The Saturday Read Conversation: Helen Lewis

Writing vs editing, DeSantis, Biden, Starmer, and Labour's self-ID shift.

Good afternoon. Welcome to our new email: the Saturday Read Conversation, a periodic Q&A with a leading writer or thinker. First up is Helen Lewis, the deputy editor of the New Statesman from 2010 to 2018 and now a staff writer at The Atlantic. Helen was my first direct editor and I have long been guided by her take on things. “Great journalists aren’t made in the office,” she told me in 2014, a statement I took perhaps more literally than she meant it.

Will and I spoke to Helen last week about everything from her changing approach to journalism to why Ron DeSantis doesn’t get it, as well as Labour’s new shift away from self-ID (“I want Keir Starmer to turn up at my house with a bunch of flowers and a note saying, ‘Hello, we now agree with you on everything. I can’t believe we didn’t recognise you, John the Baptist crying in the wilderness.’ But it’s not going to happen, is it?”). The conversation has been edited for clarity. We hope you enjoy it. HL

You can subscribe here to Helen’s weekly Substack, the Bluestocking, which we both read:

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Harry

Helen when we met you were an editor who wrote. Now you are a writer who edits (one day a week at Private Eye). Why the shift?

Helen

I want to do more writing, I want to go to places where stuff is happening and talk to people. I spent too much of the past decade living on the internet, where everyone is angry and you’re finding all the same stories as everybody else who’s on there. I’d like to go and be in weird places with people who don’t spend their whole time reading the same things as I do.

Harry

You have written a few features in the last couple of years for The Atlantic, most notably on Ron DeSantis in March. What have you learnt about the craft of the long-form piece? Which we don’t really have in the UK, despite our attempts to change that.

Helen

I think I’ve learnt about the novelistic use of detail. You can then apply that to everything else you write. You can tell so much of the story in little glimpses, in delicate little touches – as in a screenplay you should be showing not telling. That speaks to the importance of reporting. If you’re describing something, it will bring it to life for people, rather than just baldly stating your opinions. I think people are quite tired of polemic. I kind of groan slightly now when I see lots of opinion journalism. I just feel like I really overdosed on it in the past decade.

Harry

The opinion is going to be there anyway, in the way you structure the material, right? You will have plenty of opportunity to get your view in through the details you choose.

Helen

It’s more elegant to try and create an atmosphere than to turn to the camera and say, ‘such and such is a bad man’. There’s a scene I had at the end of my DeSantis piece, which was his inauguration in Tallahassee in January. And they had a guy who was an 81-year-old veteran of the Bay of Pigs come up and do the Pledge of Allegiance. And he stumbled through it. And I just thought any good politician would have gone up and taken his arm and done it with him, right? And DeSantis – he just stared straight ahead, looking a bit embarrassed. And everybody tensed up because they felt really bad for this guy. I thought that if I tell that story it is going to convey the fundamental problem of Ron DeSantis as a political candidate, which is that he’s got no charisma, no empathy, no initiative – that he wouldn’t think this was his problem, that he could do something about it.

Harry

There was that famous press conference where the Ukrainian journalist is almost tearful, saying she wants to come up and give [Volodymyr] Zelensky a hug. And he just stops and says, “Well, why don’t you?”

Helen

Right. As I said in the piece, Ronald Reagan, Tony Blair or Bill Clinton would have done it. Or take Barack Obama singing “Amazing Grace” at the church in Charleston, just understanding what a big moment is, and what people want emotionally from politics. [Obama was speaking at the funeral of a pastor who was one of nine people killed by a white supremacist gunman.] People go to Donald Trump rallies because they’re angry but also because it’s the Colosseum: they want to be entertained. And that’s why he’s so successful. If you don’t understand that you don’t understand politics.

Will

Let’s get into Keir Starmer. He’s 20 points ahead, but somehow he’s always being criticised. You wrote a great piece on him in December (“Starmer’s secret”), the whole point of which was that we get him wrong, that he has much greater strategic patience than us in the press. Do you think we’re getting him wrong now? Or is he finally making some missteps?

Helen

I think nature abhors a vacuum. You have to pretend that things are on a knife-edge even when they’re not. The counterpoint to that is that Theresa May went into the 2017 election 20 points ahead and managed to lose that in very short order. So it’s not like we can all actually go home. But I think a lot of political journalism isn’t really an analysis of what’s happened – it’s an argument by the writer that the politician should agree with them more. So you will see a lot of commentary asking why can’t Keir be more left-wing. And the reason is: Britain isn’t a particularly left-wing country, and he wants to win an election in Britain.

Harry

But let me hold you up on that. I’m writing a piece now, arguing that Labour could and should be more left-wing on tax. If you look at the polling data, people are extremely supportive of a lot of left-wing policies on tax, but somehow that’s all discounted, and there is a sense that we’re a Tory nation. 

Helen

Right, but I remember having this argument under Ed Miliband, in that renationalisation of the energy companies was, and is, really popular. But there are two other points here. One, how much is this going to cost? Two, how much of your time is it going to take up? That was Blair’s point against it – is that really what you want to do with your term? You see this all the time: policies poll well, people like them in the abstract, but do they like them in reality? And what do they add up to? I think Labour is undeniably cautious for a very good reason about policies that individually poll well but can be painted as radical. Labour succeeds in getting its most radical policies through when it sounds most conservative, when it talks about marriage and family and law and order.

Harry

I feel like the 2017 election is always the thing that gets ignored here, when people suggest Labour must win on Tory terms. But are you one of those who just thinks that election was an aberration?

Will

They didn’t win, Harry.

Harry

But Labour called for £50bn in tax rises and was then ahead in the polls for a year [after the 2017 election]. That seems to me to fly in the face of this idea that you can never be bold. But is that the wrong way to think about it? 

Helen

No you can be bold, but Joe Biden is a really interesting example. The Inflation Reduction Act is a huge piece of legislation with all kinds of stuff in it. But how did he win the election? I think there was no more important thing Joe Biden did to win than, at the height of ‘defund the police’, saying, ‘Do I look like a radical socialist, man?’ in that debate with Donald Trump. I think if you’re going to be a left-wing government, which is something I want, you should be as boring as possible about it and not promise people that the Glorious Revolution is dawning in Britain, but instead promise that you’re going to make life better for working people.

Harry

And then be bolder once you’re in office?

Helen

Exactly. The Labour government of 1997 came in pledging to stick to the Tory spending envelope over the first two years, but overall it was an incredibly progressive government, which took pensioners out of poverty, took children out of poverty, instituted the minimum wage, put money into public services. But the thing it’s now remembered for is not being left-wing enough. It was a lot more left-wing than the next John Major term would have been – that’s the baseline here.

Will

Does this boringness of Keir’s, which we’ve praised a bit, does it make it hard to introduce him to American readers? Meet Captain Boring, America.

Harry

That’s quite a good title.

Helen

It’s a challenge. 

Will

Perhaps casting him as the Ruthless Man makes him interesting. I wanted to ask you about this Labour policy shift on gender self-ID this week [24 July].

Helen

So look at that policy – it is a huge deviation from what he was saying to get elected [as Labour leader], which was ‘I will introduce self ID’. He has now said sex and gender are different, that women have a right to single-sex spaces, and that being trans is to be treated as a medical issue, not a kind of spiritual self determination. Those are three huge changes towards the gender critical position in the space of three years. And what did he do? He got Anneliese Dodds, a politician that basically nobody has ever heard of – I know she was briefly shadow Chancellor – and ran an op-ed in the Guardian, the most pro self ID newspaper out there. Then he refused to go on the Today programme the next day to defend the policy. When he was later asked about it on LBC he said, ‘We’ve always been in favour of safe spaces and a woman is an adult female’ and I’m thinking: did I receive a blow to the head at some point here? He just very ruthlessly ditched a whole load of stuff, and actually severely embarrassed a lot of people in the shadow cabinet. David Lammy said people who think that women are biological females were “dinosaurs” hoarding their rights. And it turns out – update – we love dinosaurs. We meant dinosaurs in a good way, hoarding their rights in a good way, clinging on to their rights with their little dinosaur hands. Then there is Lisa Nandy, who said during the leadership campaign that a male rapist should be put in a female prison. Those people will now be quite embarrassed in future interviews, but tough. He needed to close down that issue in order to stop every interview before the next election being: does a woman have a penis? And he’s done it. And he did it in recess, without a big blitz to go out and defend his position. It’s been pretty effective. The usual suspects – [Labour MPs] Lloyd Russell-Moyle, Nadia Whittome, Zarah Sultana – have really not kicked off about it. Because Keir has been wandering around with his big stick for some time now. 

Will

How do you feel about your experience of this debate over the past half decade? I thought the piece you wrote about reactionary feminism was interesting (“The feminists insisting that women are built differently”). And perhaps more sympathetic than it would have been had this debate on gender not happened. 

Helen

Look, I think it’s been good for me as a journalist to be rejected by people who I would have once thought were my allies, because actually a true journalist should have no allegiances, no tribe. And it’s been fascinating to me that there are people who I disagree with on almost everything, but I agree with them on the fact that male puberty confers a sporting advantage. The people who reject that are essentially creationists. And lots of people I thought were pretty sane on lots of stuff turned out to be gender creationists. And that has made me question whether or not they might be wrong on other things, too. I think it’s a really useful exercise as a journalist to go: I assumed you were the side that cared about evidence, and in this case you’ve proven that you’re not, so I’m not going to take that on trust anymore. And maybe I should have done that earlier.

Harry

You’re being very sanguine about this now. But was there a time where it was much more of an affliction to be cancelled by people you thought were your friends?

Helen

I can’t think of that many people I genuinely respected who have ended up on the properly screamy side.

Harry

Not friends then. Your ideological gang, if you like.

Helen

Am I sanguine about it? No, I’m not sanguine about it! I want Keir Starmer to turn up at my house with a bunch of flowers and a note saying, ‘Hello, we now agree with you on everything. I can’t believe we didn’t recognise you, John the Baptist, crying in the wilderness.’ But it’s not going to happen, is it? I realised this by writing [her 2020 book] Difficult Women. The suffragettes won, and then almost immediately the violence of the campaign was written out. And history was written as if women getting the vote was always going to happen. Of course they were going to get the vote, silly. That’s what happens. That’s what’s happened here. Labour’s leadership is now saying: ‘We’ve always acknowledged that men have a sporting advantage over women, we’ve always acknowledged that men commit rape at much higher rates than women, no one ever said that wasn’t true – that would be crazy talk!’

Harry

So now they’re gaslighting?

Helen

Well we just went through this ten-year period where people pretended that biological differences didn’t exist. And I’m happy that time appears to be over, but I remember it happening. It feels very odd that people have already forgotten that they said things that they absolutely said.

Will

I’d like to ask you about Twitter. In an email the other day you said you think you might finally be done with social networks. Are you done with Twitter? You still have an account.

Helen 

The difference is, now I don’t give a s**t. I will put my articles on there to help other people in journalism remember that I’m alive, but I don’t care. I’m still on there as that’s where I have a lot of my network and contacts from ten years-worth of journalism. But I was a fool to have been tricked into making content for free for people who did not have my best interests at heart. Why did I do that for so long? I think we all tricked ourselves into thinking it was going to help our career and I’m not entirely sure that it did.

Harry

I’ve been meaning to write a piece for months to the title “Twitter was a con”. But does the platform’s demise make it harder to break out now if you are a young journalist? It was the great equaliser.

Helen

I think that what I got from Twitter was a lot of invitations to be on BBC politics shows and argue about stuff. But after a while you realise that the only reward for that is being invited to do more BBC politics shows where you are invited to argue about stuff. The bit where someone turns up with a huge cheque or a Pulitzer – that bit never happened.

Harry

Whereas writing a great piece is rewarding in itself?

Helen

I’m just not sure what you get from Twitter anymore. It replaced the pub for journalists, right?

Harry

Yes, that was a bad thing.

Will

What about the Tories: where do you think they go after [Rishi] Sunak, if he loses?

Helen

I think it would be wrong to predict that the Tories go Cameroon again, because they might just as easily double down and go, “We want David Frost to be leader”. I would say the Tory party is tired of governing. It’s clapped out. And it has this fundamental problem, which is that it’s become a boomer protection racket. It’s so in hock to the idea that this is how you win elections: freebies for the over 60s, stopping all housing development, protecting retirement pension benefits, while really squeezing the pips out of working age people. But it doesn’t really know how to make the sums add up in any way apart from that. And that’s probably the bit that it needs to go away and think about.

Will

I can imagine Frost as leader.

Helen

You can see a Corbyn-esque turn, right? Populism will have to find the next thing to fight against after Brexit: the mirage over the horizon that’s causing all of our problems. And I think that’s probably going to be climate change. That’s going to become the next frontier. The Tory right are going to say ‘this is totalitarianism. We are being told what to do. You’re impeding the glorious freedom of people to set the air on fire.’ I don’t think Brexit has got a lot of mileage left in it as a great populist cause because it’s happened. Populism only really works when you haven’t achieved the thing, when it’s a promised land.

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If this interview intrigued, you can sign up for more Saturday Read Conversations below. Have a good week, and catch you on Saturday for the main email. Thank you.

— Harry & Will