182. Polly Toynbee

0:06Well behaved women rarely make history. Bloody difficult women do.

0:19I'm very honoured to host one of my trade's ultimate goats, i.e. greatest of all time, Polly Toynbee. and for those who haven't been paying attention she's what the BBC today called a left-wing influential she's a journalist, author and a distinguished do-gooder and I know Polly you may want to talk about do-gooding in a minute. Toynbee is probably this country's finest and most forensic social affairs journalist and editor she's held senior positions at the BBC on national newspapers and since 1998 she's been a columnist and reporter chiefly for The Guardian Polly, your new book, one of many, is the shimmeringly brilliant and very honest memoir, Uneasy Inheritance, My Family and Other Radicals, which I've read in full and compulsively too.

1:09We have much to discuss. Well, I'm delighted you've read my book. I'm very honoured. Well, I think it's a masterpiece and I think it's a very important social document too. and it occurs to me that one of the drivers of your wanting to write that memoir must have been, as in the title, your unease with having sprung from the loins of so many very distinguished and noble antecedents. So can you set the scene by telling us a bit about your family? Well, I was brought up generation after generation of people on the left, on the liberal side, you know, the anti-colonialists, the suffragettes, all the way through, fighting the great liberal and left-wing causes and mostly losing them in their lifetime.

2:05Losing and losing again. And also comfortable middle class. All of them had good professional jobs. An awful lot of them were professors. Strings of them were professors. and so perfectly well paid, and so constantly guilty, anxious. How do you be a good left-winger who believes in redistribution and yet live a life that is so much more comfortable than almost everybody else's? And that's a dilemma we all face on the left, and sometimes it's comical, and sometimes we're accused of being hypocritical and champagne socialists and all of that. So you have to think your way through that. that you give away what you can, but that's not really the point.

2:48The point is to be born into privilege and be honest about it. And that's what I wanted to explore in that book. I wanted to look at my family all the way back and say how extraordinary privileged we've all been, mainly through education and passing that on, and through an assumption that any of us could do anything any time we wanted to, an assumption that, well, was our oyster, really. I have to say, I mean, you've said the word honest, I've said honest. The only, I think the only word I disagreed with, or the only thing you say about your family that I think didn't quite ring true for me was your description of your family as middle class.

3:32Because to my mind, I'm afraid, Polly, you're upper middle class. And did anyone, has anyone else tried to knit that, pick that knit with you? Yes, we've often discussed that, and it's very complicated, isn't it? Because the middle class, as described almost every day, the Telegraph today has a whole thing about Rachel Reeves. How red middle class is your house? Rachel Reeves wishes to destroy the middle class. But they talk about the middle class as being, for instance, people who have children in private schools. Well, that's 7 % of the population. So there's a great murkiness about what middle means.

4:11What it means is not working class. And certainly bits of my family were upper class, certainly. And some of them married quite a bit below them. But nevertheless, never intellectually below them, nor professionally below them. But socially, some parts of my family have been up there in the aristocracy. Mostly in that, perhaps you could call it upper middle. What do you call the professorial class? And then my great-grandfather was the Regis Professor of Greek at Oxford, very distinguished translator of Greek plays, very fashionably played on the London stage. But he came from Australia without a bean, but his father was educated.

5:00And so that's the nature of privilege. That was Gilbert Murray. That was Gilbert Murray. And you are also the granddaughter of Arnold Toynbee. Now, I mean, my generation, my husband's generation, know who Arnold Toynbee was. But for our audience, can you tell them who he was? He was a historian who became, I think fairly briefly, incredibly fashionable. And famous. Fukuyama, very famous. He was on the front page of Time magazine. He was regarded as a great prophet. He wrote 12 volumes of a study of history in which he had a kind of vision in which he felt that he could see everything about what made civilizations rise and fall.

5:48He was unbelievably learned so that he could move from China to Asia to the Romans to all civilizations encompassed in his vision. And his vision on the whole was that civilizations don't die, they commit suicide. and we might be in the middle of that right now. I'm afraid we might have to get onto that because I do want to get onto your views on, for example, the freedom of speech, the burqa, immigration, civilizational threats that I think we feel, whether they're real or not, is also up for debate. One of the things that shines through your book and makes it a kind of gripping read is not just the fact that almost everybody you mention is famous and deserving or has a multi-part biography of their own.

6:42So, you know, I mean, every page is sort of studied with bold-faced names of huge interest, you know, Gordon Brown. You've had a kind of extraordinary life, and so it's wonderful that you've put it on the page. Your grandmother. and she comes across as the absolute anti-heroine of the book a woman of unparalleled ghastliness it's very unusual to read a memoir where there's a hate figure who's such a close relation I think every good book needs a bad a baddie a baddie and she certainly is baddie and I didn't really know her but she didn't want to meet you she didn't want to meet me and she turned against my father and his older brother and so by the time I was born she already hated my father she took one look at me and prodded me with disgust and then my parents separated divorced when I was about three and she said to my mother that's the only intelligent thing my dear you've ever done she was appalling to my father and responsible for his many great neuroses which which included alcoholism but also deep depression.

7:59And she was an extraordinary woman who was quite determined to offend everything about the family background I've described. She became very conservative. She took up with sort of hunting-shooting types, utterly appalled her father, Gilbert Murray, who was a strong vegetarian, passionately anti-hunting. And then, final insults, she converted to Catholicism, which was extraordinary. My great-grandfather was a humanist, and he was president of the humanists. And you are too. As indeed I've been. I didn't discover about him until I became president. And turned her back on everybody on the grounds that she was the holy one.

8:45And she then divorced. Despite the fact having become a Catholic, she got a special annulment from the Pope. So what the Pope wouldn't do for Henry VIII would do for my grandmother. And she got an annulment, left my very distraught grandfather and said she was going off to live a life of great purity with a former Trappist monk. And they lived together. He was much younger than her. And she was very disapproving of anybody in the family with any kind of irregularity in their sex life, whatever. Not just divorces, but a cousin who had a baby very young, and she was utterly shocked by that. But it wasn't until after she died that her diaries turned up, and it turned out she'd been living the most wild sex life, keeping notes about it in her diary with this Trappist monk, while scorning everybody else in the family who was in any way irregular.

9:45She was a monstrous hypocrite and a beast through and through. And anyone who knew her said she was a beast. And so that makes her quite fascinating in a way. And such a gift to you as a writer, too. Lucky you. Well, I wish I'd known her. Yes, it would be interesting to have an actual portrait of her from your lived experience, ghastly phrase. we could talk forever about you know Philip, Anthony and Lawrence the generation of sons that she had and one of them was your father the other was Lawrence Toynbee the other was her favourite Anthony the youngest wasn't no Anthony was the oldest who sadly killed himself oh that's right she destroyed all her children in different ways and the oldest one killed himself when he was very young about 22, 23 my father was the middle one she'd already hated Anthony she hated my father too Lawrence?

10:45and Lawrence was much younger and she adored him also he was born young enough to convert to Catholicism when she became a Catholic so he became a Catholic and he was a very good painter but he also, like my father a really severe alcoholic even worse than my father and they were really destroyed by their mother Yeah, I mean, I know, I knew, I mean, some of the six daughters of Lawrence. And one of them was my son's godmother, Sarah Toynbee. And she sadly died. And she, I would say, had a, you know, she liked to drink as well. She had a very severe drink problem. Right. Do you think it is genetic?

11:31It's hard to know, isn't it? I've often thought about it. I love a drink, but luckily I don't particularly like being drunk, so I'm not an alcoholic. It's difficult to know, isn't it? Because so much of it is also environment. And maybe there was... Going back through my family, actually, there is a history of alcoholism, teetotalism. One, two, three, four... My great-great-grandmother, who owned Castle Howard, was a rabbit temperance teetotaler. and when she took over Castle Howard, she'd more or less thrown out her husband, sent him off to Italy, she smashed all the wine in the cellar of Castle Howard and had all the bottles thrown in the lake.

12:15And she and her children were all brought up to be absolutely strict temperance. But nearly all her sons died of drink, nearly all of them were alcoholics. Some of them, you know, some of the daughters were less likely to be so. and then the next generation down. Certainly some of them were and some of them weren't, but it does seem to be a sort of threat. But I wonder whether it isn't much more common in all families. Do you have any alcoholics in your past anywhere? Not that I know of, not that I know of. I think it was, because I've, it sounds awful, sounds name-droppy, but I mean I go to Castle Howe quite often because friends with Nick and Vicky Howard, blah, blah, blah.

13:01And it's completely, your descriptions of the castle are wonderful and so different. It was a much more austere place under the aegis and the Châtelaine, the Countess of Carlisle, your great-grandmother. Great-grandmother, the Red Countess. The Red Countess. Imagine going all the way now to York, to Castle Howard, and not getting a drink. I mean, I can see why Nick and Vicky live a much more sybaritic lifestyle. But listen, I've got so much to cover. Your childhood, you went to a sort of posh, kind of quite dim boarding school called Badminton outside Bristol. Well, it wasn't really very dim. It was quite serious.

13:42Badminton sounds posh like Badminton House. It was actually nothing to do with that. It was in a suburb of Bristol. It took itself seriously. It expected people to pass exams. It wasn't a school for sort of stupid Debs at all. and I think my parents chosen it because it had a slightly liberal reputation. I couldn't spot it myself but it did and I hated it. I really was miserable. Absolutely loathed it. Ran away. Got caught by the police. Brought back again. Useless. I mean perfectly good teachers. Dull but perfectly good serious teachers and I ended up with only four O-levels one of which was art, none of which was maths.

14:27So I really threw it away. That was my fault probably born in the school just because I hated it so much. And then you went to Holland Park Comprehensive which was it really the first comprehensive in Britain? Pretty much. It was one of the first two certainly and I joined it in the sixth form and that year had been the ones that had started right from the beginning and it was a kind of model school or so it saw itself but what they forgot was it actually it was drawing most of its children from very poor north kensington so although there were you know the bends were there and tony benn's children yeah yep tony benn's and if uh a few people like that on the whole most of the children there were pretty poverty i know think grenfell everybody i mean that milieu rather than the millionaires row of Kensington.

15:21Because most millionaires row sent their children to private schools. So it was only a few lefty, well-off people who sent their children there. And then you surprised the family who thought you were a kind of teenage tear away by winning a scholarship to Oxford. It was astonishing. It astonished me more than anyone. It's that usual thing that can happen to anybody anywhere, having a brilliant teacher, a completely wonderful head of the English department, Mr Stedman Jones, who was quite severe but passionate about literature and had particular obsessions, Jacobean drama and Dr Johnson and things, and managed to infect me with his enthusiasms.

16:03And he would pick on a few people who he thought he could get into Oxford or Cambridge and give us extra teaching. and I thought afterwards looking at this idea it's probably because of my background he thought well from background like that she must be able to do this but after I wrote this book I had letters from other people that he'd picked on who came from totally working class backgrounds who he just picked out and said I think so and so can do this so it was very much his scholarship more than it was my scholarship it was his achievement but it was astonishing because they had written me off pretty much as being a hopeless case and in a very academic family that's quite difficult.

16:41I mean, my, you know, my grandfather, Arnold, was a professor. My great-grandfather, Gilbert Murray, was a professor. My two great-aunts, great-aunt Jocelyn and great-aunt, they were professors. One was a professor, one was a don. She was a professor of archaeology at Cambridge. So you are very surrounded by people who just take it for granted that your whole life is dedicated to hard academic work who have no sense of frivolity about them i can't imagine what sort of teenagers get up to if they're not studying greek and latin you write brilliantly about your feeling of imposter syndrome i mean that it must have all been a some kind of clerical error when you've got your scholarship and having to have they they kind of lionized you your very the very academic side of your family would come and take you out to lunch the two aunts you've mentioned before you went up as we say and you were kind of you kind of rose in their esteem didn't you because you'd been given this academic honor absolutely i mean of all of their many grandchildren great-grandchildren um i was possibly the least likely one to end up with an oxford scholarship and i was astonished myself but also quite sort of embarrassed because i knew it wasn't really quite that sort of serious person and i would disappoint them and sure enough I did.

18:00Because you left after 18 months or something. I was very miserable. After a year and a half I left Oxford and now I think about it as such a wicked thing to have done, to have been offered the best possible education with the most privileged way of being a scholar and to simply walk away is disgracefully spoiled. It was part of, I think, part of that self-confidence that somehow or another you're going to land on your feet you're going to find something to do, you'll do something I mean I wrote a novel before I went up to Oxford so my first term at Oxford my novel came out and that probably gave me a certain presumption So you were already published by the time you got to Oxford I was, it wasn't a good book but it was published So did you have sort of an early form of celebrity as an undergraduate Yes and it was very toxic because people kind of hated you for it, of course.

18:59What were you doing? How dare you publish a book before you've even arrived in Oxford? And so endless nasty pieces in Charwell and Isis and things like that. And I think that was part of the reason I hated it so much. I rather withdrew from the place. I felt quite persecuted, I think. And so I spent less and less time there, more and more time on a farm in Wales. We all have routines. I'm Jabron, and with diabetes, mine was finger sticks. Sometimes, I skipped them because it hurt. The Freestyle Libre 3CGM changed that. It gives me glucose insights without finger sticks. Learn more at freestyllibre.us.

19:39Finger sticks are required if your glucose alarms or readings do not match symptoms, or when you see check blood glucose symbol for the first 12 hours. The views expressed should not be used for medical diagnosis or treatment as a substitute for professional medical advice. Individual circumstances may vary. For prescription only. safety info found at freestyellibre.us Are we allowed to mention the odd lack of serendipity that meant or serendipity that meant that you are not my aunt if you see what I mean. I think we both would have been very unhappy if I'd been your aunt. I don't think it would have suces.

20:10Because you walked out with my uncle Edmund and this is a passage in the book that was serialized in The Guardian. We don't really have to go into it but you did. I'm so young. I was 16 So before you got... We were both very, very young. Before Oxford. This was pre-Oxford. You got pregnant by my Uncle Edmund and you went to see my mother, Charlotte, who had her first child, my brother Alexander, later known as Boris, and you took one look at the squalling, chubby, blonde, red-faced infant and you thought, I am definitely not going to go through with this. Absolutely. And then I'd already pretty much decided, but you know he was a school he looks exactly like he look now actually great sort of fat pink thing with the shock of blonde hair but also he's looking at his mother's life looking at your mother who I admired enormously and thinking she got a pretty hard life looking after a baby while struggling through Oxford it looked miserable and I thought that's not for me definitely um you know she never complained and she sat finals pregnant nine months pregnant with me eight months pregnant with me extraordinary extraordinary and she was wonderful in lots of ways and i really i really liked and admired she's also a very good painter well i she would have been delighted by that review in in your wonderful book polly so thank you on her behalf for that i heard that recognition well i'm glad i brought your aunt i bet you're glad i met so there we go polly i've always been terrified of you so it's just i mean it's kind of this is an encounter i didn't really expect to happen but i am very pleased it is so oxford you then left and you you threw yourself into a completely different way of being i you sort of took yourself out of your media you became a kind of manual laborer and you thought that you could combine that with writing that didn't go well did it it was an absurd idea I thought yeah I want to write my second novel I want to be a novelist and I must and I thought journalism was would be a terrible thing to do I'd done a little bit of writing for magazine once you've written a novel you tend to get asked to write some other things and I thought no no this will contaminate my wonderful novelist talents with journalism and so go off and work with your hands in the day to keep your mind free for higher thoughts and thinking about these great books you're going to write so I went and worked in a Tate and Lyle sugar factory which was unbelievably hard work totally exhausting and very quickly tells you silly middle-class girl why not many people work in factories end up writing wonderful novels.

22:53Well, of course, T.S. Eliot worked in a bank and wrote poetry. The bank's a bit easier than working in a sugar factory. Where you got a terrible skin condition, I seem to remember. Yes, and everybody got it there. It spread up all your arms and legs after you'd been there for a while, a sort of allergy to the sugar. And the other woman there said, oh, don't worry, it wears off after six months, your body gets used to it. But it was pretty horrible. Also, it was very heavy lifting. you had to lift four and six bags of sugar at a time very fast off a conveyor belt into boxes behind you so um and i worked for a while in a wimpy bar too and uh various other things and then i thought well nobody in their right mind would do these jobs and none of the people who work there would do their jobs voluntarily and um so i did some more journalism and writing and and got finally, I got offered a job on the standard.

23:54I didn't work there, but I did some stuff for them and then got a job on the Observer, just a temporary job filling in for someone who was away, which was amazingly good bit of luck. It's so difficult to talk, don't you find this, to talk to young people now who want to be journalists. And you probably as well just fell into it. you know it was anything I thought I could do you know you have to do a degree in it an MA in it do you have to pretty much I mean young people now I see once arriving the Guardian unbelievably skilled and professional and you know just wander in and somebody offers you a job it was a time of course when journalism was expanding vastly all of the newspapers suddenly had magazines and art sections and review sections and it was a great expanding time it was a good time to be looking to get into journalism what's one of the things the themes of your life your your as it were your working life seems to me to be work um the kind of underpaid undervalued work that keeps society going we saw that during the pandemic we had key workers and we realized who was doing the actual work and you've written you know books about it um and you've tried you've tried to live the life of a manual worker on a zero hours contract do you want to just give the our listeners a sense of the range of jobs you've done that have fed into your books like a working life and and the and the one on low pay i mean i was when i was at the observer i was on the news desk and quite often sent to do sort of industrial stories at a time of many strikes and things like that and I thought listen I don't know this world at all so I took time off so took a sabbatical took time off and went off and took a whole lot of jobs around the country really just to find out more so I worked in Lucas's car parts factory in Birmingham I worked in Lion's Cake factory I worked in a hospital as a ward orderly, which would now be a health care assistant.

26:02And a number of, I've joined the Women's Army for a bit. What's the Women's Army? I know. You could join. You could join as a taster and get out within six weeks. But when I got in there, they said, oh, no, you didn't read the small print. But it turned out you could. and so I did a number of these different things just to try and find out more about the world that I don't know about. I brought up in South Kensington, father lived in Suffolk, knew nothing about work itself but I think what's always really interested me is the nature of work and so I wanted to do ordinary jobs. I wasn't looking for worst possible jobs, looking for ordinary sort of minimum wage type jobs.

26:49Yeah, so they're£4.10 an hour when that was at the time you were that was the second book i did that was called let's just so people can race dramas and it was called hard work life in low pay britain that's the second one i did which was better than the first one i did i wrote that one when i was at the observer that came out the observer serialized it and it came out and then i went back and a lot of my working life i went on reporting on work on strikes on trade unions it was very much the stuff of newsrooms in those days. And then much later, much, much later, I thought, I'll go back and have a look and see what's changed.

27:30So over 30 years later, I went back and did it again. But this time, much more seriously, by then I'd been social affairs editor at the BBC, and I'd spent a lot of time reporting on social surveys and research. And I knew a hell of a lot more about sociology and an awful lot more about everything in general. So I took, I rented a flat on a council estate about 10 minutes away from where I lived in Clapham, which I could do because it was an estate I knew and where they were doing up a block and they could rent it to me, and took any jobs I could get at the minimum wage from the local job centre.

28:05This time I was much more scientific. I lived only on the money that I earned, because that's the only way you know actually what you can't do. You know, you can't go on the, you know, living in London, you can't go on the tube. Even buses seem a bit expensive. You never go to the movies. You can never go swimming. What you eat, even however careful you are, is incredibly dull. You can never drink alcohol. This is just ordinary, you're not starvation. you can pay your rent, you can pay your electricity, but it's a very, very basic way of life. And if you had children, it would be miserable because they would be looking in through the windows of shops and things, things that they couldn't have.

28:51And then when you're on your own as a grown-up, you put up with it. And also, it was only an experiment for me. I didn't for one minute toy with the idea of what it would be like to be poor. I was only adding up what you could actually live on. What it'd be like to be poor is something you and I would never know because it requires insecurity. What would it be like that if your child lost their school coach, you couldn't get another one? What would it be like if you lost your job and you were really stuck? What if it was like if you really couldn't think where the next meal was coming from? These are things that if you're born into a secure middle class background with lots of friends and lots of families and people who would pick you up at any time, you can't even imagine that state of insecurity.

29:41So I wasn't playing around with the idea of, ah, now I know. I was only literally doing it as a sort of mathematical exercise to tot up exactly. things that you wouldn't know like if you apply for a job you travel you travel across town you go to the interview then they send you back and say they want some more forms filling and take it back again all of every hour you spend doing that is hours you desperately need to be earning money and then they say come back again next week the difficulty of moving from one job to another so often when people are in quite rubbish jobs and you think they could do better you realise particularly if they've got children, the process, just the physical process, moving from one job to another is really difficult.

30:28So by doing it yourself, you learn things you wouldn't necessarily think to ask somebody just if you're interviewing them. Also, it's a catchier way to get to engage people with these things. You say, come with me on this journey, we'll go together. Look at what it feels like, what it looks like, how people treat you and try and imagine, as I'm trying to imagine what it would be like. Yeah. There was no accompanying documentary series, was there? I mean, that would have been wonderful because then you couldn't have been undercover, of course. No, it had to be undercover because I also had to not tell the people I was working with because otherwise they would have been compromised.

31:07Of course. You must tell the story of when you were a nursery nurse and you were pushing a child in a kind of crocodile in a pram and you've walked past a man you knew very well. and he looked at you and did a what happened then? Reminder It was an amazing bit of luck that of all the jobs around the place, suddenly a job turned up in the foreign office nursery that had just been opened. So I took this job and turned out you need, even in the foreign office, you need no qualifications to work in a nursery which is a bit alarming in itself and every day we used to take the children down Whitehall, through horse guards, out onto Green Park to play so one day we're going along and I have a double buggy and two kids attached to my wrist walking along and up the road sweeps a group of rather smart men all men and in the front one that I know really quite well and it is Peter Bandleson and I think oh god this is going to be so embarrassing what's he going to say to me what am I going to say to my colleagues this is all and he looks at He vaguely wonders if he might...

32:19I'm wearing my KinderQuest tabard and my uniform. And he looks away because it's completely impossible he could know such a person as me. He sweeps by. I wonder what he really felt. He thought probably discretion was the better part of valour at that moment. No, no, he definitely, definitely didn't recognise him. Did he recognise you? Definitely not. Oh, I'm very disappointed. He just got a sort of impression that he might know me, but then... Oh, I see. How could he know such a person? Okay, he couldn't have known a nursery nurse. God, we've got so much more to talk about. I mean, you were taken up by David Cameron in the sense that he loved something you said, which was that he loved one of your metaphors in your writing, society being a caravan crossing a desert where the people at the back can fall so far behind, they're no longer part of the tribe.

33:12And there are left behinds in society and we saw them roar when this country voted probably to leave the EU in 2016. And we're seeing them roaring now about mass immigration and the arrival of tens of thousands of illegals. I've just before we talk about that, your the baby you saw kicking on the mat, who is at the time a Tory MP, described you. You've you've you've hit out at him in the press and he's hit back. So when Cameron rather loved that expression about the left behind in the cavalcade, he stole it. He said, I'm not surprised. But he said, you incarnate all the nannying, high taxing, high spending school momminess of Blair's Britain.

34:07Polly is the high priestess of our paranoid, mollycoddled, risk averse, airbagged, booster seated culture of political correctness and elf and safety fascism. Well, the one thing Boris had was he could string words together like anything. And that's something a lot of good people always quote that. and I think, yeah, all right, I'll take that. That's okay. It's all right. I think it's quite flattering. Yes, I'll have that. I'm sure people have said worse things about you, Polly. Oh, much. Private Eye, for example. I mean, don't they have a whole column about you at one point? Yes, they did. No, they didn't.

34:39I think I was Polly Filler because I wrote a column of such vacuousness for the Mail on Sunday. Nobody could accuse you of writing a column of vacuousness. You've been described as the queen of leftist journalists. Only today I was listening to the BBC and the world that one described you as a left-wing influential. Do you think that's where you sit in the spectrum? No, I can't understand this at all. I think it's part of the BBC's paranoia that anybody who's not a conservative has to be carefully labelled as being left-wing. I mean, I'm a Starmerite. I'm a supporter of Starmer. I don't agree with everything he's done.