Jon Sopel’s Strangeland: “Our institutions are being undermined by charlatans.”
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Lewis speaks to Jon about his new book, which hit the shelves last week.
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Read time: 5 minutes
In brief…
- If you haven't already heard Jon mention it 100 times on the podcast, he has written a book called Strangeland.
- As it hit the shelves last week, Lewis interviews Jon about the book and why he wrote it.
- Jon says that while our democracy is something of a fragile state, at least “we're in a hell of a lot better place than America is”.
Why did Jon decide to write Strangeland?
The year is 2022, and Jon Sopel has just returned to the UK after spending eight years in the US.
In those eight years, a lot had changed.
It was a tumultuous time in British politics, “astonishing” even, Jon says.
For one, we had gone through three prime ministers in the space of just 12 months.
“It felt like the glue that had held parliamentary democracy together was just falling apart”, Jon tells Lewis.
”There were a variety of reasons for… Brexit, the unlawful proroguing of Parliament by [Boris] Johnson, the lies that were told over what would be done, and the easy solutions that turned out to be much more complicated.
“I thought there's something going on here, and what are the factors that are combining to make this all seem so bizarre?”
What was Jon’s time in the US like?
Between 2012 and 2022, Jon was covering all things US politics from across the Atlantic as North America Editor for the BBC.
From Donald Trump’s first win in 2016 to his supporters storming the Capitol in 2021, it was certainly eventful.
But he also appeared on American cable channels to give a British perspective on what was going on in the UK.
He tells Lewis: “Americans were scratching their heads saying, ‘can you explain to me, Jon, what's going on in your country?”
It came as we were going through the “nightmare”...that was “get Brexit done”, he says.
“It looked like the mother of Parliaments was the mother of all screw ups at that particular stage.”
But while he was “fascinated by what was happening in my own country”, Jon was dealing with a Donald Trump presidency, and what happened on Jan 6 2021 at the same time.
Jon says: “You go to America, you do not expect to be covering the threat to democracy when the mob takes over Congress.”
The more time passes, the more Jon realises that things were actually far worse than they first seemed.
“There were paramilitary groups who had arsenals of weapons stacked in hotel rooms in Arlington, Virginia, just across the Potomac River from Washington,” he says.
It made him ponder whether we could experience something like that here in Britain.
“I thought, how safe is our democracy? Could we have a January 6? That was a big driving force.”
What does Jon think about the role of the media and the rise of populism?
A section of Strangeland, Lewis points out, talks about populism and the potential role the media plays in amplifying voices like Donald Trump’s or Nigel Farage’s.
Jon tells Lewis: “It felt like we had a group of politicians in America, and in the UK, who had suddenly ripped up the rulebook by which you play.
“You could say whatever comes into your head. If you get enough likes on social media, then people will follow you.”
Jon felt that as these figures were gaining more and more traction, for the most part the mainstream broadcast media was still playing by the old rule book.
“Every piece had to have internal balance to make it seem for every weight, there was a counterweight.” Jon feels that in a sense the British people were “misled” by this apparent false equivalence.
He says: “There is a huge number of people on one side of the argument who think it's bad. There are very small number on the other side who think it's good, and yet somehow we didn't reflect that.”
Jon also writes in Strangeland that there was an overreaction for fear of appearing out of touch.
“I was never told ‘go to a Biden thing, go and find Democrats.’ We weren't interested in finding Democrats because Democrats were too much like us.”
It was far more entertaining, Jon says, to find someone with three teeth in their mouth talking about how much they love Donald Trump.
Does Britain still feel like a different place?
“What I want to argue in Strangeland is, that for all the faults of British society, we do have free speech, we do have the rule of law, we have free and fair elections, we have due process before the courts,” he tells Lewis.
Those are all things Jon thinks are “absolutely fantastic”.
He adds: “There is also value in accepting the fragility of our democracy, how our institutions risk being undermined by populists and charlatans who would do ill and grave damage and undermine confidence in the political system.
“I want our liberal democracy to flourish so that the values that have made Britain a great place to live all the time that I have been alive on this planet survive.”
So, rather than Strangeland telling us we are all doomed, it is “alerting us to the dangers rather than catastrophising them.”
Jon adds: “At least we're in a hell of a lot better place than America is.
“We haven't got the polarized divisions. We haven't got the culture wars over guns, over abortion…There was no January 6.
“We don’t have the things that are tearing at the fabric of our society, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't be cautious as well.”
You can pick up a copy of Strangeland here.
Listen to Jon and Lewis's full discussion here.
