My ratings were as bad as GB News
Former home secretary turned thriller writer Alan Johnson talks politics, books and broadcasting with Chris Harvey
‘When I was a junior minister I did a TV programme that recorded no viewers’
In a small room at the Savoy, I’m reading a list of novelists to the former Labour home secretary Alan Johnson and wondering if any of them would make it onto his bedside table. Churchill, it begins, Disraeli, Ann Widdecombe, Iain Duncan Smith, Edwina Currie, Jeffrey Archer, Chris Mullin. “I’ve got an Ann Widdecombe,” he says, “and she wrote a nice little thing in it.” Pause. “I won’t say I’ve read it, because that would be lying.”
He’d find room for Mullin – former MP for Sunderland and the author of A Very British Coup – and maybe Disraeli, because he’s always been intrigued by the idea that the great Tory statesman wrote novels while leading the country. “I can’t imagine a prime minister now having the time to read a novel, let alone write one.”
To the distinguished ranks of these literary MPS, we can now add Johnson. Already the award-winning author of four admired volumes of memoir, detailing his journey from childhood poverty to the political heights, the 71-year-old has just written a spy thriller, The Late Train to Gipsy Hill. After standing down from his Hull seat in 2017 to focus on writing, though, he is at pains to point out that he “desperately” wants the book not be seen as another effort by a politician trying his or her hand at fiction.
He’s accompanied by his third wife, businesswoman Carolyn Burgess, who he says was the first to read the novel – “she doesn’t hold back if she thinks things are bad,” he adds.
It isn’t. I read it in a couple of sittings, and it wouldn’t be hard to
imagine it as a Jed Mercurio-style TV blockbuster, with its plot about an ordinary Joe – Gary Nelson from Aylesbury – who gets caught up in the aftermath of the poisoning of a Russian in London with Polonium-210. There’s also a glamorous Ukrainian waitress, who is not quite what she seems.
It’s clearly inspired in part by the real-life murder of former KGB officer Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006. Johnson, who was home secretary between 2009 and 2010, believes that the killing was a Russian state-directed execution. Does he think President Putin personally approved the murder of Litvinenko? One-word answer. “Yes.”
As for the novel’s depiction of the UK capital, one of Johnson’s Russian characters states: “We can do anything we like in London. It is ours. We own it.” Does he believe there’s any truth in that? “Yeah, I believe that their impunity was incredible.”
It’s hard to ignore politics with Johnson in the room. Does he think that as a former health secretary (prior to the Home Office), he would have handled the pandemic better than Matt Hancock? “I wouldn’t like to say that, I certainly wouldn’t have got into the disgrace Hancock got himself into… Was it Hancock’s fault that we were so ill-prepared? I would blame Hancock for taking people out of the NHS and plonking them into Adult Social Care without any tests, against all protocols. I’d say that was a big, big mistake.”
During the pandemic, Johnson believes the Government has taken its eye off the ball on other health issues. “Undoubtedly. It became the National Covid Service rather than the National Health Service. It was almost impossible to get a GP appointment. And that must be a mistake. Because there’ll be another pandemic. And this exclusion of everyone else from the NHS, which has now got a waiting list that could go as high as 13 million waiting for treatment, is bound to be a mistake. It’s not sacrilege to say that about the NHS – it’s there to protect health.
“The vaccine should have been the big game-changer and I think Sage and the politicians just got to a state of being so cautious that they were overcautious.”
There’s a clarity and certainty about Johnson that makes it obvious why, post-gordon Brown, there was pressure on him to step up as a candidate for the top job, though he felt he’d reached his ceiling.
“People wanted me to be leader of the party and a lot of it was to be a counterpoint to David Cameron, Eton boy and all that, Osborne, the picture of [Cameron and Boris Johnson] in the Bullingdon Club, but I always said they had no control over their childhoods, the same as I had no control over mine.
“In fact, me and my sister used to go with my mum – she cleaned all these posh houses around the top end of Ladbroke Grove and Holland Park. And we heard in one place about a child being sent away to boarding school at age six or seven. To us that was the deprivation. Imagine, we thought, being sent away to school when you’re that age.”
As he related in his Orwell Prizewinning memoir This Boy in 2013, Johnson’s childhood was marked by poverty and tragedy. His feckless, violent father abandoned the family when Johnson was eight, leaving them penniless. His mother died during heart surgery when he was 13, but his 16-year-old sister Linda managed to convince the authorities she should look after him.
Johnson remembers how despite being from a poor background, “my mother had an instinctive feeling that books were a good thing… she dragged me and my sister to Ladbroke Grove library almost as soon as we could turn a page.” Books crept into their tworoom tenement flat: “When I got to 12 or 13, I got this passion for Agatha Christie, Erle Stanley Gardner, Leslie
Charteris, Margery Allingham, all of these great crime writers.”
He tried writing them himself “Inspector Andrews and Mr Midnight was one, loosely based on [Charteris’s character] The Saint.” With the encouragement of his English teacher, Peter Carlin, to whom his new novel is dedicated, he would send them off to publishers – and get rejection slips back.
Sensibilities have changed since then, of course, and Johnson admits there were discussions with his publishers about whether having his lead character enjoy watching a woman putting on her make-up on the train was an example of the male gaze. But largely, he says, the culture wars have passed him by.
It prompts me to ask him about GB News and his old mate/adversary Andrew Neil, who it seems may have left the channel never to return. “I think the idea was great … a kind of TV version of LBC on the radio. But it got itself into all kinds of problems with the anti-woke thing. It wasn’t the kind of balanced programming that Andrew envisaged, I’m sure. It looks now more like just a homage to the booing-footballers-for-takingthe-knee crowd.
“I think I once held the record for a TV programme that no one watched – when I was a junior minister I did a programme for Welsh TV [with the National Federation of Sub Postmasters about rural Post Office closures] that officially recorded no viewers. But now GB News seems to have overtaken me.”
The channel, of course, has turned to Nigel Farage, who spent lockdown making boat trips on the English Channel to report on the increasing numbers of migrants making the passage. With illegal immigration now, Johnson says, “it requires a solution that involves not just France, but Holland and Belgium and other European Union countries, it’s the only way to tackle it. I hate to say I told you so. But it was entirely foreseeable.”
He has to go, he has a train to catch. I wonder if writing has made him wealthier than political life. No, he says, although the books have done well – half a million sales for This Boy, “but I’ve not gone into it to make a load of money. It’s a wonderful new life.”