novel is ever more important in the age of fake news. “Fiction,” she told the packed tent, “it’s always truth.”

Though you may win more headlines with incurious outbursts on Twitter, perhaps this is something more of our novelists could reflect on.

 

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