Former BBC correspondent and now successful podcaster Jon Sopel is sitting in a taxi in heavy traffic in central London, talking on a mobile with an occasionally less-than-clear line.
The night before Sopel, with colleagues Emily Maitlis and Lewis Goodall, won gold in the prestigious British Podcast Awards, taking first place in the News & Current Affairs category for their daily show, The News Agents.
Sopel doesn’t mention the award. Instead, he talks about his new book, Strangeland: How Britain Stopped Making Sense, an account of returning to a changed United Kingdom after years abroad as a correspondent in Washington, and his reaction to that change.
There are elements of the book that mirror an often-successful current genre in British publishing: think James O’Brien’s angry polemic, How They Broke Britain, aka the “isn’t everything sh*t?” school.
The United Kingdom has taken odd decisions, Sopel says. Brexit was an act of “self-harm”, followed by years of political instability that have left its institutions “in a pile of dusty masonry, twisted metal and broken glass”.
Sopel does not share the opinion that “everything is sh*t”, however. Not entirely, anyway. “I think there is hope there. I think that we’re not as divided as America. I think we’ve done some stupid sh*t, yes, if you want to put it like that.”
Instead, Sopel wants to focus on populism – “a curse on our politics, where people think there are simple solutions to complex problems and then hate what happens when they find out that there aren’t”.
“Things are much more complex. Then you just get more disillusionment and more anger and resentment against the political class. And then you get ‘oh, they’re all the same’,” he says.
His return from Washington in early 2022 after eight years in the US proved to be “disconcerting – or maybe discombobulating would be a better word”, the Stepney, East London-born Sopel writes in the book’s introduction.
“It is, after all, my home; it is where I grew up, a country I love and am proud of. But it’s changed, or I have. Maybe both. It just feels like a strange land,” he adds.
The culmination of the madness was Liz Truss’s 49 days in No 10 Downing Street – “a slow-motion car crash that happened at quite a remarkable speed”, with hard-to-fathom recklessness.
He remains grateful to her because her 49 days overlapped with the launch of The News Agents, delivering the fledging creation a huge boost in audience. “We will always owe her an enormous debt of gratitude, she is our patron saint.”
Watching on, Sopel wondered where “the big beasts” in British politics had gone, the Blairs and the Browns, the Thatchers and the Heseltines, “or even the Camerons and Osbornes”. Then, he wondered whether he had begun to show his age.
However, the disbelief at Truss’s short-lived rise remains. “For the rest of her life, Truss will be at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday laying a wreath as one of our former prime ministers.”
Now in his mid-60s, Sopel, a BBC veteran of nearly four decades who has reported from trouble spots all over the globe, holds on to hope. “I believe that politics is able to do great things.”
However, his life experiences, he says, have taught him that the guardrails often thought to be permanent in societies – the accepted dos and don’ts – can disappear in months, if not weeks.
Social media has played a destructive role, but “just because something gets 60,000 likes on Twitter or X doesn’t mean that that’s where the centre of political gravity is, or that’s where public opinion is”.
Platforms could properly control matters, if they wanted, he argues. “They can be very effective at blocking certain things when they want to. Try and upload a clip on to social media of a goal being scored in a Premier League game. It will come down instantly. Well, if they have the power to do that with the goal in a football match, why can’t they just pull down other things that are untrue? There has to be a better way of rooting out falsehood.”
Traditional media, though he hates the phrase, has a responsibility, too, he says, to hold politicians rigorously to account, but “we’ve got to be fair about it and not just go, ‘God, aren’t they all bloody terrible, venal and greedy’ or whatever else”.
But equally, he adds, “I think that journalism that says, ‘On the one hand, and then on the other, and only time will tell, and this is John Sopel, BBC News from wherever today’, is crap. It doesn’t tell anyone anything. Trying to be impartial in that way is just cowardice because sometimes you’ve got to call things for what they are. There is no ‘on the one hand’ or ‘on the other hand’ with Ukraine”, for example.
For Sopel, his frame of reference was forever changed by being in Washington on January 6th, 2021 when supporters of Donald Trump brought with them a gallows for vice-president Mike Pence.
“For me, the shock was January 6th, and the fear of, Jesus Christ, could the same thing happen in our countries? And what do we do about the rising tide of populism? And what do we do about journalism?
“How do we reach an audience that increasingly wants to get news as a source of affirmation of their views already rather than information about what the hell might be happening in the world? These are huge challenges.”
In Trump’s case, the lies began immediately. “The classic one for me was when his press secretary Sean Spicer came in and said the crowds for Donald Trump’s inauguration were the biggest in American history. They weren’t. You could see they weren’t. It didn’t even matter, it’s such an irrelevant fact. Trump could have said, ‘My supporters are busy holding down blue-collar jobs, they don’t have time to come to Washington’. That would have been a really smart thing to say. He didn’t. He wanted to insist that his crowd was the biggest ever. And he wouldn’t say they weren’t. I think to call out untruth is our job.”
But none of this is about ”opposing” Trump. “A lot of American TV has gone this very polarised route where they were either trying to monetise pro-Trump sentiment or monetise anti-Trump sentiment. No, I’m trying to hold people in power to account, not trying to kind of turn it into a business model,” he says. He believes The News Agents is reaching an audience that had “fallen off the grid” of the broadcasters.
Podcasts are getting “a different audience from the conventional RTÉ audience or the conventional BBC audience. That’s important. Audiences are fracturing. Old people are watching a linear TV news, but young people are not – not in the UK anyway,” he says.
Despite the gloom, Sopel sees “glimmers” of hope. “[Joe] Biden has had to try to move back towards grown-up politics in America, not just the simple solutions that Trump promised so much and didn’t deliver on.”
He also sees such glimmers in the UK, even if the opening chapters of Keir Starmer’s time in power have been damaged by story after story of donations and internal intrigues.
“It was just bloody stupid. I’ve never had anyone buy my glasses or buy my clothes or anything else. Yes, it was declared, but it was just plain dumb to get himself into that position,” he says..
The donations controversy hurts, however, because Labour’s Starmer was trying to offer a different kind of politics after 14 years of Conservative rule, one with no easy choices.
“He’s talking about the detail of policy, that things are complex, that is he is not going to give the British public simple solutions because we’ve had enough of that, that it’s going to take a while. That Jerusalem wasn’t built in a day. There hasn’t been enough of that serious kind of levelling with the public about where we are. Whether the public will have patience with that, I think, is a huge question.
“Whether he has got the communication skills to present his argument about what needs to happen and about how it’s going to happen, again, I would say I’m not entirely sure,“ Sopel says. “But I think that’s it’s a move back towards grown-up politics.”
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