The Tory on the train
Michael Portillo was a hated British politician, until his career was spectacularly derailed. Now he’s taken a different track, finds Grant Smithies.
From the waist up, a jacket so yellow, a canary might declare it ostentatious. The shirt? Pink as a freshly-smacked bum. Below the waist, trousers of a violent crimson.
The face? A cluster of large features – long ears, broad brow, wide mouth, big teeth – clustered about a mountainous nose, recalling Arnold Schwarzenegger.
When he opens his mouth, a booming baritone issues forth, the posh vowels betraying many years spent at British public schools.
Ladies and gentlemen, meet Michael Portillo, former politician turned broadcaster. He’s about to colonise our TV screens for weeks on end, hosting two shows about railways.
‘‘Railways are a perfect way to see any country,’’ he says, when I ask why choo-choo is superior to vroomvroom, or even whoooosh.
‘‘On a train, the world goes by at a speed you can take in, without you having to steer anything. And you meet people in a way that you simply don’t meet them when travelling by road or air. Also, I regard the train as a vehicle, quite literally, for us to talk about history, and history’s my great passion.’’
Portillo’s Great Continental Railway Journeys series has just started screening on SKY’s Living Channel. Over six weeks, he’ll be clattering across Russia, Poland, Israel, Italy, Spain, Portugal and France, hurtling over mountain passes and through verdant river valleys, leaping off now and then to check out notable cities and villages, blinding unfortunate fellow travellers with his loud jackets on railway sidings across Europe.
After that, in the same timeslot, come 20 episodes of Great British Railway Journeys throughout his own homeland. In both shows, Portillo follows ancient travelling itineraries set down more than a century ago in a musty old rail handbook known as Bradshaw’s Guide.
‘‘The idea is to illustrate how railways have affected our history,’’ booms Portillo, ‘‘often in ways we might not have considered. We focus on the period of the railway guides, which is the 1860s in the UK and 1913 on the continent, because it’s a great way to show what’s changed since those guide books were written, but also to see what remains the same, in terms of significant architecture, local culture and so on.’’
The first attempt to collate reams of historical info and relate it to rail routes, these Bradshaw guides were once every curious traveller’s crucial companion.
Portillo makes the point that it’s easy for people who always travel by air or road to forget the railway even exists, and that it had such a transformative effect on our society.
The advance of railway networks
City of Gold
changed what could be manufactured and traded, and where it could be sold. It changed people’s diet as food came in from elsewhere by rail. It exposed people to other cultures, and to distant areas of their own country.
‘‘Britain was the first country to undergo the Industrial Revolution, and the railways sped that revolution up. They helped usher in enormous social changes, but perhaps the most important was increased mobility. Before the railways, we were a sort of Jane Austen society, where most people could only walk or ride a horse to the next village. But quite soon after the railways were brought in, people in working class families started to use them to holiday at the seaside and see the wider country they lived in.’’
Railways were transformational for women, too. ‘‘Queen Victoria was convinced by her husband, Albert, that riding on a train was ladylike, and she became addicted to train travel. This encouraged other women to start travelling by rail, and so many of them started doing so that the chaperoning system broke down, and women acquired an independence they’d never had before.’’
The son of a Spanish refugee who fled the Franco regime, Portillo grew up in a ‘‘very left-leaning household where politics were discussed all the time’’. Ever the rebel, he instead swung hard to the right and joined the British Conservative Party.
He was close mates with Margaret Thatcher and served as Minister of Defence in the John Major government. Nicknamed ‘‘the darling of the right’’, he was relentlessly skewered by the left, becoming a favourite target for the Private Eye satirical magazine, who referred to him simply as ‘‘Portaloo’’’
In 1997, he was stunned to lose a previously safe Tory seat to Labour, a loss so surprising that such humiliating public blindsides are still known as ‘‘a Portillo moment’’ within British politics. ‘‘My name is now synonymous with eating a bucketload of shit in public,’’ Portillo complained to The Guardian many years later.
After keeping it a close secret for decades, Portillo finally admitted to many historical gay relationships during his university years, stressing that he had since entered into ‘‘a very happy marriage’’ and become ‘‘actively heterosexual’’.
He was lauded for his belated honesty in some quarters, but derided as a hypocrite in others. One particularly vocal critic was Sir Ian McKellen, who wrote a scathing essay condemning Portillo’s allegiance to a Tory party that had relentlessly plenty to enjoy for those who like their humour broad and their drama kitchensink. Writers Jonathan Benson and Jez Freedman make the most of the comic potential mind-altering muffins afford, while also exposing the casual racism inherent in small communities and across the generations.
One of Us Tonight, 8.30pm, TVNZ1
opposed gay rights.
Given that he was once such a controversial figure, one has to wonder, as Portillo makes his way by train through an increasingly politically polarised world, poking a microphone in the face of fellow travellers, does he ever get a railhopping leftie telling him to bugger off?
‘‘No, fortunately, I do not. We try to keep politics out of the show, though this is more difficult when travelling through places like Russia or Israel. But for the most part, people are happy to talk to me. It probably helps that I haven’t been involved in politics now for a very long time.’’
Portillo retired from politics in 2005, having unsuccessfully campaigned to lead the Conservative Party in 2001.
‘‘I’m better known these days for my TV shows, and I’m happy about that.’’
Portillo has now hosted so many assorted Railways Journeys series that there must be few unexplored yards of rail left to see. He has loved every minute of it, he says, and the experience of making these shows has changed him for the better.
‘‘Working in politics made me very stiff. You’re always wary and on the defensive, particularly of journalists – people like you! It took me several years to unwind from that, and I’ve enjoyed that process. But the more I do it, the more I think the chief reward of travelling is that you’re thrown into situations where you meet people very unlike yourself, and situations you never thought you’d find yourself in. It makes you more confident and self assured.’’
Portillo’s burgeoning confidence is visually expressed through his wardrobe. He has become a railhopping dandy, sporting the kinds of clothes that would have raised gasps during his Parliament days.
‘‘My jackets are getting more outrageous year by year, that’s true. If you were to seek a psychological explanation, you might say that I was bottled up for 20 years in a dark blue suit, and now something in my psyche has exploded, and all these colours have come out as an expression of my rejection of my deeply repressed earlier life.
‘‘I was recently in Bulgaria, and whenever you’re standing beside a train filming a shot, they make you wear a high visibility safety vest. The fellow handing me the high-viz vest was laughing as he put it on me. He said ‘I’m very sorry, sir, to be reducing your visibility’. And he was right! The safety vest was considerably less luminescent than the jacket I was already wearing!’’
Great Continental Railway Journeys
screens 9.30pm Thursdays on the Living Channel.
follows for 20 episodes in the same timeslot from March 23.
Journeys Great British Railway