Kamala Harris: how the 'female Obama' started with a bang and went downhill
Newspaper editors infamously prepare obituaries before their subjects have died, keeping them ominously in reserve until the moment of truth. The writing was on the wall for Senator Kamala Harris last week when both the New York Times and Washington Post published political obituaries about a campaign in disarray.
The death of the dream that a woman of colour could become the next US president was officially pronounced at 1.19pm on Tuesday in an email to supporters with the subject heading: “I am suspending my campaign today.”
Harris was the biggest name so far to withdraw from a crowded and volatile 2020 presidential race. When she launched her campaign at an outdoor rally in Oakland, California, in January, few in the crowd of more than 22,000 people could have guessed that she would be gone before Pete Buttigieg, mayor of South Bend, Indiana, or Andrew Yang, a tech entrepreneur and political novice.
In fact that rally was the high point. There was never a better moment in the Harris campaign. Apart from a classic debate soundbite, it was all downhill from there for a candidate whose campaign succumbed to factional infighting and whose “let’s have a conversation” mantra was ill-suited to the political moment.
“From my perspective, she never connected with the electorate,” says Moe Vela, a former senior adviser to Joe Biden and board director for TransparentBusiness. “I don’t think voters ever got to see her true and authentic self due to vacillating policy stances and plans. There was an inconsistency to her at a time when voters are seeking stability.
“Combining that with a campaign team that appeared to be in turmoil, you have a recipe for disaster.”
On paper, Harris, 55, should have been the ideal antidote to Donald Trump: a “female Barack Obama” who could rebuild his coalition. Like the former president, she is mixed race (her father from Jamaica, her mother from India), spent part of her childhood abroad (in Canada) and became a lawyer, then the first black US senator in California’s history.
In congressional hearings, Harris had tormented Jeff Sessions and other figures from the Trump administration.
She seemed to be the ideal person to cross-examine Trump on a debate stage and prosecute the case against his corruption, misogyny and racism.
Harris raised an impressive $12m in the first three months of her campaign and quickly secured major endorsements in her home state, which offers the biggest haul of delegates in the Democratic primary contest.
But as the competition grew, Harris’s fundraising flatlined and the media shone its light elsewhere. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren pulled in tens of millions of dollars from grassroots supporters, while Buttigieg drew money from traditional donors.
Some detected bias. LaTosha Brown, co-founder of Black Voters Matter, said: “I feel in many ways the women, and Kamala in particular as a black woman, were not treated the same as the white men in this race. There was an environment of sexism and racism.”
In recent weeks, reports emerged that Harris’s staff complained about being badly treated; another female candidate, Senator Amy Klobuchar, has faced similar allegations. Brown commented: “I only hear complaints about the women. Either all the men are just nice bosses or they are not judged by the same standard. I have not heard a real critique of what kind of managers the white men are.
“The white men can just turn up and be charismatic and that’s enough. For some reason, a woman has to be an extreme nurturer or a stellar boss. When Pete Buttigieg had a surge, he got all kind of press. I never saw that kind of headline for her; she always came in from behind. If you look at how she was treated as a candidate, it was completely different.”
Others argue that Harris, who constantly stressed the need to “speak the truth” on race and other issues, lacked ideology and seemed vague and inconsistent on policy.
Like other Democrats, she stumbled over the issue of healthcare, at first indicating that she supported abolishing private health insurance, then backpedalling and claiming she had mi
sheard a question at one of the debates. She eventually released a plan that preserved a role for private insurance.
But in June, struggling to break former vice-president Joe Biden’s lock on African American voters, Harris produced arguably the stand-out moment of the primary debates so far. She accused Biden of past opposition to bussing, an effort to racially integrate government schools.
“There was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools, and she was bussed to school every day,” Harris said, before delivering the killer line: “That little girl was me.”
Biden’s head snapped around to look at her. It was a blow to the solar plexus. He tried to defend himself but, up against the clock, blurted out: “My time is up. I’m sorry.”
The line, “That little girl was me,” rapidly appeared on T-shirts and a Saturday Night Live parody. However, it also produced sympathy for Biden and a backlash that denied Harris momentum. In the following debates, she seemed to fade into the background.
Other catchphrases or stunts never quite took off. There was a “3am agenda” about the hopes and fears that wake people up at three in the morning. It echoed, perhaps unfortunately, Hillary Clinton’s 2008 ad about who is best qualified to answer a 3am phone call in a crisis.
And Harris could never quite escape progressive scepticism about her past. She started her career in Oakland, serving as a local prosecutor in the 1990s, before becoming the first African American and the first woman elected as San Francisco district attorney in 2003 and as California attorney general in 2010.
During her presidential run, Harris billed herself as a “progressive prosecutor”. She titled her first book Smart on Crime – looking to leave the “hard on crime” and “soft on crime” stereotypes behind.
Yet Harris’s contradictory, complicated record as a prosecutor in California corroded her presidential bid. Even as she started programmes to steer low-level drug offenders away from prison, she boasted about increasing conviction rates and supported fellow prosecutors accused of misconduct.
Her anti-truancy programme, which led to the arrest of parents whose children were chronically absent, her inaction on police brutality and her opposition to decriminalising sex work also drew criticism from progressive voters. Eventually, she decided to embrace this biography with the slogan “Justice Is on the Ballot”, and by vowing to “prosecute the case” against a “criminal” president.
California, which should have been a stronghold, proved problematic in other ways. Bill Whalen, a fellow at the Hoover Institution thinktank at Stanford University, wrote in the Washington Post last month: “Analysts seeking to understand the Kamala Harris flop need look no further than Harris’s ostensible selling point: her record in California. After nearly three years as the state’s junior senator, Harris doesn’t have much to show for herself.
“Take, for example, Harris’s signature policy issue. What is it? Her Democratic colleague, Dianne Feinstein, is known among California voters for her policy-grinding: on assault weapons bans; protecting the Golden State’s forests, deserts and lakes; and the occasional supreme court nomination brouhaha.”
The downward spiral was clear and irreversible. Harris finished September with $9m in cash, according to finance disclosures; Warren had nearly $26m at the same stage. Last month Harris’s campaign announced it would fire staff at its Baltimore headquarters and move some people from other early states to Iowa for a last stand.
Aides shared grievances with the media, including questions over whether Harris’s sister, Maya, the campaign chairwoman, had too much influence. Several senior aides quit to join other campaigns.
One of them, Kelly Mehlenbacher, wrote in a resignation letter obtained by the New York Times: “Because we have refused to confront our mistakes, foster an environment of critical thinking and honest feedback, or trust the expertise of talented staff, we find ourselves making the same unforced errors over and over.”
Harris cited lack of financial resources for her decision to terminate the campaign now. She had qualified for this month’s debate, which will be held in her home state, but her exit, which represents her first defeat as a political candidate, puts the party at risk of a debate featuring white contenders only – a dismal look for a party that had the most diverse field in political history.
“This is America,” muses Brown. “All of what I want to believe about America, she continues to show how embedded racism is in the political system.”
But out in the country, dissent and resentment were bubbling away, and through the prism of vox pops, we were starting to understand what was happening. We talked to people who had strong opinions, but were often not the kind of voters who had either the time or inclination to make their voices heard via the traditional forums: party activism, public meetings, protest marches. As journalists employed by the Guardian, we needed to be fair and balanced, but not necessarily impartial. We were trying to expose our viewers to opinions they were probably not used to hearing. Our own views came into the conversations we had, and made these exchanges more equal, authentic and spontaneous.
The people we met during this initial period have been stuck in our heads for years. From 2011: the two young men selling paintball sessions in central Birmingham – one of them just back from military duty in Afghanistan – who were lucky to even make the minimum wage, and completely detached from politics. In 2013: the two older men in Merthyr Tydfil who answered our questions about the death of Margaret Thatcher by telling us they still thought about the 1980s miners’ strike “every day”, and a 17-year-old student who did not know what a trade union was. In 2014 we met Debbie, a young mum from a council estate in Falkirk, Scotland. At a packed pro-independence public meeting on a Sunday night, she told us that the referendum had ignited her interest in politics for the first time. It had been, she said, “One of the most exciting things that’s ever happened.”
Standard TV news packages tend to be scripted by the reporter, and vox pops are added to show what the public think of the story that’s just been told. For us, although we always prearranged some encounters, vox pops were the first thing we did when we hit town. The views we encountered then guided a lot of what we did. We asked the people we met where we should go next, or who else we should meet. If a conversation with someone was particularly interesting, we would take their number, with a view to meeting them again.
The films we were making were shaped by what we divined from talking to people, rather than the other way round. When we spoke to people for any length of time, our questions tended not to begin with “Who are you going to vote for?” or “What do you think about Brexit?”, but much more open, contextual lines of enquiry: “What’s it like living here?” or “How do you feel about the future?” We did not wear suits, or carry offputtingly cumbersome equipment, or shine lights in people’s faces. If the interviewee had the time, the conversation often lasted for 10 or 15 minutes.
As we spoke to people, we sensed that the gap between politics, the media and the public was widening. It was also becoming unsustainable. “They’re all in it for themselves, they don’t care about us” may have become the great cliche of vox pop journalism. But before it was a cliche, it was a warning.
* * *
From the early 1990s until around 2010, mainstream debate was personified by such politicians as Tony Blair and Bill Clinton: men with an alleged genius for understanding public sentiment, and manipulating it. But since then, politics has been upended. Within a couple of years of David Cameron taking power, an often angry and unpredictable public was starting to render the usual rituals – big speeches, appearances on daytime TV – increasingly useless. Now, three years after Cameron left the stage, voters increasingly set the agenda. Not surprisingly, the vox pop – the literal “voice of the people” – has itself become the focus of angry debate.
Last month, an Ofcom review found that many viewers thought the use of vox pops in the BBC’s news and current affairs coverage gave more prominence to extreme views at the expense of the “middle ground”. On Twitter you will find hundreds of tweets expressing exasperation with the form. There is a certain irony in people who habitually sound off online taking issue with other people voicing their opinions, but that doesn’t seem to stem the torrent: “I’m fed up of seeing vox pops of closet racist Dave from Blackpool and closet xenophobe Tony from Skegness.” “Ban all vox pops on the news. I really don’t care what Pete the electrician from Stoke-on-Trent thinks about constitutional law.” “Another day, another set of BBC vox pops from a load of pensioners at a ballroom dance.”
In March this year, as Theresa May’s Brexit deal collided with parliament, the writer and comedian David Baddiel expressed his dismay on Twitter: “BBC News are once again doing that thing: ‘We sent our reporter to … a Leave constituency, always. Because that’s where people will be crossest. Which they think makes for better vox pops.”
Back in 2017, The Radio Times published a piece by the columnist Alison Graham: “If I were Queen of the world I would draw up an Act of Parliament on fancy notepaper banning television vox pops from the minute an election is called until the result is declared. Then I’d give myself emergency powers to ban them for an unspecified period after that, too. Then I’d hope that in a world where, thanks to social media, no opinion ever goes unexpressed in a torrent of online detritus, vox pops will surely, finally, be dead.”
These furies seem of a piece with the regular explosions of annoyance about audience members on BBC1’s Question Time, and viral mockery of the contradictory opinions of participants in radio phone-ins. Hostility to vox pops arises from the feeling that too much media attention is focused on a particular kind of leave supporter – white, old, working-class. It’s true that the 48.1% of voters who backed remain often seem to play only a minor role in the media’s portrayal of where Brexit sits in our politics, but there is perhaps a snobbish idea that some people are beyond the pale, and things would be a lot better if they were returned to a state of voicelessness.
But there are questions to be asked about how vox pops are used, and what they say about the media’s attitudes to so-called ordinary people. These interviews come at the end of a package – suggesting that the substance of the story has already been largely decided – and follow a basic formula: one for, one against, and one comedy reply.
The superficial presentation of people’s views in hasty vox pops is a key part of one of the biggest political stories of our time. In Britain and elsewhere, a constructed idea of “the people” is now both central to events, and deeply problematic. The new breed of populist leaders use public appeal to justify a politics of division and nastiness. The same reductive approach is common to Nigel Farage, Donald Trump, the Italian politician Matteo Salvini. Want to keep out immigrants? Build a wall. Fear for the nation’s social fabric? Classify incomers by usefulness, according to the “Australian-style points system”. This kind of politics never deals substantially with the complicated, difficult stuff woven into a lot of people’s sense of grievance – deindustrialisation, housing shortages, a world that has long since started moving into an era of automation and insecurity. In the populist worldview, “the people” are one-dimensional; so are the solutions.
* * *
On Wednesday 6 May 2015, opinion polls were still suggesting the next day’s election would be very close. In the weeks immediately beforehand, 56% of published polls had put Labour ahead. That day, we published a film put together over two days talking to people in the bellwether Midlands constituency of Nuneaton. We had been exploring the effects of five years of austerity, and a narrative had taken shape in our heads that the country might be ready for a change. But the vox pops we did in Nuneaton hit us like a blast of cold air. Our film rejected the fashionable idea of a “change moment”, and instead highlighted the tangle of resentments – against benefit claimants, immigrants, and the supposedly cushy lives of people who lived in Scotland – that seemed to be driving people’s political thinking. It wasn’t what we wanted to hear, but it was pretty much all we found.
When the Conservatives won a parliamentary majority, there was a great deal of soul-searching among the editors, reporters and commentators who had been taken by surprise. Some theories held that there had been specific problems with the pollsters’ methodologies (over-weighting particular groups of Labour voters, underestimating “shy Tories”). There was also general acknowledgement in the media that political journalism had relied too much on data, and not enough on qualitative conversations with voters.
But something else was going on. In left-leaning political circles, people wondered how they had not seen the Tory victory coming. Part of the explanation came from an effect of social media, identified by the internet activist Eli Pariser in 2011 as the “filter bubble”: an effect of endless personalisation, which, he said, “moves us very quickly toward a world in which the internet is showing us what it thinks we want to see, but not necessarily what we need to see.”
We were not aware of it at the time, but doing vox pops had become a way of bursting our bubbles. By going to locations we wouldn’t normally visit, and allowing random chance to dictate who we spoke to, we had rediscovered some kind of antidote to the data-driven approach of polling and the algorithms of social media.
But by the end of that year, it was our turn for some soul-searching. A December byelection in Oldham West and Royton was the first test for the Labour party under Jeremy Corbyn. We arrived in town buoyed by the sense that we had successfully divined the likely result of the election, and by our early coverage of the rise of Corbynism. It was raining torrentially for much that day, which makes for harder work than usual. We took cover in an indoor market, and got to work talking to people. We were shocked by the hostility towards Corbyn among older Labour voters; in our minds, the force of their opinions signified a serious possibility that the party would lose the seat.
In fact, Labour won with a majority of more than 10,000. We learned several lessons. First, predicting political outcomes was a mug’s game. Second, we had been guilty of creating our own filter bubble, by relying too much on a particular type of voter found in a particular place. Statisticians call this “availability bias”. In simple terms, you can’t base political coverage only on the sort of people you find in a market in the middle of the day.
* * *
In May 2016, the referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU was looming. Polls were tight, but the general consensus was that the remain side would win. As we began a new series of Anywhere But Westminster, we were determined not to repeat our own mistakes. We spent a week driving from Merthyr Tydfil (we like it there – people talk) to Manchester, via the English Midlands. We had nothing set up: our only aim was to speak to as wide a variety of voters in as wide a variety of places as possible.
We listened to Labour-voting leavers in Merthyr, and wealthier Eurosceptic Tory supporters in Leominster, Herefordshire. In the inner-city neighbourhood of Handsworth in Birmingham, we got a sense that assumptions of a remain victory were by no means well founded. There, we tested the received view of Brexit as a cause that only appealed to a certain kind of white person. At that point, many people were describing the respective sides of the battle as “in” and “out”. In a downpour, we spotted a British-Asian man taking shelter, wound down the car window, and asked him which side he was on. “Out,” he shot back.
In Soho Road, the multicultural thoroughfare that is Handsworth’s main drag, we talked to Sikh business owners – who, in defiance of the facts, seemed to think that people from EU countries were a drain on the state and on taxpayers, and other people whose support for Brexit seemed to be down to the decay and decline they saw in their immediate environment.
We then went up the M6 to Manchester. At a university recruitment fair, 10 vox pops turned up only one leave supporter. When we asked them how they felt about the future, most of the students we met were optimistic. But 15 minutes drive away, in the deprived northern Mancunian neighbourhood of Collyhurst, the polarities were reversed. “I fear for the kids – for my grandkids and that,” said one woman. “Jobs, and things like that: so I’m looking at pulling out.”
Her neighbour had come to the UK from Malawi. “I’m looking at immigration,” he said. “I studied environmental health, and I can’t even get a job. As a person that came into the UK, I’ve seen the change. I know what is happening. It’s affected me. And the thing is … I’m pulling out.”
We stopped to talk to two women next to a burned-out pub called the Billy Greens. Close by was an abandoned playing field, where rusty goalposts protruded from an expanse of overgrown grass. The conversation was brief, but it got to the heart of how the leave campaign had managed to frame its campaign as the vehicle for an unlikely kind of class war.
JH: “How is Collyhurst doing?” Woman 1: “Collyhurst is coming up again. It’s a really nice place to live. But we do need more money spent on it.”
JH: “Have people in power talked about spending money here?”
W1: “They’ve had the gardens done, but that’s it. Nothing else. There’s nothing for the kids to do. Nothing for the kids to play on. Nothing at all. And yet it’s a lovely place to live.”
JH: “But booming, thriving Manchester’s only 10 minutes’ drive down there.”
W1: “Years ago, when I grew up here, there were places to go: playschemes, and everything. There’s nothing for kids. Nothing at all. You can look round and see.”
JH: “It’s home, though, right? You feel very connected to it.
W1: “Oh yeah. [Pointing at the pub] My mum had her wake there, God rest her soul, in the Billy Greens.”
JH: “What I find odd coming here, is that they’ve spent millions of pounds regenerating the middle of Manchester …”
W1: “Oh yeah.”
JH: “But you haven’t had money spent here.”
Woman 2: “In Miles Platting [nearby area], they closed the swimming baths and all that lot.”
W1: “And the library. They’ve got nothing. And I feel sorry for them. For those six weeks [of school] holidays, if you haven’t got a lot of money, you’ve got nothing.”
John Domokos: “I’m curious about why you think that happens: all the money gets spent there, not here.”
Woman 1: “It’s people with money. People with money. Money talks!”
JH: “Last question. How are you voting in this referendum?”
W1 and W2, loudly and emphatically: “Out!”
JH: “They’re all voting ‘in’ in town.” Woman 1: “Course they will! ‘Cos they’ve got that!” [rubs thumb and finger together to suggest money]
JH: “So it’s down to a very simple thing for you – those who’ve got money vote which way?”
W1: “To stay in.”
JH: “And those who haven’t got as much money?”
W1: “To come out.”
We didn’t predict the referendum result. But for us, the film that finished in Collyhurst helped to frame what had happened. Lots of analysis and data since that referendum has cast doubt on the idea that Brexit was some kind of working-class revolt. But all across Britain, in neglected places that rarely saw TV cameras, we had met people who were voting to leave the EU as a way of calling for change: to be heard. The idea of listening to the “left behind” briefly took hold, and found its way into Theresa May’s early speeches as prime minister. It felt to us like Brexit might be a turning point for Britain, and that the vox pop was somehow part of what was changing.
* * *
A year later, Theresa May called the general election of 2017. Mostly because we had never been there, we decided to begin our coverage in the Cornish town of Redruth, where the last Cornish tin mine had closed 20 years earlier. Partly because tin is a crucial component in smartphones and electric cars, there had recently been talk of reopening the mine, something that seemed to interest a lot more people than party politics. The campaign had yet to ignite: the people we spoke to seemed largely detached from it, and
the few people we could persuade to talk specifics said they would be voting Conservative.
Theresa May was ahead in the polls, and there was a sense that rightleaning Brexit supporters would have things their way. But as we kicked our heels on an almost deserted, pedestrianised street, a man on a mobility scooter came into view, and clocked our camera. He would identify himself only as “the tin man”.
Tin Man: “Are you making a film about the deprivation in this country? This fascist shithole?”
JH: “Is it that bad?”
TM: “Well, don’t you think it’s that bad? Or do you not see it as it is? If you fell down dead now, mate, no one would give a shit. Isn’t that a sign of a fascist country?”
JH: “I meet a lot of people who seem quite cheered up, because they voted Brexit and we’re getting out and things are going their way.”
TM: “Yeah, brilliant. Prices are going up, and it’s costing another $30m to reopen the tin mine because of the fall in the pound. This wonderful country doesn’t manufacture anything any more. We’re totally reliant on Swedish mining equipment, which is costing us more money. It’s not helping us, mate. People have been conned.”
JH: “Do you have a meaningful option in this election, do you think?”
TM: “Absolutely. For the first time ever I think we’ve genuinely got a choice.”
JH: “And the choice is?”
TM: “To do things differently. There are countries that do things differently. I want to vote against crony capitalism. And the only way to do that is to vote for someone like Jeremy Corbyn.”
JD: “What’s it like being disabled in the current climate?”
TM: “It’s an absolutely miserable experience. Constantly picked on and harassed by the government. I got myself a cracking job down the mine: a job I was born to do. Now I get problems with my health, and I get treated like dirt. I’m running around on a scooter that was given to me [by a friend]. I don’t get any help from the government whatsoever. And this is after I put millions of pounds in the economy, working at the tin mine.”
JD: “The crux of this is … ”
TM: [loudly] “The crux of it is, surely society can be better than this!”
JH: “We met a woman down there who said she thought Jeremy Corbyn was dangerous.”
TM: “That’s just ridiculous, isn’t it? He’s a man who wants to change things for the better. Change the priority. Stop spending money on bloody war, feed and clothe the poor. Not one person excluded, yeah? And then we can start to progress as a species, for the first time ever.”
We met the Tin Man when Labour were 15 points behind in the polls. The encounter with him was cut into a short standalone video that was posted on Facebook. It quickly amassed 2.2m views, and he was the subject of a story in the Camborne and Redruth Gazette. Labour came within 1,500 votes of winning the seat.
* * *
Now another election is looming, and we are still doing vox pops. But in the course of the last three years or so, encounters between the media and the public have been so built into the Brexit moment that they have become ritualised.
In terms of the sheer amount of vitriol, mistrust, mocking memes and conspiracy-mongering, we are arguably in the middle of Britain’s first true social-media election. In some ways, Twitter is one giant vox pop.
But there are crucial differences. Most people don’t have a huge Twitter following.And the things that make vox pops both revealing and satisfying are absent: all context and local surroundings, all the non-verbal communication that humans use to signal respect and empathy.
One thing seems particularly striking while going back through our archive of roughly 140 films, and probably more than 1,000 hours of footage: almost all of our encounters have ended on friendly terms. No matter what political differences come to the surface, the encounters usually proceed respectfully – that’s how people tend to behave when they come face to face.
Ten years of vox-popping has taught us that calling the results of elections is not our job. But if Anywhere But Westminster has one key purpose, it is to at least try to transcend the polarisation and mutual loathing. At the risk of sounding sentimental, we want people to listen to each other.
Two weeks ago, after we had finished filming in Southend-on-Sea, we drove the 30 miles to Jaywick, and went back to find Step Man. At the local convenience store, the woman behind the counter told us that people in Jaywick now hated the media: there had been too many programmes, she said, reducing it to a caricature of deprivation. The worst, she said, had been a Channel 5 show titled Benefits By the Sea.
It was surprisingly easy to locate his house: the same red car was parked outside, and the bench was still there, propped against the wall. But when we rang the bell, there was at least two minutes of complete silence, before an upstairs window opened. There he was: paler and more gaunt before, and halfhidden behind the pane. We spoke for 10 minutes.
SM: “Hello there.”
JH: “Hello. I don’t know whether you remember us. Five years ago, we were making a film in Jaywick. We spoke to you on that bench there.”
SM: “Oh yeah?”
JH: “Can we talk to you again?”
SM: “Not really. I’m not very well at the moment. I’ve got emphysema.”
JH: “What do you think of the state of the country?”
SM: “[Laughs] Shit.”
JH: “Do you think things are better or worse than when we met you five years ago?”
SM: “Going like that [moves arm downwards], isn’t it?”
JH: “Did you vote in the referendum?”
SM: “Of course I did. And I voted to leave.”
JH: “How do you feel about that?” SM: “Well, I want to be out. Nobody seems to know what they’re doing.”
JH: “And how’s Jaywick doing?”
SM: “Oh, the same old same old. Nothing seems to change in Jaywick. Jaywick just rattles along. Like the rest of the country.”
JH: “Are you going to vote in the election?”
SM: “Of course I am.”
JH: “Who are you going to vote for?” SM: “I’ve voted Labour all my life, and I’m not going to vote for Corbyn. He’s not doing the working classes any good at all.”
JH: “So if not him, who are you going to vote for?”
SM: “Boris.”
JH: “God – you’re a lifelong Labour voter, voting for Boris?”
SM: “Yeah, because I want to get out of bloody Europe.”
JH: “But what’s he going to do to the country?”
SM: “Well, I don’t know. But as long as he gets us out of the mire.”
JH: “Eton-educated, very wealthy …
”
SM: “I wish I was. But they need to get it all sorted.”
JH: “And the future of the country? How do you feel about that?”
SM: “Well, I’d love to see it blossom. The poor having a few bob in their pocket. Pensioners doing well. All looked after. Hospitals. None of this … Every time you go into hospitals, hanging about in corridors – I’ve been there many, many times. Friday and Saturday night – all these arseholes who’ve had too many shandies, cluttering it all up, and people lying on trolleys, here there and everywhere.”
JH: “And you’ve had that experience?”
SM: “Yes. Many, many times.”
JH: “When you voted for Brexit, was the NHS in your mind? The idea of bringing the money back?”
SM: “Of course it was.”
JH: “It was a dirty lie, wasn’t it?”
SM: “We don’t know yet.”
JH: “You were a railwayman and you voted Labour all your life. You know of old that if we get Conservative governments, they don’t make anything better.”
SM: “Yeah, but I can’t see Corbyn making it any better.”
JH: “The conversation we had with you was a big thing for us. It changed the way we thought about politics.”
SM: “Well … I hope we just get out [of the EU]. And do very, very well.”
It was getting colder: he was starting to cough. We said our goodbyes – “See you later, my old mate,” he said – and he closed the window and went back inside, after we’d asked him his name. He told us it was Frank.
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