Iain Dale: Britain’s political entrepreneur

Political journalism has turned the page on a century of printed pages and balanced BBC reporting. On the nation’s trains and buses no-one is seen reading a paper other than the Metro free-sheet. The Sunday papers and weeklies are as expensive as cheap paperbacks. Today’s shapers of political debate are on social media, commercial radio phone-ins and guest interviews, Substack or mobile phone apps.

One pundit who has successfully navigated the new political media waters is Iain Dale. He is not a clever-clogs PPE graduate, though he does speak fluent German — rare indeed in monolingual Brexit Britain. I first came across him as a lifelong fan of the political literature and memorabilia bookshops to be found in Washington DC, when I first began doing US politics (via American trade unions) nearly half a century ago.

Dale opened Politico’s, his UK political bookshop off Victoria Street, a stroll from  Westminster, just as Labour won power in 1997 and settled in for the long Blair era of politics.

He is Britain’s leading political entrepreneur. He makes no secret of the fact that he is also a lifelong Tory supporter, a schoolboy fan of Margaret Thatcher. She is loathed north of the Trent for her de-industrialisation policies much as she is admired in the south for validating profit and turning a blind eye to social decay.

He picked up the political bug at the University of East Anglia in the 1980s, where he launched a Conservative Club and found students queuing to sign up. He worked for various MPs and organised a campaign for powerful City interests to close down a centuries-old labour scheme to keep dockworkers in employment. Yes, it was a fiddle — but no more of a fiddle than the rackets KC’s have to guarantee high fees or the expenses fiddles journalists on the BBC and Fleet Street got up to.

In 2009, Dale set up Biteback Publishing which produced until recently books by politicians on politics, policies and memoirs and he knew how to make money for his authors by getting them serialised. (Full disclosure: two of my 28 books on politics were published by Biteback.)

Now his old firm has published his autobiography: Have I Said Too Much? My Life in Politics and the Media (Biteback, £25). Iain’s memoir is a social history of the decline of old England, the royals, land-owning fox-hunters, trade unions running the Labour Party, Scotland and Wales being told what to do by the English.

Some of his most moving pages concern his personal development as a gay man, now happily married to his partner John. Coming out was not easy in the early days of gay Britain and Iain was 40 by the time he did so.

He failed in his principal ambition – to become an MP. He tried — how he tried — but the gods who confer the letters MP after his name never smiled kindly.

The Commons’ loss was the public’s gain as he became better and better as a political interviewer. There are two types: the angry, self-important interrogators like Andrew Neil, or the balanced, fair ones like Laura Kuenssberg. Iain Dale is in the second camp.

The plain fact is that politics hasn’t been working well this century. Politicians know how to denounce each other but never work together for a common good. Blair and Brown fought each other on the issue of Europe and Cameron turned his government into a booster for Nigel Farage. It is best to draw a polite veil over  the six Brexit era prime ministers, including the recently failed Labour one.

So Iain Dale has not had many years of strong, confident British politicians to get his teeth into. In many ways he is a bigger, smarter and above all kinder figure than most of the politicians he discusses in this memoir. For future historians his book will be a better introduction to Britain’s political life 1990-2025 than anything produced by an academic or a Westminster political editor.

Denis MacShane is a former Minister of Europe.

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