‘I’ll keep going, I hate the idea of giving up’
John Sergeant tells Margarette Driscoll about his struggles with modern life and how Thatcher would have handled Brexit
Political crises can always find their mirror in Shakespeare, says John Sergeant, whose years at Westminster give him an unrivalled, armchair perspective on the current shambles. Margaret Thatcher was pure Julius
Caesar, the trusted lieutenants gathering round to knife her. With Theresa May, it’s Richard II.
“He is the most tragic king because he’s not up to the job,” says Sergeant. “It’s not ambition with Richard, it’s just straightforward incompetence. At the end, when he is removed, he says: ‘I wasted time and now doth time waste me’. And that’s Theresa May. She’s wasted all this time and people will never forgive that.”
So she is done for? “Oh, definitely,” he says, cheerily. “It all depended on her winning the Brexit test.”
Everyone of a certain age remembers Sergeant’s “golden moment” as the BBC’S chief political correspondent when, in 1990, Mrs Thatcher strode out of the British Embassy in Paris. An unwitting Sergeant was doing a piece to camera and the prime minister, who had just failed to win outright the first vote in a challenge to her leadership, took him by surprise by stopping to say she would fight on (she resigned two weeks later), while Bernard Ingham, her press secretary, tried to elbow him out of the way.
“It made my career,” says Sergeant. Even now, strangers shout, “She’s behind you!” when they see him.
There are parallels between Thatcher and May, he says, and that Paris moment, which spelt the beginning of the end of Thatcher’s premiership, seems to be repeating itself: “If two people had changed their votes, Thatcher would have won the first round and stayed as prime minister. So they are both victims of votes and they are both victims of Europe.”
Politics is cruel, and never more so than at the top. “People say how awful it’s been for May and how hard for her, but she had her chance and she missed it,” he says. “I’m sorry for her personally, but these things are always severe. It’s not just ability and qualifications that matter but having the character for a certain situation. Churchill won the war, but would he have won the peace? He was too belligerent, he wasn’t interested enough in domestic politics. He’d have been a menace. He’d have wanted to invade France.”
Sergeant adored Thatcher, who was forensic, maddening and amusing, but always a terrific story. He says she would have spotted the problem with the backstop two years ago and never let it become the problem it is now. Theresa May he knows less well, so he was taken aback when she came up to him at a charity concert last year and said “Oh, hello John.”
“But now I’ve seen her dance, I think she’s probably a fan of Strictly.”
Strictly Come Dancing was his other golden moment, of course, when his flat-footed dancing won the hearts of an audience that kept voting him back, despite the withering criticism of the judges. He voluntarily left the show in week 10 when he was in real danger of winning, saying that “even for me, that would be a joke too far”.
How to reconcile these two very different career highs? Well, there has always been as much the comic actor as journalist about
Sergeant. When he left Oxford, he dreamt of becoming a comedian, but, afraid his vicar father would think he was wasting his life, he opted for a traineeship at Reuters instead.
As he was waiting to start his new job, he performed in a student review at the Edinburgh Festival and was spotted by Alan Bennett. He took part in Bennett’s award-winning sketch show On the Margin. Bennett later wrote Sergeant’s reference when he applied to the BBC: “We saw each other recently at the Cheltenham Literary Festival. Alan’s partner wondered how we knew one another, and Alan said: ‘He was there at the very beginning.’ It was lovely,” he says.
At 74, alongside writing and broadcasting, he’s happily “fooling around”, indulging his love of comedy and entertainment in myriad ways. He has done a one-man theatre show, flown a Spitfire, writes travel pieces (he’s just back from Cuba) and made documentaries on everything from railways to Tutankhamen. The latest sees him joining a bunch of fellow old codgers, including king of the jungle Harry Redknapp, Hi-de-hi actress Ruth Madoc and Michael Whitehall (comedian Jack Whitehall’s dad), in Hard to Please OAPS. They attempt to get to grips with cuttingedge technology with predictably disastrous results. At one point, Sergeant sets off into the country with Whitehall, the two of them equipped with briefcases that turn into scooters. “Michael quite sensibly said he didn’t want to ride, but I did, and fell off, which [the producers] loved. Then we went to a hotel to try an anti-snoring device. The producers were worried whether we would share a room. I said: ‘Of course – though separate beds’ – and it was a wonderfully funny sequence.” The series was shot last summer but they have stayed friends. At the weekend he was at Whitehall’s Boat Race party. His invitation asked for his dietary requirements, Sergeant replied “caviar and champagne”.
Though he’s not as technically inept as OAPS might suggest – he has a smartphone and “literally six remote controls” for his TV and other gadgets – he does sometimes feel bemused by the modern world. “You feel we have quickly moved into a very different society,” he says. “The thing I really hate is having some small query at the bank and having to get through the whole security clearance. Mother’s maiden name or whatever it is … I often I fail because I can’t remember.
“You can’t be charming or say ‘I’m terribly sorry ’ to the machine and there are no marks for fooling around. I don’t want to spend my time complaining, but what an extraordinary way to do things. You wonder if the people who design these systems ever try them out.”
In addition to his introduction to remote-control golf trolleys and Uber, Sergeant has recently come up against another aspect of modern life. Last November, his son Will, who has two children and lives in New Zealand, was revealed to be now living as a woman, having taken the new name Mina.
Hoping to be “an inspiration to others”, Mina went public, revealing that she had flown back to Britain and had come out to her parents over a pub lunch. Sergeant politely declines to talk about it, but Mina said her father had been very supportive: “He has accepted what is going on, he just loves me and wants me to be OK. He’s an amazingly loving father.”
Sergeant recently ran into David Cameron and gave him advice about writing his memoirs (big-up the other characters and not too many sentences beginning with “I”). He’s constantly travelling, giving speeches, broadcasting, writing. Months after OAPS wrapped, he’s “in costume” in the blue suit, striped shirt and Panama hat he wore for the programme.
He works hard and has no intention of stopping any time soon. “You can ask what on earth am I doing on the eve of my 75th birthday, but I enjoy it. Showing off is a strong element of it, but I hate the idea of giving up.”
Some of his work ethic stems from his upbringing in an Oxfordshire vicarage, which gives him some sympathy for vicar’s daughter May. “Her first connection with politics would almost certainly be her father talking about the parochial church council, as my father did. There would be some row in the village and people would take positions, the vote might be close – seven to six, say – but that was it. People didn’t start shouting about having a re-run.
“Gordon Brown was a son of the Manse. Angela Merkel is another vicarage child. I can see links between all these people, leaving aside a belief in God. It’s a kind of belief in judgment day. Were you a good person or bad? Have you helped people or hurt them? So May is doing her duty. Not to ‘get Brexit done’ – I don’t think the issue has ever been particularly important for her – but to stand firm.”
Yet he doubts that she will triumph, having made the fatal error of allowing the Brexit Withdrawal Agreement to be seen as “her” deal, rather than the Government’s plan. “She’s become a player and the best resolution to a political argument is when people don’t know who’s won,” says Sergeant. “Take an intractable problem like Northern Ireland. If you are a junior minister and you go to Northern Ireland now, years later, the hardest question you can be asked is: who won, the IRA or the British? That’s where you need really clever politicians, to find a resolution that does not involve victory.”
He made friends across the House, but is particularly proud of being invited to two political funerals: “One was Thatcher, the other was Tony Benn. That’s not bad. They both meant a lot to me: we lived together in this strange world of politics, fun and drama.”
‘You wonder if the people who design these systems ever actually try them out’