Al Murray on Brexit, the pub landlord's politics and why he could never vote for Jeremy Corbyn

al murray thank you for joining us to hear about your personality politics you're welcome so look i think it is fair to describe you as it not as someone coming from a very respectable upper middle class stock your descendants include ambassadors scottish aristocrats bishops your father was a colonel in the british army you went to boarding school and then oxford yeah so look you are establishing as an adolescent did you embrace all that impressive background or did you fight against it um i don't know if i did either to be honest i mean the the the the interesting thing is is i know more about my background really from from my wikipedia entry than any any conversation we ever had at breakfast or or at dinner um and i also sort of feel that my trajectory very much is downwardly mobile i'm heading in the right direction away from all these tops and aristocrats in my um in my background i mean no not really my father worked for he was a colonel in the army but he was he worked for british rail so he was a fa in the nationalized days so he was effectively a civil servant so i always sort of thought we were kind of a technocratic family really and that didn't feel like a thing to particularly um kick for or against you know and he worked for a nationalized industry so you know uh from the from the old days of consensus politics so i don't know i don't i don't know that i ever really gave it too much thought i mean i was at boarding school so i sort of preoccupied with the pecking order which is what what happens to people at boarding school actually you know that's why that's why i think people who've been at boarding school so many of them end up being in politics and uh so well suited to the vicious atmosphere because that's what being a boarding school's like i've i might have some passing experience for that yeah there you go so when did you first become aware of politics or politicians per se do you remember well i remember i remember margaret thatcher winning the election in uh 79 and our boarding house master at um at the boarding house i was in being delighted in it being you know we'd get the all the papers every day and i'd read them all and him being absolutely delighted so i have a memory of the of the of the winter of discontent as an actual political event rather than um say the you know the power cuts in the early 70s when i was much smaller so i remember i remember you know that was when i was 11 i think so remember that and then i very much remember the politics around the falklands and and thatcher and um that was sort of you know it felt like there was no avoiding it at the time it felt like like it was big stuff going on and then of course the minor strike um which uh i remember you know thinking in bedford what's he got to do with us really all this i don't i don't understand it and and it you know and actually nottinghamshire not being that far from bed for tuna actually actually being con actually contingent on our lives but um uh you know i mean i've never i inter i've always been aware of politics and you're very interested in it but i've always been loath to pick a side because um that's that way seems madness lies basically which which dovey brings me on to your first vote you did vote for the first time at some stage presumably yeah i would it would have been um it would have been the 87 election i guess yeah yeah do you remember 24 i think i do i i think i remember who i voted for um and it would have been it would have been at home in my parents village so mum and i probably walked up the village and went to the village hall and voted together i expect um but i don't but um it what i mean what one of the things i mean you know obviously we live in this social media age you suddenly look at how other people look at life and and when i see people going i've just been involved taking pictures themselves and going and then people saying i've just cast my first vote and they're all like um they're all sort of squishy about it i sort of think i i can't relate to that either i don't think you just do it you're meant to do it so just do it it doesn't it you know it's not like voting for the first time in afghanistan or something um uh it's it's routine in a part of your sort of boring civic duty i think so your background would suggest you'd have been a tory voter in 87 you see this is the problem my back my background might but you don't know the you know the conversations in my family and my my grandfather for instance um the ambassador of which you of which we spoke earlier he was very heavily involved in the in the second world war in the um intelligence efforts and black radio and all sorts of stuff and then became a ferocious cold warrior um but i think probably was a probably was an athlete labor man actually on reflection so we were very much in the bowel wave of that so i i don't i don't i don't know i'm i i mean i honestly i don't like telling people i vote anyway but i know i i know i didn't vote tori in 87 but um but i'm probably i'm fairly sure i probably didn't vote labor either i don't know i can't remember it's ancient history in a way not anything we can do nothing we can do about the result though is there not now so look you you went to university uh yeah pretty quickly you got into stand-up comedy yes yeah did politics play a big part of that was your stand-up comedy political no but the scene was the scene was uh drenched in politics and in actual fact um the first year we went up i remember um because i was the first year i went i went and just did some fringe stuff and so we had a sketch group was hung around them the main players who were the who were the oxford review at the time and the atmosphere um towards the oxford review and towards and cambridge in the footlights and people like that doing uh comedy up from the comedy circuit was nakedly hostile um uh that we were the gilded sons of privilege uh and and it was mainly sons there were a couple of daughters gilded children of privilege and we had absolutely no place um being part of the edinburgh fringe and it was nakedly hostile towards us which i which i at the time found rather unfair because i i can see why but at the time i sort of thought well the idea is that we're just trying to be funny we're not trying to we're not trying to jump the cue or anything although you could argue we had you know we were given the opportunities by going to oxford to go to the fringe we were but i i found it all i found the sort of didacticism of of that political comedy at the time a bit of a turn off because um it assumed you weren't thinking for yourself and uh and involved a lot of preaching to the choir and i've never really i've never really liked that i've always sort of taken the view that an audience is bright enough to think for itself and rather than telling them what to think maybe you ask them to think about things but not what to think and that there was that was very much a tone at the time in stand-up and and then some people some people came along a couple of you know around about the same time as well who weren't interested in that and who were interested basically being daft um which is farm appeals to me far more because they weren't demanding your loyalty they were just asking you to find the world ridiculous which is far more my um feeling on things so it was a it was a there was a lot of politics around i mean it was you know it was when you could it was when people were saying thatch thatch exactly ben elton's thatch and all that and i remember ben elton had a routine and this really annoyed me at the time and it stayed with me this formative experience better what elton had a routine about traveling on british rail and how terrible it was and how you couldn't get a seat and he had that double seat double seat gotta get a double seat routine you get then he ended that routine we don't blame the workers blame the management is what he said and i thought well my dad's management at br and they're having a terrible time with under investment from central government because one of the problems with the nationalised railways you just turned into another budget to cut and i thought it was terribly unfair that ben elton was slinging such mud at my father to make a to make a point that was actually about how he hadn't got a seat on a train because he got on the train too late you know that he'd everything was grist to this mill and i didn't like that and i thought you know because it and then a couple years later was the leaves on the line thing i remember a boring writing meeting went well actually the root the problem with the leaves on the line is the new light rolling stock i used to get terribly hung up on the subject of the railway you're you're a details man your politics is the details thing sometimes yeah so pub landlord is obviously your most well-known creation it's what made you famous yes pablo arnold himself he's highly patriotic yep perhaps not overly educated uh he's funny but he's he's pretty simple i've never worked out whether you're taking the mickey out of that kind of person that kind of voter or it's an affectionate tribute or it's both which is it they're not mutually exclusive um uh i i i mean i i it's you know it's a thing i get asked about and it sometimes you get hold of me as an accusation you're punching down these people and or whatever these people are like and i don't i don't know that i am i mean obviously i'd say i'm not but i don't that's not certainly not the intention and um uh uh the thing i mean the thing is is the act has mutated as the times have mutated but but he's not changed as much as the times have and what's been quite interesting is that the characters remain roughly stable but because the times have changed he carries on bumping up against them so there's the comic friction offered by changing times that goes with having quite a set idea with a with a comic character but yeah i mean i i always think that people who are sort of confident themselves can laugh at themselves and so in that sense it's not that um it's not that heavy a satiric blow on the on the on the person who might think like that or at least i don't think so i mean it's when people get twitchy about it go you shouldn't be saying like and it's the two wrong ends of the stick is the sort of left-wing end of it where you shouldn't be saying these terrible things because you're encouraging the wrong people you're like well no um it's obviously a satire and then the other people the other and going i could you shouldn't be i agree with you 100 thinking no it's obviously a setter so you know you never you never you never can't please everyone which is after all the first thing you learn as a comedian yeah how does the public vote he can't vote um because he's burned down and fa too many pubs and faked his death too many times okay well he did have a vote how did he vote oh um uh well he would vote he would always um vote for the like if there's an independent he'll vote for them there's like a sort of wacky independent vote i mean he thinks that he thinks that the tories are lefties he thinks that but he's also i mean there's a slice of him he's the very old labor because after all you know old labor born out of the post-war consensus was it was british jobs for british workers and all those all those sort of quite old things that have maybe fed into the the sort of populist drift on the you know in in the in in in ukip and things like that so i mean he he's he's a he's a mishmash i always think he's he you you wouldn't want to pin him down too much because he he'd agree with surprising things i think if you if you actually sat him down with a manifesto like a like a real person would you couldn't really stereotype him in other words like a lot of people like real people yeah yeah yeah yeah and you know because after all you know um you can have people who hold ostensibly right wing points of view like bringing back hanging with also br you know nationalize the railways which is an ostensibly left-wing view and and in fact actually these sort of pigeon holes don't um necessarily help these these gradations these left right gradations so look let's move on to both what you did and the pub landlord did yes this is a really interesting thing you actually ran for parliament didn't you yes in 2015 yeah against nigel farage in the suit of southampton somewhat famously and you stood for the free united kingdom party which of course yes fukp yes now i put it to you this was a straightforward satirization of nigel farage and ukip well yes it was but it was it was several things there were several arrows in the quiver for this one and one of the things was was the year before um it became quite clear that that comedy was drifting into sort of another another moment where it was going to become obsessed with politics so we had five years of the coalition and and we were coming to the end of that and you could tell that that maybe the liberals were going to get um you know ejector seated and that that was probably going to happen and you know because they'd lost they'd lost their vote haven't they basically with um thanks to clegg and student loans anyway and that year 2015 you had um russell brand coming out as political right and uh and his book and it was all taken terribly seriously and a lot of it i thought was plain straight hilarious laughable right um a lot of audiences oh entirely yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah why did you say that oh just because it was a lot of us preposterous but but that that suddenly it it picked on politics you need you know he's a he's an excellent reader of the zeitgeist he could see which way the wind was blowing so he he he went for that one completely understandable but it was more how seriously he was taken that was the thing that was laughable really um and he at one point in all that said there's no i don't vote there's no point voting voting never changed anything which is so clangingly obviously not true right evidentially provably untrue and we've seen especially since he said that we've seen that that's not the case you know with what three general elections a mat you know a referendum we just had another referendum where scotland you know we just had one where scotland very nearly did and uh it did change the state of the union anyway and i thought well i haven't got his kind of platform but what could what what's the sort of what what's the response to this that i can make i think people should vote right but i don't wanna no one's gonna listen to me going oh i think people should vote in a po-faced way or al murray responds to russell brown so i thought i'll do something that means that says vote something right in the in the upcoming election and i was sat in a pub in cambridge in and the show that year was all about politics and it's sort of in a reflection of what russell had been doing um and the and the moment and the friend i sat in the pub and a friend of mine said well you know you they just announced the election on that long campaign and friend said you're going to have to run aren't you you're going to have to run he'd seen he'd literally come to the show seen the show said you're going to have to run on you and you're going to have to run in than it because if you're going to run you've got to run where ferrari's running because because then you're doing do the two things happen two things happen together you know encouraging people to do it and that's the place where you'll attract the most attention because after all there's some overlap and there at the bar on a bar mat i wrote down that you know oh we'll call it the fu k p well um uh we'll we're gonna break up the channel tunnel and i wrote my little 12 point manifesto and i and i rang my manager in the morning he's like what a brilliant idea and we formed a political party a couple of days later you know we did it all properly did all the forms we wore its skin you know and did it all properly and then and then off off we went and it did so it had that was his genesis but then obviously there's so much overlap between you know farage waving a pint around and being a man of the people and the pub lander waving a pint around and calling himself a man of the people that you know there's so much overlap and also the sort of irony that he went to a posh public school i went to posh public school in real life you know just the sort of all those ironies the two would are too too delicious to resist tom for someone who spent his whole career doing irony it was just the meat was too rich and then and so we would start running a campaign and then actually the business of political campaigning really became our subject matter rather than nigel because i thought the campaign in 2008 in 1915 was so much of it was so inane and bordered on inanity it was funny you know you'd have this thing where labour would go 10 000 new nurses if we win so we'd immediately reply 10 000 won if we win we've beaten you like the sort of humanity of the promises so we got quite that's the thing we got caught up in actually rather than rather than farage um because that was the more actually the sort of more more interesting day by day um subject matter as the campaign progressed so the result of that particular vote in south africa i believe you've got 318 votes which was which was more than the communist socialist and bnp parties at the time but a few less than uh craig mckinley and obviously larger flourish but yes yes i know i didn't get elected as an np he didn't your 318 votes may have contributed to that is that what you wanted to achieve did you want in some way to help get in the way of him becoming an mb no no no that was that was that was that was not it there was there wasn't there wasn't an intention at all to i mean uh to influence aside from taking part to influence of course the event so we didn't go i didn't go to hustings we didn't get involved in that because we weren't saying look we're going to save manston airport or or this is the wake up call westminster requires and we did one focus group where basically all anyone cared about was dog turds and um you know all they cared about was dogmas and and bins actually the punters when you got to talk to them which is the sort of truism about british politics or any politics is is that we have this weird thing where everyone votes nationally on things that are bothering them locally generally you know that strange extra position so you know the intention was the intention was to join in rather than uh derail take part of the democratic process and of course i got a lot of flak from it from from you know the the from fans of of farage mainly um you know you're you're trying to take votes off him well so is the tory guy and so is the labour guy says everyone you know like you know you shouldn't be doing this you're making a mockery of democracy i'm a comedian you know it's my job you know um it's not is it so fragile that me taking part will destroy it no you know and and the arguments offered against me doing it i thought were we were all from people and obviously all came from people who were on nigel's side of rajasthan question right you didn't have any labor or tory people going oh you shouldn't be doing this is disgusting so you know you you also see the seeds of the thing that's completely rampant now in our political discourse which is it's all right when our lot do it which is the which is the tone of all british politics at the moment and of course your reaction on the platform to family losing was one of those iconic moments of british electoral history that sort of mock surprise yeah and then clap you you gave him do you think that a year later then when farrage triumphed with the brexit vote he his side won that referendum do you think in a way he ended up having the last laugh well maybe maybe if if that's the if that's the the dynamic of me loving him i mean maybe had he won in fanet in uh 2015 uh cameron would have been able to say look you see you can only muster one mp for this leave the eu thing when you're not getting a referendum it won't happen so maybe you know there's lots of there's lots of uh uh possibilities there i mean i think he he definitely does seem to have he does seem to have had a last laugh i mean there's still plenty of laughing to be done about the the question of brexit anyway um i think um you know the idea that that referendum would settle once and for all the question of britain's member of the membership of the eu and dealing with the eu is is the is hilarious as a as a as a was it was a ludicrous success at the time it's becoming funnier and funny and funny that cameron could possibly think that's the case um you know because he thought he was going to win anyway didn't he thought that'll that'll settle it and it and he and obviously he muffed it but i mean maybe i mean i just sort of think we only have to look at the way it it it sort of pops up like the lost loch ness monster doesn't it the the the eu uh question the trade deal the deal will gonna have we're gonna have to there'll be deals they're gonna be deals forever we're gonna have decades of deals now what did you did you personally vote in the brexit referendum yeah yeah which side of all i'm not gonna tell you that's the point of personality politics yes but i but i but i think one of one of the one we have an actual problem in our politics these days is everyone parades their point of view i think that i think there's no shame in being a floating voter um in fact i think there's honoring being a floating voter i think there's honoring the secret ballot you know the secret ballot emerged for this precise reason so that you could so you couldn't be you couldn't be duffed up for your affiliation and also you're allowed to change your mind i mean after all that's the point of a general election is a chunk of the public changes its mind uh uh you know i mean if we had the if we had a if you you know you see the polling now where they go you know now people every people are people people about about leaving the eu and it looks like people think it's a bad idea now also what what happened doesn't it so your policies has changed though over the years i think well you certainly your allegiances change election to election yeah they do yeah they slide about um but i would you know i mean the the emergence in the last few years of the idea of being liberal and centrist as it were or consensus as some sort of um some sort of dirty word it's been that that's that i found that quite surprising and uh and and and possibly possibly because if i hold any point of view it's kind of kind of one in the middle because that after will afford to be the luxury of being a floating voters that you know i think michael caine a while ago said any conservative right of david cameron i i don't like the look of that and any any anyone left of tony blair i don't like look at that now i'd go i'd go wider but i said but i see what he means um uh and i i sort of um i don't know i mean i have if small l liberal instincts because after all they as far as i could tell from what the history i've read is they lead to the least trouble um they lead to the least division and they lead to the least uh mayhem um uh i think um i can't be certain of that but you know i don't know there any there's been any liberal pogroms in the last couple hundred years i can't think of any sure we're certainly being to get it out of you now though i'm very pleased to say let me ask you about another thing though because on the side on the other side of that sort of centrism i suppose uh you're also quite a proud military historian i think you read history at the university yeah documentaries and long-running podcasts about germany in the second world war yeah you have quite a fascination with military history yeah that makes you a little bit of a of a patriot and a militarist as well which is maybe something you've got in common with pub landlord um well he's interested in the second world war because he thinks it's uh britain is the plucky underdog that fought by itself and won the war and it's defeated the entire planet on its own yeah but is there a bit of that you share i think that's what i'm trying to get to well i think of course it's satire but there is a little bit in in you that is also him yeah i think well no we i think that's where i probably started um with my interest in the war as a kid you know growing up in the 70s um the second world war was pot was a positively glamorous part of british culture you know it was it was war films it was action man it was it's cult escape from colditz board games it was um battle comic um warlord commando there was a whole chunk of it for boys um no to and having said that i do know women who also that all rubbed off on them too the glamour of the raf of the battle of britain and all that and and that's how i pre came at the subject but um i'm i mean the the the endless fascination i have for the second world war and the sort of the basically you know that it's a mosaic of um stories and also the essential the test of uh uh character but not just of individuals but of institutions of countries of cultures of democracy that the sort of the you know in a lot of ways i mean when the pandemic started there was an awful lot of oh you know it's comparison to 1914 it's like it's our blitz and all this stuff all that sort of um hogwash really although we did it on the podcast we're like is this is is um is uh johnson churchill or is he chamberlain who is he you know is he is he the guy who's trying to you see the guy's trying to muddle through all the bloke the bloke who's going to fight this thing we you know we talked about that obviously because it was irresistible the comparison but the but the the interesting thing about this and you know the interesting thing about the second world war is when you can script three and a half million people through the army through an institution you find out an awful lot about society and so you as well as the sort of tales of daring do and the and the big moral questions that go with the conduct of the war you've got this thing where suddenly the uk as it was in the 40s was put on the microscope and we are living today with the consequences of the post-war settlement still and the political parties very much framing themselves in the terms of in terms of that political segment settlement you know and you can you can see the the two the two traditions which are hooked around each other the labour tradition which is that we've as to thank essentially to thank the nation we create the welfare health service and that's our great achievement and then you and then and then the tory thing which is that we did this by putting together because we're a special people and those those are very closely linked and i often think it's it's a little unfair when mark francois goes on the news and he goes my that was it you know you know gets into his um private corporal jones thing um about the eu and and tories are laughed at for being hung up on the second world war well labour's hung up on two years after it with the health service 1947 the health services to you know their their unquestionable moment the tory's unquestionable moment is churchill and the war well they're not that far they're not that far from one another if we're actually going to look at our political traditions and our cultures um so and the war delivers all of that the war offers us all of that stuff and also you can look if you want to look at the arguments about lockdown and masks and all that sort of stuff there are arguments like that in 1940 about blackout about rationing about the conduct of the war and there are throughout the war arguments like that rancorous arguments even though it's a time of national consensus in terms of effort just the same thing because essentially you know it's 80 years apart it's the same it's kind of the same country in lots and lots of ways for all the differences and that's fascinating i just find it absolutely fascinating okay look we've got to draw this to close pretty soon but before i i have to sign you up i have to give a uh my estimate of of of what you are we'll see that at the end of these personality parts yes of course yeah finally before we do that i just want to know i suspect you're not going to tell me how you voted in 2019 although your repeated usage liberal might give me a clue i tell you who i couldn't possibly vote for and that and and you know and we've we've seen it with the ehrc thing um uh i could i just couldn't go there because i couldn't i couldn't go talking about jeremy corbyn i couldn't go near it because because you know i marched with i marched with uh with with jewish people that the two times that they marched about about that because there were they had opportunities in the labour party to do something about the the scandal of anti-semitism and the sort of the this extraordinary movement of people to educate themselves into being anti-semites because they seem to think that's what was required of them it was amazing watching it happen yeah um so i couldn't i couldn't possibly go there and i was quite public about that um uh certainly a couple of years ago and it seemed to really be raging that scandal my last question before i saw me what would pod landlord if not our murray would pub landlord ever vote for kierstahler [Laughter] well i suppose um uh [Music] i don't know i think he probably he probably could you know if uh star marie opened some coal mines and uh you know declared war on france and if he doesn't well you know he's gonna have to think of something he's gonna have to pull something i mean the landlord doesn't trust lawyers anyway so you know he's he's got a he's got a he's got an uphill struggle okay our murray i'm gonna sum you up therefore as uh a patriotic but private liberal centrist floater how do you please i think i think that that pretty much sums up though of course the eternal problem with being a liberal is the liberal party we haven't got time for that and murray thank you so much for showing your personality parties i think we got there in the end i think we kind of did yeah but you never know i changed my mind like i'm like a weathervane though is the truth it's been great talking to you thanks for your time thanks tom pleasure

Channel: Times Radio

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Id: rsjGI9Uut4k

Length: 30min 4sec (1804 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 22 2020