From heroin to hero
How Guardian sketchwriter John Crace was called to Parliament
My lockdown hero, my new superman, is John Crace.
He’s the Guardian’s political sketchwriter – the sharpest, funniest commentator there is on the mad world we’re currently living in.
The nicknames he’s given politicians have become part of the language: Failing Grayling, Door Matt Hancock and the Maybot – thanks to Theresa May’s robotic repetition of ‘Brexit means Brexit’.
Crace’s pieces, which appear several times a week, are created in the suburbs of south London. As you round the corner into his street, you can see that every house is similar, except for one whose front garden is a small, tropical plantation. ‘Oh please, let that be his,’ Dafydd Jones (the Oldie photographer) said as we approached. And – bliss! It was.
Crace is 6’2’’, slim and strong – my literary superman does actually look like Superman. If I were a member of the Government, I would wither under his direct blue gaze.
He is responsible for the banana trees, palms and giant ferns in the exotic front garden. The back garden, bigger and more conventional, was created by his wife, Jill.
They have been married for more than three decades – through thick and thin – and there have been periods of very, very thin. Crace’s father was a vicar and his mother a marriage-guidance counsellor. He did well academically, studying politics at Exeter University and the LSE. But, all the time, inside, he was lost, anxious and vulnerable.
‘I kind of felt that I didn’t have all the building bricks you are supposed to have; I didn’t know how to negotiate life.’ Heroin became the answer. He was an addict from the age of 20 till he was almost 30. ‘Do you remember that Ready Brek ad in the ’70s which had a picture of a kid going off to school with a glow around him? Well, heroin gave me that glow – a layer of protection.’
Over those years, he did odd jobs: sold ice cream, worked in a bookshop and got sacked from an insurance company. And he married. I wondered how the marriage had survived his addiction. ‘Well, I was keeping a lot of this secret from her. It was like trying to have two or three lives going on at the same time.’
Two years after their wedding, they found a treatment centre and Crace got clean. He has remained so for the past 33 years, though he has had a nervous breakdown since and demons still occasionally haunt him. ‘My comedy comes from a dark place,’ he says.
It was a much-respected friend he met at Narcotics Anonymous who got him writing. ‘I remember seeing something he’d written in the paper and thinking, “Hmmm, maybe I could actually do that.” It was as arbitrary as that. And one of the attractions of journalism was that no one asked me to explain the ten-year gap in my CV.’
Crace had a lucky start. Telephoning to pitch his first idea to the Independent on Sunday, he got straight through to someone in Features, who said, if he wrote it, she would consider it. (He suspects now she thought he was the writer Jim Crace because she later dramatically reduced his fee.)
He did most work for the Guardian educational supplement. Then he was given their ‘Digested Read’ column, then ‘Westminster Digested’ and, in 2014, when Simon Hoggart sadly died, he found himself, unexpectedly, inheriting Hoggart’s job as political sketchwriter.
When Crace entered Parliament (as it were), the uniform was jacket, shirt and tie; John Bercow later abolished the tie. When he’s there, Crace wears a slightly worn jacket from Rohan – ‘very Guardian’ – and ‘smartish’ trousers. Off duty, he is invariably in a sweater and jeans from All Saints.
Four years ago, his wife started cutting his hair with clippers at grade one. During lockdown, he grew a beard: ‘She leaves the facial grooming to me,’ he laughs. He reckons the best £229 he ever spent was on an exercise bike which he pedals away on for 75 minutes most days. ‘I turn up the resistance and end up in a full sweat. It’s as good for my mental health as it is for keeping me fit – almost like a meditation.’