It must still have been light out; he never would have done it

in the dark. I wasn’t born yet, the garden wasn’t any bigger:

still city sharecrop size. He’d have come home to see a khaki-

wearing, razor-domed intruder in his house; fatigues unworn

and military sharp. The bombs were going off in London

at the time; if not each week, regular enough. Paddy on the news

in coded warnings. In cars blown to smithereens. Now this:

after a whole day’s digging underneath the sun – hair beaded

to his head, another night’s sole-care-giving set to commence –

he finds this lickspit shithouse in his living room. At ease.

Before his dinner – so believe me, that means serious offence –

he dug a hole, ceded a square of precious acreage for the job.

He left one hand Lady-of-the-Laking in the soil: a warning

to my brother’s other toys, for sure, not to get ideas. No politics,

no Union Jacks. He’d put one little Brit below a clod of dirt,

had one inside in tears, his birthday spoil turned casualty of war.

Declan Ryan was born in Mayo, Ireland, and lives in London. A pamphlet of his poems was published in the Faber New Poets series in 2014. He co-edits the Days of Roses anthology series and is the poetry editor at Ambit.

Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity, released in the US exactly two years ago, proved that popular cinema could be adult in its themes as well as thrilling in its execution. But originality can’t usually be converted into influence unless there is some commercial success involved. Had Gravity failed to take $700m worldwide, two new films by veteran directors – Ridley Scott’s The Martian and Robert Zemeckis’s The Walk– probably wouldn’t have gone into production. Studio executives, no less beloved of their talismans than any gambler, have now ring-fenced this chunk of the autumn schedule for sophisticated spectaculars. That’s how it will stay until something flops and the effects of Gravity are seen to have worn off.

The Martian and The Walk are opening superstitiously close to Gravity’s release date but the similarities don’t end there. Both are also in 3D and full of magical special effects; they revolve around death-defying solo missions in which there are no villains, only the prospect of failure (ie, death). But neither borrows Gravity’s boldest assets: 90 minutes of action and an on-screen cast of two.

In The Martian, Matt Damon plays the astronaut and botanist Mark Watney, left behind on Mars by colleagues who assume he has been killed in the violent storm that forces them to flee. He is now 140 million miles from home with only one year’s food supplies left. All means of communication with Nasa were blitzed in the storm. And wifi is notoriously spotty on Mars, don’t you find? (Doubling for the Red Planet, Wadi Rum in Jordan has a sultry barrenness.) But that’s no reason to get down in the mouth. The film follows Mark’s efforts to survive. To grow potatoes, he makes water by burning hydrazine rocket fuel, then harvests his own excrement and fills the entire base-camp with soil, transforming it into a strong contender for the next Turbine Hall installation at the Tate.

All the while, he is keeping a video diary in which he is sassy (“In your face, Neil Armstrong!”) as he outlines every step of his plan to make contact with Planet Earth. It’s almost as if he knows he’s a character in a movie. This is intercut with scenes of the Nasa team (led by Jeff Daniels) making its own calculations about budgets, resources and PR. Both sides of the picture have their own appeal but together they conspire against one another. What with all the fuss about him on earth, Mark never seems very alone. Without suspense, his experiments don’t get far beyond the level of an averagely engaging episode of Tomorrow’s World.

The detail in Drew Goddard’s screenplay, adapted from Andy Weir’s novel, is painstaking but only in selective ways. Each stage in the process of creating water is demonstrated, for instance, but there is no evidence at all of the parents Mark claims are waiting for him back home. We see other astronauts’ families. Could Mark be imagining his? If so, it could be a solitary sign of the deterioration that would surely take hold after facing extinction alone for so long.

Perhaps any film that makes Matt Damon the focus of so much time and energy is on a hiding to nothing. Though there’s still a trace of the amorality he displayed in The Talented Mr Ripley or Gus Van Sant’s Gerry (a far scarier film about being lost in inhospitable terrain), there isn’t much here to distinguish him from Buster Crabbe as Flash Gordon. That retrograde innocence reaches all corners of the movie, from the corny soundtrack choices (“Starman”, “I Will Survive”) to the anachronistic crowd scenes showing public places across the globe crammed with well-wishers, all of whom have rejected smartphones and snarky live-tweeting to follow Mark’s story on giant video screens instead.

Robert Zemeckis has already made one gripping film about isolation: that was Cast Away, starring Tom Hanks. In The Walk, he examines a different sort of solitude. If you’ve seen the documentary Man on Wire, you’ll know the story: Philippe Petit (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is a high-wire walker who resolves in 1974 to cross from the top of one of the towers of the newly opened World Trade Center to the other. (Why? Because he can.) The weakness of this dramatised version is its limited editorial voice: Philippe talks directly to camera and assumes all voice-over duties, so there’s no relief from his egotism. (The screenplay finds him a good deal more charming than we do.) Stripped of the intriguing flaws shown in Man on Wire– he no longer cheats on his girlfriend after completing the wire-walk – he is an oddly neutered sort of narcissist.

But the film has more than enough spectacle. Zemeckis, who made Back to the Future and Who Framed Roger Rabbit, is a peerless visual magician, adept at placing the camera in off-kilter places: inside a photograph of the World Trade Center, so that Philippe seems to be drawing his line between the towers on the very lens, or directly in the path of an arrow. (For once, the use of 3D is justified, as well as cheekily old-fashioned.) These are mere appetisers for the big coup: putting the camera up on the wire itself so that we can marvel at New York as dawn streaks the city pink and gold. The special effects and green screen technology are flawless, not least in the digital reconstruction of the twin towers. Any poignancy arising from seeing them in their gleaming infancy cannot be attributed to the film. It does itself proud all the same by letting the images speak for themselves. 

The Martian (12A) is directed by Ridley Scott and out now. The Walk (PG) is directed by Robert Zemeckis and out on 2 October

Simon Schama’s arms used to windmill wildly on screen, but in his fantastic new series his hands are most often to be found in his pockets. Why this should be is anyone’s guess: perhaps he tired of the stick he used to take about it. All the same, it seems to me a good thing. Nothing now stands in the way of my enjoyment of Face of Britain (Wednesdays, 9pm). Schama’s ability to structure, pace and deliver a televisual essay is unmatched by any other BBC historian. So, too, is his way with words, so succinct and yet slyly romantic. His passion for his subject is sincere, his curiosity contagious rather than effortfully cloying. I would be tempted to use the word “masterful” if it didn’t sound so stupidly grandiloquent.

I won’t ramble on here about how he dealt, in the first film (broadcast on BBC2 on 30 September), with such hoary subjects as the painted image of Elizabeth I, or the effect of photography on the relationship between Queen Victoria and her people. (Episode one was devoted to the relationship between portraiture and power.) His skill was demonstrated to perfection in the first ten minutes, during which he told the story of the portrait that was commissioned to celebrate the 80th birthday of Winston Churchill in 1954 – the same painting that was famously burned by Clementine Churchill just a few weeks after its very public unveiling.

In Churchill’s studio at Chartwell, his home in Kent, Schama held up a series of black-and-white stills of the prime minister, taken during his sittings with Graham Sutherland. You could, he said, call these pictures “war photography”. On one side was Churchill, the crumbling egotist, then recovering from a stroke. On the other was Sutherland, a superb painter who was quietly steaming. Sutherland’s subject had asked him whether he wanted the cherub or the bulldog, as if there were only two possible interpretations of his character, and perhaps in revenge for this insult Sutherland now decided to deliver not some visual blandishment, but the truth. He painted an obituary: a magnificent ruin, but a ruin all the same. Here was slackness, loss, a kind of absence. It was all a million miles from the white cliff of a lower lip Yousuf Karsh had caught beautifully in the dark days of the war.

The queasiness involved in this intimately gruelling situation – Schama’s voice was a veritable tremble of indignation – was underscored by film of the unveiling, broadcast on the BBC, but which I’d never seen before. Crikey. Sutherland, his hair Brylcreem’ed, and no doubt gasping for a fag, kept looking up to the heavens, knowing what was on its way. And then . . . it came. Without even looking in the painting’s direction, Churchill decreed it “a remarkable example of modern art”, cue much sycophantic laughter from his parliamentary colleagues. You could almost feel Sutherland’s discomfort: the prickling of his skin, the sweat that beaded his brow. And in that moment another obituary was born, this one for Sutherland’s portrait, which Schama, brandishing the sole remaining transparency of it, rightly described as one of the greatest, up there with Holbein’s Henry VIII. What a loss. What Schama calls “our nation’s family album” is much the poorer for Clemmie’s incendiary barbarism.

Come another week, come another whimsical autobiographical comedy set in the Seventies. First it was Lenny Henry, then it was Danny Baker, and now here is Emma Kennedy with her version. It’s unfathomable: is this stuff on a loop, or what? When I think of BBC bosses just lately, I picture them in retro clogs, passing round the pink wafers as they congratulate themselves on their latest commission. But the good news is that The Kennedys (Fridays, BBC1, 9.30pm) – we’re in a new town, where everything is futuristic and lovely and the dustbin men are apparently yet to go on strike – is miles better than Baker’s effort. Plus, it stars Katherine Parkinson (The IT Crowd) as her aspirational mother, Brenda. I love Parkinson to death. Thanks to her, I didn’t just tolerate the dinner-party-and-lasagne gags. Sometimes I smiled at them, too.

Monday: Sahaviriya Steel Industries (SSI) announces it will mothball the steelworks in Redcar, resulting in the direct loss of 1,700 jobs. As a result of the low price of steel, SSI will cease producing steel on Teesside, although Andy McDonald, the MP for Middlesbrough, estimates that job losses could be as high as 9,000 once the impact is felt along the steelworks' supply chain, with contractors and suppliers on course to be hit hard.

Wednesday: The government announces a loan of £45m – to Evraz, a steel-making and mining company owned by Roman Abramovich, the Russian oligarch. It has operations in the Ukraine, Canada, the United States, and Russia. 

Why isn't the government stepping in to rescue jobs in Redcar? Government subsidy of the steel industry is tightly regulated by the European Union because overproduction of steel by heavily-subsidised national champions, resulting in crashes in the price – has been a persistent problem within the European economy. (That's also why closing down Trident manufacturing in Barrow and replacing it with alternative, well-paying work, is not as easy as it often sounds – the government has more leeway to subsidise jobs for defence than it does industries that compete on the global market, which is why the three unions who represent its workers remain opposed to scrapping the submarine.) 

However, other European governments have persistently found ways round these regulations, with the Italian government heavily subsidising its steel industry under the guise of funding "environmental protection". And as David Cameron's choice to use the international aid budget to rehouse refugees here in Britain shows, the British government isn't opposed to fiddling the rules when it suits. It comes back to the central problem of the government's industrial policy: they have a plan to mortgage increasingly large chunks of Britain to China. They don't have a plan to retain the top academics or to maintain British industrial capacity.

“Genitalia is hilarious,” says Miss Cairo, a 23-year-old drag performer who, moments ago, was proudly displaying hers on stage at Soho Theatre. “Male, female and everywhere in between – it’s all funny to look at.”

Full frontal nudity (especially of the “everywhere in between” variety, but I’ll get to that later), readings from the radical feminist "SCUM Manifesto" and a slapstick reenactment of the shooting of Andy Warhol all feature in Jonny Woo’s Transformer, a draggy and druggy homage to Lou Reed’s most revered album. Cairo plays the part of Candy Darling, the transgender actress and member of Andy Warhol’s inner circle referred to in Walk on the Wild Side (she “never lost her head, even when she was giving head” – that one). Woo, queen of the east London drag scene, steps out of a dress and into tight jeans and a curly black wig to play Reed.

“Oh my god, it’s so liberating,” he says of his temporary break from drag, “I have so much fun being a straight man.” Woo quickly corrects himself – Reed, of course, wasn’t straight, as such. But the playing a man thing still stands. In preparation for his role, Woo researched the Velvet Underground frontman and, through interviews and recorded live performances, built up a picture of a slightly awkward oddball, who was probably a lot of fun (around people he liked, at least. Reed famously gave journalists an extremely hard time).

“He wasn’t a performer who exuded sex appeal,” says Woo, who goes on to talk about the teenage Reed’s treatment with electroshock therapy (rumoured to be for homosexuality, although that was recently denied by his sister) followed by a string of turbulent relationships with both women and men.

Woo, 42, born Jonathan Wooster, began devising a theatrical cover album after Lou Reed’s death in 2013. The show premiered last year and, this year, ran at Edinburgh Fringe, before returning to London in September.

“I’ve always been fascinated by the variety of the songs on the album,” says Woo, who first listened to Transformer as a 19-year-old drama student and was immediately drawn to the cabaret-like sound and tragicomic lyrics of tracks like Make Up and Goodnight Ladies. But, more than anything, in his ode to the album, he was keen to capture the spirit of a time and a place – New York in the early Seventies, in and around legendary nightclub and music venue Max’s Kansas City – in which, as he puts it, “people would make music, get shitfaced and run about”.

Arty and debauched Warhol-era New York isn’t a far cry from Woo’s own experience of the city, when he moved over there from London in the early 2000s. Under both the wing of drag veteran Lavinia Co-op and the influence of drugs (quite a lot of them, apparently), he began exploring drag and performing in burlesque shows.

“This underground culture and this exploration of the boundaries of gender always exists,” says Woo, when asked about the current (seeming) resurgence of queer visibility. From the heyday of old school gender benders like Lou Reed and David Bowie, to the present day and, say, RuPaul’s Drag Race, masculinity and femininity have always been fair game performance-wise, argues Woo. All that’s really changed, from decade to decade, has been the drugs.

In his Transformer, Woo, accompanied by a live band and backup singers including Miss Cairo, combines music with a fittingly disjointed spoken word narrative to tell the story of Reed and his queer rocker posse. Between songs, Woo’s Reed tells anecdotes (including one about why ballpoint pens probably shouldn’t be used to snort coke) taken directly from High on Rebellion, a collection of true stories centred around Max’s Kansas City.

At one point, Reed is interrupted by radical feminist Valarie Solanas, who reads an extract from her treatise to the evil of the male sex, the SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men) Manifesto. She then simulates shooting Warhol, also played by Woo (who does a swift wig swap) with a banana – a reference to the cover of the Velvet Underground’s debut album, designed by Warhol.

“We’ve got Candy Darling representing queer rights,” says Woo. “So we thought it was really important to get a feminist perspective in too.”

He explains that he was keen to create a sense of the political atmosphere in the US, contemporary to Transformer, which was released in 1972. Plus, he argues, Solanas made some salient points in the SCUM Manifesto. The line, “Women don’t have penis envy; men have pussy envy,” certainly got a cheer from the audience.

When Reed’s Transformer was released, it was declared “artsyfartsy kind of homo stuff”, by Nick Tosches in Rolling Stone. Woo, in his drag-infused interpretation of the album, seems to have taken this ostensibly negative review and proved that it was, in fact, a compliment.

While the show explores the issues of women’s and LGBT rights, Woo is very aware that, as it stands, it’s lacking in any reference to race (something which was a fairly big deal in the US circa ’72). He says that he’s keen to add in some references to Bob Marley and how he, in Max’s Kansas City, introduced New York to reggae.

Another Max’s Kansas City reference, it turns out, is Miss Cairo’s strip routine, which is based on a performance concocted by Warhol Superstar Andrea Feldman, in which someone would yell, “Showtime,” and she’d promptly get naked.

“I picked Cairo to do the show because of her singing voice,” says Woo. “But also because she has a very natural drag look. She’s not overly-contoured, she’s not overly-drag; she looks feminine.” Woo explains that this look, which is far more ambiguous gender-wise than the heavier and more clownish makeup worn by most drag queens, is very much “of that time”.

Cairo, who identifies as trans, is however, a very modern drag artist. She’s smart, thoughtful and fiercely political, which is something she’s keen to demonstrate when she performs.

“I want people to be comfortable with their bodies,” she says. “I used to like getting naked just to shock people. But, with my drag, because I’m aesthetically what’s in demand in terms of femininity, I can play around with that.”

Essentially, Cairo is pretty. When she strips, not everyone in the audience is expecting to see a penis (which she artfully tucks between her legs).

“I can be sexy on stage,” she says, “but I can also be throwing my dick around.”

“The stripping is good because it’s confrontational, exciting and erotic all at the same time,” adds Woo.

Confrontation, in fact, is often key to Woo’s stage persona. But, especially as London is losing so many LGBT venues, I wonder if he finds himself toning it down when performing to predominantly straight audiences.

“In Edinburgh I did,” he says. “I really tried to please people and it didn’t work. I tried to alter what I was doing. I wanted to get the big cheer and I wanted to be accepted, but I came away frustrated. In London, I’m a bit more fuckoff-ish, because that’s kind of what people are coming for. But the Edinburgh audience was essentially very straight, white, middle-aged and middle-class.”

But the straightness of the audience certainly didn’t stop Cairo from taking her clothes off. And, by the sound of it, the chunk of the audience consisting of “old rockers” weren’t at all bothered.

“We had a lot of hardcore Bowie and Reed fans turn up to the Edinburgh shows,” says Woo, “and a lot of them would come up to us after the show and tell us that we’d got it spot-on. Then some of them would tell us the story of the first time they saw Lou Reed live. The older people are the ones who really got into it.”

But what about Soho Theatre, which, in spite of its location, is not an LGBT venue? Woo tells me that they’ve been hosting drag shows there for many years.

“I’ve actually developed most of my stuff in non gay-specific venues,” he says, “as have a lot of queer performance artists.”

What’s more, Woo explains that the recent spate of LGBT venue closures isn’t at all new.

“When I came back from New York in 2003, about ten or 12 gay venues in East London had closed down,” he says. “Gentrification is the word people use, but that’s always been around. I think overdevelopment is what’s happening now.”

Woo responded to the most recent string of venue closures by opening a drag bar, The Glory, which he co-owns with his partner, in Haggerston, East London. That’s certainly one way of doing it. Even so, is drag being pushed out of queer pubs and clubs, and into the mainstream? Cairo seems to think so.

“I think it’s amazing that drag has entered the mainstream,” she says. “ It’s beautiful that we’re becoming more accepting as a society. But I also feel that, bringing it into the mainstream, maybe we’re losing sight of why drag is important.”

For Cairo, drag is meant to be political: “It fucks with stereotypes and it messes about with society’s perception of masculinity and femininity.”

Drag queens regularly come under attack by feminists who are offended by their (often quite grotesque) portrayal of women. They’re also called out by some members of the trans community, for parodying trans women. Cairo can see why these accusations are leveled at her and her fellow performers, but for her neither of these things are at all what drag is about.

“I think the gay scene is inherently misogynistic,” she says. “But I don’t see drag as misogynistic, as I think it’s just another form of identification. Drag looks at masculinity more than it does femininity.”

Cairo explains that she often experiences misogyny from within the gay community herself.

“I don’t shave my legs or armpits, she says. “I’m part Arab, and I get really bad ingrowing hairs. I’m tired of having to remind people that women don’t have to shave. Sometimes I have other queens tell me – ‘you’d be really pretty if you shaved.’ They’re subscribing to the ideal of femininity, and that’s not what drag is about for me. I’m a feminist through and through.”

Plus, unlike the majority of drag queens, Cairo identifies as trans herself. And gender fluid. And queer.

“There’s so much terminology now, it’s so wanky and pretentious,” she jokes.

 “The word ‘blackface’ has been directed at drag performers,” says Woo. “Drag queens are accused of mocking trans women and I think sometimes there’s truth in that.”

Woo feels that we need to examine why the idea of a man in a dress is inherently funny. I ask Woo and Cairo how, if at all, increased trans visibility has affected drag. Woo says that it’s made him more thoughtful in terms of how he conducts himself onstage. The word “tranny”, for example, is something he’s more cautious about using.

Cairo, who would never use the word “tranny”, says, “the problem is, within our community it’s all fine, and it’s all coming from a place of love. But when it enters the mainstream, people who are against what we do use it as ammunition”.

“You have to remember,” she adds, "everything you do on stage affects someone in some capacity.”

At the end of the show, while still on stage, Cairo takes a puff from her inhaler, then casually places it between her butt cheeks, for safe keeping. Makes sense. The buttcrack: the pocket of the nude, right?

But I wonder – within the context of this culture of offence – if there’s an asthma sufferer out there somewhere who would’ve seen this as an act of reckless disregard for pneumonic inflammation disorders. Then again, as an ex-asthmatic myself, I can honestly say that I’ve never seen anyone make an inhaler look so punk.

Semi-finals were BBC One’s dish of the day in last night’s episode of the Great British Bake Off. Just when we thought the show couldn’t produce any more food porn, they did a WHOLE SHOW dedicated to chocolate. To clarify, that meant chocolate tarts with a chocolate filling and chocolate pastry and chocolate toppings, chocolate soufflé with chocolate crème pat, and chocolate centrepieces with white chocolate features and chocolate biscuits. Rather puts my chocolate digestives to shame. Unfortunately, Flora was sent home after producing beautiful pieces without the right taste. But she did give us one more blast of her catchphrase before leaving: “I’m just making my macarons!”

Chocolate fantasies aside, the GBBO semis were the final affirmation needed to prove that Nadiya is without a doubt the finest contestant in this year’s fling of the competition. It’s not just that she made a blue peacock and pearly eggs and walked home with Star Baker for the third time. In Nadiya we find a baker who embodies everything that is wonderful about Bake Off. She’s clever, interesting, bold, funny and dedicated, and doesn’t even realise her own brilliance.

The first time Nadiya won Star Baker, she said: “My kids are going to be really proud and my husband is going to be so proud. And it’s weird because I’m never proud of myself. But I’m actually really proud of myself.” She melted my cold poor heart as she realised for the first time, she was a special lady. When she won the title again in the Quarter Finals, she said: “I’m so excited I could streak down this river.” After every disaster she comes back fighting. After her fortune cookie box cracked she returned the next week with a curry filled orange bread snake. When her vol-au-vents rolled over, she brought extra flare to her Victorian week creations. And when she almost decided soufflé was enough to make her “NEVER BAKE AGAIN”, she decided to make a blue peacock out of chocolate and rice crispies.

This week she told Radio Times: “Originally, I was a bit nervous that perhaps people would look at me, a Muslim in a headscarf, and wonder if I could bake… just because I’m not a stereotypical British person, it doesn’t mean that I am not into bunting, cake and tea.” I never really know what “British values” refers to when bandied around by politicians or on the Britain First Facebook page, but hazarding a guess I’d say kind, talented, humble and hardworking Nadiya possesses them.

So whether or not she wins next week is sort of irrelevant. Over her time in the tent Nadiya’s confidence levels have soared; and she has slowly started to believe in her talent as much as the rest of the British nation. Surely this, and not chocolate, is what GBBO is all about.

Now listen to the NS's pop culture podcast about the Great British Bake Off:

By day five on the new “cool guitar rock radio station X, FM” (aka Radio Geezer), it was clear that the breakfast show host, Chris Moyles (weekdays, 6.30am to 10am), has settled thoroughly into middlebrow white indie, delivering no nasty shocks, positively tender compared to his days on Radio 1 (1997 to 2012) where, as the shows and years progressed, he would toy with his gimpy co-hosts like someone pulling shrapnel from luckless limbs.

The 41-year-old presenter’s keynote now appears to be reasonable – biddable, even. Repetitive rather than rude. “I have a bottle of Jack Daniel’s in my drawer,” he remarked, “unopened. I don’t drink whiskey. Contrary to the laddish image that people still try and give me I don’t like being drunk. I mean, I really like the social aspect of drinking, I really like the sitting around and the catching up with mates, but I just don’t like being drunk! I’m good at finding the good weak lagers though . . .” Intriguing.

Where others find lager merely a fizzy chore, Moyles associates the enormous undertaking of that chore, socially, with politesse. “Some people frown on people who drink lager because it’s not the coolest drink to drink. There’s a snobbishness to lager drinking. I like a bit of Foster’s. Carling. Becks Vier. Frontier. Simon – who produces Johnny Vaughan – has three crates of it under his desk which he says is . . .” and on it went, like someone taking us minutely through the plot of something terribly old-fashioned and familiar, with lots of tedious ins and outs, as though this was Death on the Nile but instead of the Nile we got lager. Still, he sure sounds much nicer than he used to.

Meanwhile, over on Radio 3, for eight hours (27 September), something designed to be boring enough to sleep through wasn’t quite. An all-night première performance of Max Richter’s Sleep– the longest single continuous music broadcast ever made by the BBC – encouraged the audience to listen and snooze. Midnight: pretty strings; 2.38am: occasional singing; 6.40am: sonorous, pre-vespers organ and moments of silence, the radio equivalent of white noise emitting from a stress box. Perfect music for spas, I thought more than once. Next time you get your back pummelled, grimacing at the cost, expect to hear it. 

The misremembering of history interrupts these tales of my own squalid past. Very often I find myself wishing my memories were wrong, or that I’d forgotten more than I have. This would certainly be the case were I to be a politician, albeit a small-time one in big-time government. In the era of renunciations and sincere apologies, I would have to say sorry most of the time.

But I can’t. I can’t get past that clear day in May 1981, when the tangy cold spring air of a New York day got right inside me. Ambling home from another long, messy night in the Village, I was near 52nd when I saw people carrying a coffin.

“It’s not him, of course. It’s a fake coffin,” said a woman who saw the shock on my face. Maybe I was already crying. I knew and didn’t know but asked anyway.

“Yes. Bobby.”

Bobby Sands had died. Crowds were gathering with banners about Smashing Long Kesh and Smashing Thatcher.

The shock of it has never left me and God knows “martyrs” come two a penny now. Yet the idea that someone can starve themselves slowly to death for an idea is shocking. The idea that someone can let them do it, either “for” a United Ireland or “for” a United Kingdom, remains profoundly disturbing to me.

I need no lectures about what vile and murderous bastards the IRA were, or the numbers of innocents they killed. Nor about the smeary sentimentality of martyrdom itself. All I can say is that I had little idea of what “we” did in Ireland as long as I lived in England. A boy at school had run off to join the IRA. My mum said, “Well, he’s always been tapped, that one.”

We were kept ignorant. For some stupid reason, I did not think that Thatcher would let the hunger strikers die.

Their demands, remember, were the right not to wear prison uniform or to do prison work, rights to free association and education within the prison, one visit, one parcel, one letter a week. They wanted to be treated as political prisoners. Thatcher said Sands had no mandate. He was actually an MP, with more votes than she ever won in Finchley.

In New York that day, when we got to Third Avenue, there was anger and then solemnity. There were mumblings about what a death like that entailed . . . Mandela then instigated a hunger strike on Robben Island. There were protests in Milan and Ghent. French towns would name streets after Sands.

At that time, though, yes, we did talk about the occupation of Ireland. Now we have to pretend we didn’t and it’s all the jolly UK and thank you, England for the peace process.

So, must I unremember that day when I sat down on the pavement and wept over the long, slow suicide of a 27-year-old man? Let me know how to uncry all those tears shed for that terrible, terrible waste.

Blake Morrison

A Clockwork Orange
by Anthony Burgess (1962)

A Clockwork Orange had the sort of critical reception that innovative novels usually get – at best muted, at worst hostile. “A nasty little shocker” was one reviewer’s verdict. In truth, the ending is more nice than nasty, with the brutal Alex cured of his violence not by drugs or aversion therapy but simply by growing up. Until Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation, the novel remained little known. Its status as a cult classic is now assured. For its linguistic brilliance alone – the invention of a droog dialect called Nadsat – it deserves a retrospective Goldsmiths Prize.

Howard Jacobson

Women in Love by D H Lawrence (1920)

Women in Love is a novel that begins in the 19th-century domestic mode, with two East Midlands sisters discussing their chances of marital happiness, goes on to traverse a perilous European landscape that is at once actual and surreal, of the senses and of the mind, bending language and imagery to tasks never previously performed in the English novel, and ends up sounding notes that recall the desolation of Greek tragedy. More or less contemporaneous with James Joyce’s Ulysses, it is less formally radical but more emotionally daring.

Eimear McBride

In Night’s City by Dorothy Nelson (1982)

Despite an enthusiastic critical reception on publication, both the book and the author have undeservedly slipped from view. Filled with devoutly lyrical descriptions of unspeakable acts, this is a book for neither the lazy nor the faint of heart. But for readers who take pleasure in language that engages at the deepest level, its rewards are rich indeed. I hope it will have its time again.

Read: the 2015 Goldsmiths Prize shortlist

Jon McGregor

The Unfortunates by B S Johnson (1969)

Although this novel is known mostly for its format – individually bound chapters presented loose in a box, to be shuffled by the reader – its chief boldness lies in its evocation of the dislocation wreaked by grief; the way in which the narrator circles around the heart of the story, never quite sure in which order the pieces fall, is reflected as much in the prose style as in the unusual format. The Unfortunates also contains, in its portrayal of a sportswriter coming up with a match report on the hoof, one of the clearest accounts of the writing process I know.

Ali Smith

1982, Janine by Alasdair Gray (1984)

Life, End of by Christine Brooke-Rose (2006)

Alasdair Gray’s books have transformed the possibilities of the novel and 1982, Janine – about a man in a room for one night, up against the question of whether to live or not – is one of his most powerful, a perfecting of his combination of anarchy, politeness and lyricism, his philosophical understanding of the epic quotidian and his good-natured existentialism. It remakes the novel and it’s never going to not be a really unputdownable read.

The word “original” isn’t original enough for what Christine Brooke-Rose did with the form. She frees up the sentence by giving attention to (and by being playful with) its grammatical component parts, to such an extent that language becomes a nervous system and the book as physical an entity as you, me, or her – in this case, at the end of a life, when the body refuses all sorts of things and faces all sorts of discomforts. And the book does, too, with spirit, truthfulness and expansiveness of thought.

Will Eaves

The Inheritors by William Golding (1955)

Golding’s second novel was his favourite among his own works and time has vindicated his choice. Time is also the enemy of the book’s characters, a clan of Mother Earth-worshipping Neanderthals whose lives are cyclical; who share a kind of picture-language that resists explanation. They are defenceless against the pale, grey-eyed creatures, glimpsed between trees, who hunt and plan. Golding’s technical achievement – to suggest to us, in prose, the force and limit of minds that are poetic but not self-aware – is astonishing. In one scene, the young, isolated Lok catches an arrow fired towards him and knows it to be a gift. The Inheritors is some sort of relic cry for old ­humanity and is distressingly beautiful.

Paul Kingsnorth

Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban (1980)

If we accept Russell Hoban as a naturalised Englishman (he lived in London from 1969 until his death), Riddley Walker would be a shoo-in for a retrospective Goldsmiths Prize. Its dazzling reinvention of language only serves to emphasise the rottenness of the future world that its narrator inhabits: broken words for broken times. The sense of a past repeating itself ad infinitum runs through a book that remains, more than three decades later, unlike anything else.

Kirsty Gunn

An Episode of Sparrows
by Rumer Godden (1955)

An Episode of Sparrows is about class and change and London and growing plants from seeds. But more than anything, it is about its own making. So the words being written down are the same words that are being regarded and revised by the author; she experiences the story in the real time of our reading. She self-interrupts and cuts in on her characters’ speech. This may seem to be a traditional old-fashioned novel, but look within the paragraphs to see the gorgeous present-tense-ness of the writing.

Adam Thirlwell

At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O’Brien (1939)

There’s something about stagnation and a feeling that life is elsewhere that seems to lend itself to metafiction and O’Brien’s great novel of laziness is a masterpiece of inside-out structure. Delighted and destructive, it swaps styles the way a magician changes tricks. All other novels seem needlessly overweight afterwards.

Deborah Levy

Berg by Ann Quin (1964)

Quin was an avant-garde British writer. Berg was the novel in which she put to work, in a very British way, her homage to the nouveau roman novelists she admired – with the bonus of humour and a ventriloquist’s dummy that comes to a sticky end. Berg exported its Oedipal themes and new literary grammar to the seedy Brighton of the 1960s in a vision that Hitchcock would have relished.

Tim Parnell

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne (1759-67)

The Goldsmiths Prize launched in the tercentenary year of Sterne’s birth and the exuberantly inventive author of Tristram Shandy is one of its tutelary spirits. Written before the novel came to be narrowly associated with verisimilitude and linear anecdote, Tristram Shandy has a restlessness with conventions that points to the genre’s near-limitless possibilities. Tristram’s life and opinions stand in ironic contrast to the life-and-adventures formula of much mid-18^th-century fiction, but like the best anti-novels Sterne’s book is about much more than the debunking of literary clichés. For all their comedy, the “pitiful misadventures” of the novel’s “small HERO” have an integrity and pathos of their own and Tristram’s inability to tell the story of his life without making “fifty deviations from a straight line” is informed as much by a worldview as an unorthodox poetic of fiction. Just as the complexity of things is shown to be ill-explained by the systematic thinking beloved of Tristram’s father, Walter, so, the very structure of Tristram Shandy implies, linear, chronological narrative can’t do justice to what Sterne calls the “riddles and mysteries” of existence. Hence Tristram Shandy’s open, digressive form offers both an alternative to the inevitable reductions of plot and a foil to the tyranny of the will to system.

Jonathan Derbyshire

Confessions of an English Opium Eater by Thomas De Quincey (1821)

De Quincey’s Confessions is not a novel, of course, though its veracity as first-person reportage was questioned from the beginning. In any case, De Quincey’s primary aim was not so much to demonstrate the “specific power” of opium as to reflect on the “mechanism of the imagination” itself. To that end, he follows his “own humours” rather than any “regular narrative”, and in doing so opens vistas previously unglimpsed in English prose. As Virginia Woolf observed in her essay on De Quincey, sometimes we encounter writing from which “we all draw our pleasure from the words themselves,” without having to make a “voyage of discovery into the psychology of the writer.” The Confessions, whatever its author’s shortcomings as an autobiographer, offers such pleasures in abundance.

Lars Iyer

Concluding by Henry Green (1948)

My favourite books are curates’ eggs, one-offs that are utterly unthinkable without their very particular author. Such a book is Henry Green’s peculiar and beautiful and ironically titled Concluding, set in alternative present during a single day at a girls’ boarding school, after two pupils have disappeared. What happened to them is never revealed, even when one of them is found, but it seems that they sought to escape the strictures of their education at the hands of the sinister State. Nor do we learn of the outcome of the struggle between the State-aligned governesses, Miss Edge and Miss Baker, and the retired scientist, Mr Rock, whose presence in the school grounds they find so irksome. These, and other unresolved plotlines, are really only the occasion for the beguiling meanderings of Green’s novel, which pitches against bureaucratic conformism not only Rock’s old-world common sense, but also the pagan energies of the girls. I love Concluding for the glorious, syntax-straining sentences that flare out of nowhere, and are full of those same wild energies.

Tom Gatti

The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg (1824)

“What can this work be?” asks the “editor” at the end of The Private Memoirs. “Sure, you will say, it must be an allegory; or (as the writer calls it) a religious parable, showing the dreadful danger of self-righteousness? I cannot tell”. Hogg’s masterpiece is the story of a young man, Robert, whose strict Calvinist upbringing convinces him that he is predestined to salvation, and – through the mouthpiece of a shady companion, Gil-Martin – urges him to commit atrocities. Robert’s story is told twice: once, at some remove, by an editor, and by Robert himself, in an increasingly urgent and deranged manuscript. An unholy metafictional mash-up with multiple perspectives and registers, a deeply unsettling evocation of paranoia and psychosis, a book whose dual structure breeds assymetries and ambiguities, it pushed the novel forward and laid the ground for the most famous expression of the psychological double, Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Rejected by critics (who found it “uncouth and unpleasant”) and ignored by readers, Private Memoirs could have done with a Goldsmiths Prize to show Hogg that actually he might have been onto something after all.

Josh Cohen

Sartor Resartus by Thomas Carlyle (1836)

I’d award the prize to Thomas Carlyle’s only novel – one that should have a much larger place in English literary memory than it does. Anticipating Nabokov, Calvino and Perec’s playful experiments with narrative frames, it purports to be the introduction by an anxious editor to the German Idealist philosopher Diogenes Teufelsdröck’s (literally “Devil’s Shit”) epic treatise on the metaphysics of clothes. Layering fiction upon fiction, the novel performs Teufelsdröck’s central thesis, that the self is made out of its own disguises. Like Quixote and Shandy, it shows us the novel’s bottomless capacity to question and reinvent itself, a capacity that Victorian realism would soon eclipse. Carlyle himself would go on to achieve fame as a writer of history rather than fiction, but his novel reminds us just how surprising the form can be, and for that he deserves the prize.

Gabriel Josipovici

Jacob’s Roomby Virginia Woolf (1922)

Virginia Woolf’s father, Leslie Stephen, was the editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, that monument to Victorian values, providing readers with short lives of all the great and the good who had ever served Britain: soldiers, sailors, statesmen and bishops. To his daughter, in the aftermath of the First World War, such a publication seemed like an insult to all the nameless dead who lay, unsung, in the battlefields of France and Belgium. Like a challenge too. How to tell such a life, which is as worthwhile as any other but has nothing, as it were, to show for it – no honours, no medals, none of the outward signs of worldly success? Virginia Woolf rises beautifully to the challenge in this, the first of five remarkable novels which should have changed the face of British literature, but which, alas, form, rather, a unique archipelago in the largely conventional sea of 20^th-century English fiction. Jacob’s Room is full of cemeteries, tombstones and thoughts of the dead, but at its centre is an absence: Jacob, of whom people speak, of whom they think, but who is never shown. And yet that denial of presence on the part of the author makes of him one of the most living presences in world literature. It’s a remarkable achievement.

Francis Spufford

At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien (1939)

In which the wittiest modernist novelist invents metafiction several decades before Calvino and company come on the scene. “One beginning and one ending for a book is a thing I do not agree with,” says the nameless narrator, so he supplies three complete strands of narrative, ranging from a lovingly destructive parody of Irish mythology to a Joycean version of Dublin drinking culture. At first separate, the book’s three levels of reality leak, miscegenate, fuse and eventually conspire to overthrow their author. Elevator pitches for the book are easy to do – Ulysses as written by Groucho Marx! – but the truth is there’s nothing  like it, and its mixture of send-up and high seriousness was greeted at the time with bafflement. In retrospect it’s a brilliant forerunner of whole swathes of formal innovation.

Leo Robson

The Atrocity Exhibitionby J G Ballard (1970)

This book of definitions, “notes”, dreams, and vignettes now seems an obvious candidate for a retrospective Goldsmiths Prize. But I doubt it would have won at the time, not because of the possible competition – B S Johnson's House Mother Normal, Ann Quin’s Passages, and Muriel Spark's The Driver’s Seat were all published within a year on either side – but because it took Ballard a long while to gain the recognition as an innovator alongside those writers. Ballard didn’t write metafiction. He didn't quote Joyce. His language was flat. If The Atrocity Exhibition was cited, it was for its penultimate item, “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan”, and even that was cited for its irreverence. But “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan” wasn't just a ringing title and one-sentence punchline. It was a pair of sentences punctuated at irregular intervals by spry if poisonous reflections on Reagan's face, hair, “conceptual role”, the high incidence of orgasms in sexual fantasies involving Reagan, and experiments in which a replica of Reagan’s head were placed on the “unretouched photographs of crash fatalities.” The novel's previous item, “The Generations of America”, is a four-page list of assassinations and murders, phrased as a series of inverted begats. "Sirhan Sirhan shot Robert F. Kennedy... And James Early Ray shot Martin Luther King”, and so on into lesser-known territory. Read today, The Atrocity Exhibition is easily recognised as a descendant of Sterne and Swift and a source of inspiration to any novelist who knows in his or her bones that the novel’s freedoms, its capacity for freshness, were starkly limited by the growth, development, and imperial victories of the genre that called itself realism.

Philip Terry

Ulysses by James Joyce (1922)

Ulysses changed the stakes of the novel for ever, letting us see how extraordinary the everyday can be by plugging us straight into the minds of its characters, and using language in an electrifying way that only poets had dared to up till then.  And it changed the manner in which we think about structure and myth in novels in ways that still have repercussions today, not only in the novel itself, but in poetry, film and beyond.  As Faulkner (a man who generally didn’t think very highly of writers apart from himself and Shakespeare) said, Joyce was “electrocuted by the divine fire”.  Without Ulysses we wouldn’t have Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!,The Sound and the Fury or As I Lay Dying; we wouldn’t have Perec’s Life A User’s Manual; Walcott’s Omeros or the Coen brothers O Brother, Where Art Thou?  With the possible exception of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, it is the greatest single event in the history of the modern novel, and its influence is still far from exhausted.

The Goldsmiths Prize, in association with the New Statesman, announces its 2015 winner on 11 November

I read with interest Tom Copley’s piece on the offer that that we at the National Housing Federation are considering making to government on their manifesto commitment to extend Right to Buy to housing association tenants.  His is a voice worth listening to.  Since his election as a member of the London Assembly he has been a strong advocate for solving the capital’s housing crisis and he has regularly been at the forefront of London’s debate on the issue.

However, Tom has misrepresented the nature of our potential offer to government and in doing so has cast aspersions on the housing association movement as a whole.

Firstly, and to be completely clear, the offer is voluntary.  Our offer, if accepted by the government, will mean that housing associations will have discretion not to sell.  We offer a presumption in favour of sale in most circumstances but the final decision rests with the board.  With a statutory RTB, the decision is taken by the government.  The discounts that the government wishes to offer to tenants would in some circumstances be portable and the sector – all 1,100 of the associations we represent – would adapt and distribute the burden amongst themselves depending on their specific organisation’s priorities.  Some would sell many homes whilst others might sell few.  It is that flexibility which makes this offer much more suitable for housing associations.

Tom points out that the Conservative manifesto says the scheme will be paid for by the government requiring councils to sell off high value empty homes.  This would require legislation and can be challenged in Parliament.  We in the Federation have not endorsed this proposal and we don’t do so now. 

Tom goes on to accuse us of “collaborating” in a “shady deal” to avoid parliamentary scrutiny.  I will ignore the loaded implications of his language here and instead focus on the facts.  Housing associations are independent social businesses. The Conservative government won the election on a manifesto that included the extension of Right to Buy to housing associations.  We believe a statutory obligation to sell our homes would compromise the independence of housing associations and lead to a high risk that they are classified as public bodies.   Our offer would substantially reduce that risk.  The risk that housing associations might lose their ability to make their own decisions, determine the use of their own assets and own their own future is one I cannot take.  The consequences for our ability to build the homes we desperately need would be severe. 

Finally, Tom says agreeing to this deal would be an act of “self-interest not social conscience”.  To that I say – if it is self-interested to want to retain our independence, which has been fundamental in enabling us to secure £76 billion in private investment over the last 30 years, build 50,000 homes last year and provide five million men, women and children across the country with homes and security, then I plead self-interest.  But do not question the social conscience of the thousands of people we represent who work tirelessly every day to build and run those homes for those men, women and children who need them.

I understand the strong feelings on this issue.  I believe that we share with Tom a commitment to providing the new homes the nation needs. But I firmly and passionately believe that the offer hope to make to government safeguards housing associations’ businesses and social missions in the years and decades to come and allows us to deliver that ambition.

Had Johnny Marr not rung the 23-year-old Morrissey’s doorbell back in 1982, you can fairly easily see your way to an alternative future where Morrissey would now be publishing his tenth or twelfth novel. His first probably would have appeared blushingly around 1988, following the usual couple of stillbirths and abortions gurgling in the bottom drawers of the desk. Morrissey the novelist would have come good in the mid-1990s (novelists generally hitting their stride in their thirties) and we would now be dealing with “mature” Morrissey, the imperial phase.

However, as it stands, Morrissey the 56-year-old debut novelist (at that age Lawrence was dead, Wilde was dead, Nabokov had just published Lolita) is forced to appear on stage instantly and in full bloom. What, you may be wondering, is the emperor wearing? Absolutely nothing, it turns out.

I’ll try to summarise the plot for you. Four 20-year-old college boys – Ezra, Nails, Justy and Harri – are relay runners training for a big event. During a walk in the woods they are accosted by a tramp. After making a (five-page) long speech the tramp attempts to fondle Ezra’s testicles. Ezra kills him with a single punch. The boys hide the body and tell no one of the murder. Almost immediately Harri’s mother dies and Harri commits suicide. Following Harri’s wake Ezra is accosted not by the ghost of the tramp he murdered (which would at least have been within touching distance of logic) but by the ghost of the mother of a boy who was sexually abused and then murdered by the dean of the college they attend.

Ghost tells Ezra that she wants her son’s body properly buried. Ezra tells the others and the three boys (along with Ezra’s girlfriend, Eliza) dig up the child’s corpse to afford it the proper respect. Justy and Nails then visit the dean intending to beat a confession out of him. Instead the (septuagenarian) dean batters both (20-year-old) athletes to death with twin champagne ­bottles. (“How on earth could it have been so easy?” the dean reflects. Well exactly, the astonished reader wonders.) Ezra and Eliza are then involved in a car crash that leaves her dead and him in hospital, where as he dies he is (finally) visited by the spectre of the tramp he has killed.

All of this happens in 118 pages. As the author himself says in one of the few genuinely funny asides in this slim novella, “Edgar Allan Poe couldn’t concoct this.”

Along the way, for those looking for such things, there are insights into Morrissey’s relationship with the opposite sex: “A girl laughed at me when we were 13 and that widening mouth of laughter, as dumb and sterile as it was, the vicious disdain because I couldn’t measure up.” “The lust of the woman is at first childlike and desperate.” “Females as there they lay, under the male, with nothing to lose.” The terrifying coldness of that “female” and that “male”. As the psychiatrist in Fawlty Towers would have it, there’s enough material there for an entire conference.

Then there’s the vegetarianism. Every single character is a vegetarian. We get: “They blow up live pigs imagining them to be Muslims” from the murdered tramp. “You backslide like factory-farmed pigs . . . whose primal screams ignite no humane response from their human killers” comes from the athletics coach. (And doesn’t that sound just like a sports coach to you?) Meanwhile, the narrator ruminates on “pigs, like slaughterhouse bulls, cut into ribbons by the thrill-kill human race”, while “two billion loving animals a year are being butchered in concentration camps” comes from Eliza. “At this stage,” the narration points out, “it hardly mattered who was saying what.” Again – exactly.

In terms of actual prose analysis, there are single sentences containing no fewer than seven ham-fisted hyphenated conjunctions (“Side-swipe tear-ass anchor-weight knee-pumping dead-shot morgue-bound skull-bone”). Then there’s the alliteration. Dear God, there is the endless, arch, aimless alliteration. We are told of a “schoolboy soul”, of a place where “shafts of speed leave sparks”. A world where the “coach croaks” a “muttering mantra” filled with “muttonhead meaning” about “savage sport”. Fair enough over the course of a book – but all of these fall within a single page.

Much has been made in other reviews of how a decent editor might have saved this book, or helped it at any rate. In truth, this would be like asking a doctor to help a corpse that had fallen from the top of the Empire State Building. What a decent editor should have done would have been to drop the manuscript slowly from the slush pile into the wastepaper basket. What a decent friend should have done (and reading this, one wonders if Morrissey has any friends. Was there no literate adult around to say, “Ah, hang on a minute . . .”) would have been to tell him to leave this sorry, ­gurgling mess in the desk drawer and move on to the next thing, in the hope that maybe a decade later he would arrive at writing an actual novel.

List of the Lost confirms one thing powerfully: the enormous favour that Johnny Marr did the world when he rang that doorbell back in 1982.

“List of the Lost” by Morrissey is published by Penguin (118pp, £7.99)

John Niven’s books include “Kill Your Friends” (Windmill) and “The Sunshine Cruise Company” (William Heinemann)

The New Statesman's party has become an institution at Labour conference, kicking off proceedings with a healthy dose of intrigue, networking and (this year at least) great sunset views over the English channel. Sponsored by Hitachi, it featured a headline speech from Chuka Umunna, one of the "refuseniks" who declined to serve under Jeremy Corbyn in his shadow cabinet. "Unfortunately the shadow business secretary can’t be with us, so I’ve been asked to say a few words instead," he began.

Umunna also spoke emotionally about some of the tensions in the party between Corbyn supporters and the centrists. "I was very disturbed earlier at the Demos fringe which I was speaking at, to have a new member who joined the day after the general election and considered themselves to sit on one part of the Labour spectrum telling me that they feel they cannot say what they think about the future of the party, and how we should make our Labour values real for fear of being castigated and accused of being a Tory," he said. "We have to draw a line under that kind of behaviour in our party."

See below for a few selected pictures from the bash, which was attended by all wings of the party - and a few other familiar faces.

Copies of the New Statesman released before the Labour's conference

Recent issues of New Statesman analysing Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping

Leaflets advertising fringe events hosted by New Statesman

Drinks waiting to be served to guests

The Times's Tim Mongtomerie arriving at the party

New Statesman political editor George Eaton

New Statesman Staggers editor Stephen Bush chats to Lewis Iwu

Stephen Kinnock MP and LBC radio host Iain Dale

Eddie Izzard talking to Nick Pearce, who has just left the think-tank IPPR

Former Labour MP Jacqui Smith

Labour MPs Tristram Hunt and Simon Danczuk

BBC's Daily Politics reporter Adam Fleming

Former Labour MP Hazel Blears talks to Jacqui Smith

Eddie Izzard with shadow education secretary Lucy Powell

Labour MPs Wes Streeting (left) and Toby Perkins (centre)

BuzzFeed's political writers Jamie Ross (left) and Siraj Datoo (second right)

BBC's Daily Politics host Andrew Neil and Sun Westminster correspondent Harry Cole play up for the camera

Sonia Sodha, former political adviser for Ed Miliband and now leader writer at the Observer

New Statesman editor Jason Cowley with Labour's Liam Byrne 

Guests enjoying the party

Jess Brammar of BBC's Newsnight (centre) talks to Schools Week editor Laura McInerney (right) and reporter Freddie Whittaker

Labour's Tristram Hunt MP (centre) and Lord Glasman (right) talk to Nick Pearce

New Statesman's deputy editor Helen Lewis introduces the speakers

New Statesman's editor Jason Cowley

Hans Diems, group public affairs officer at Hitachi

Labour MP Chuka Umunna 

All photos are by Philip Hardman.

Jeremy Corbyn has headed to Scotland for his first post-conference visit. It is here that many of Corbyn's supporters are most confident that he can improve Labour's standing (the party has just one Scottish MP and is forecast to endure another landslide defeat to the SNP in next May's Holyrood election). Unlike Ed Miliband, Corbyn is an unambiguous socialist and shares many of the nationalists' distinctive stances: opposition to Trident, tuition fees and austerity (though the SNP's hostility to the latter was largely rhetorical). Corbyn is also an outsider in his party, free of the taint of the Labour establshment and the No campaign. 

Unsurprisingly, then, early polls have shown a small swing to Scottish Labour, with another finding that a third of SNP voters are more likely to vote for the party under Corbyn. But those who view the Labour leader as an easy panacea risk much disappointment. On the basis that divided parties never win elections, the SNP has immediately argued that Labour is incapable of defeating the Conservatives, making independence more necessary than ever. To rebut this claim, the party will need to gain significant ground south of the border. 

Corbyn failed in his first attempt to make Labour a pro-disarmament party and, owing to the opposition of most of his shadow cabinet and the trade unions (who hold 50 per cent of conference policy votes), he is unlikely to succeed in the future. He has conceded today that the party may enter the Scottish parliamentary election without a clear position - a gift to the SNP. Corbyn's campaign pledge to abolish tuition fees and restore student grants was barely mentioned at the conference, with shadow universities minister Gordon Marsden stating that the party's current position was merely under "review". 

But the Labour leader's biggest problem is quite simply that he is a Unionist. For an ever-greater number of Scottish voters, the independence question transcends all others and is the prism through which they view issues such as Trident. Perhaps most significantly, it is those on the far-left, Corbyn's natural audience, who were most disappointed by the referendum result (based on polling by the British Election Study). Whatever else the Labour leader can promise them, he cannot promise to change that outcome. The danger for his party remains that the SNP's hegemony has only just begun. 

Towards the end of his biography of Ted Hughes, Jonathan Bate quotes a passage from one of Hughes’s letters, addressed to his lifelong friend Leonard Baskin and his wife, Lisa. “Almost all art is an attempt by somebody unusually badly hit (but almost everybody is badly hit), who is also unusually ill-equipped to defend themselves internally against the wound, to improvise some sort of modus vivendi with their internal haemophilia, etc. In other words, all art is trying to become an anaesthetic and at the same time a healing session drawing up the magical electrics.”

The letter was written in 1984 and closes with the thought that he had “lived quite a lot of my last ten years (at least) somehow unconscious” – a victim of that self-induced anaesthesia. But then Hughes had been, as all the world knows, “unusually badly hit”. His life story is one of early success and blessed reward fatally blighted by tragedy, not once but over and over again.

“Tragedy” is a word used too casually and too often but it is hard to avoid when discussing the life of Ted Hughes. The suicide of his then wife, Sylvia Plath, in 1963 made him not famous but infamous, especially as he struggled to shepherd the work she had left behind into print. In 1969, his lover Assia Wevill killed herself, too, along with their daughter, Shura. These stories – particularly that of Hughes and Plath – have for decades been objects of fascination for a peanut-crunching crowd of people who otherwise wouldn’t concern themselves overmuch with poetry. Yet it is the poetry that lifts what should be merely gossip to a very much higher plane. The blazing gifts of these two writers allow an audience to tell itself (no peanut-crunchers, we!) that prurience might be renamed scholarship. It is our duty to stop and stare.

I’ve done some of that staring myself, though not so extensively as Jonathan Bate has done in his “unauthorised life”. “Magisterial” is generally a code word for “doorstopper” in review-speak and it must be allowed that Bate’s biography is the latter. But a magister is a teacher and Bate is certainly that: knighted just this year for his services to literary scholarship, he is an Oxford University academic and a biographer of Shakespeare and John Clare. (Full disclosure: he was a judge of the Man Booker Prize in 2014 and I was one of the other judges on that panel.) A fellow writer quails at the thought of the quantity of what Bate has sifted in archives at Emory University in Atlanta and at the British Library. The Emory archive alone occupies 92.5 linear feet – two and a quarter tonnes – of paper. Bate reckons that he has read 100,000 pages of manuscript.

But the “unauthorised” on the cover is there for a reason. Hughes’s publisher, Faber & Faber, had made clear after the poet’s death in 1998 that there would never be an “authorised biography” – his feelings towards biographers were not warm, given the way in which he had been assaulted by those who turned his and Plath’s story against him. Bate reprints a letter from Olwyn Hughes, Ted’s sister and literary gatekeeper, to Natasha Spender, in which she praises Spender’s attack on “vampire biographies”. But the publication of an edition of Hughes’s letters in 2007 gave Bate hope that the estate – controlled by Hughes’s widow, Carol – might be up for “a literary life”. To his surprise and delight, Carol agreed to this plan when he proposed it. Bate recalled in the Guardian last year, “I wrote in my notebook that Carol had expressed herself ‘totally happy with my idea of using the life to illuminate the work’.”

Yet apparently without warning, after Bate had spent four years immersing himself in his task (time in which he discovered a diary that even Ted’s sister didn’t know he had kept; time in which Carol provided him with photocopies of the material at Emory so his travel there could be reduced), the estate withdrew its co-operation. “No reason was given,” Bate wrote. The estate – through a solicitor – replied to Bate’s piece with a letter in the same newspaper, voicing concerns that Bate’s work had become more biographical than literary and claiming, “He repeatedly resisted all requests to see some of his work in progress, as agreed.” Faber cancelled Bate’s contract. The book, which then had to be substantially reworked, moved to HarperCollins and this is what we have before us.

Perhaps all the fuss is not surprising. To write a biography is always a problematic undertaking. As Janet Malcolm has written, the biographer at work “is like the professional burglar, breaking into a house, rifling through certain drawers that he has good reason to think contain the jewellery and money, and triumphantly bearing his loot away”. She writes of the “voyeurism and busybodyism that impel writers and readers of biography alike”, obscured by “an apparatus of scholarship designed to give the enterprise an appearance of banklike blandness and solidity”. All this is from The Silent Woman, her extraordinary examination of the nature of biography, specifically as it relates to Sylvia Plath. There are no clear answers in the question of how life and art intersect. Bate’s account of Hughes is certainly transfixed by the life.

But then there was a lot of life in the man. Over the course of more than 600 pages, the reader is reminded of Hughes’s extraordinary appetites, for art, for nature, for learning, for friendship and for women. He was born in the Calder Valley village of Mytholmroyd in 1930 and, in one sense, his life follows the classic postwar trajectory of a working-class boy made good. In 1941, following in the footsteps of his sister, he won a county scholarship to Mexborough Grammar and he was away; grammar school was, Bate writes, “the intellectual making of him”, as it was for so many others of his generation. Following a spell of national service, a Ministry of Education grant took him to Cambridge, where – after he had graduated and when she was a Fulbright scholar – he had his fateful meeting with Sylvia Plath.

The trajectory of this book follows their lives together, a partnership that continued beyond her death in 1963. It was not simply that Hughes was the keeper of the flame; Bate, through his archival research, is able to trace just how far back Hughes’s writings about Plath went. He shows, too, that Birthday Letters, the 1998 collection addressed to Hughes’s late wife, was but the tip of the iceberg. (I was involved in the poems’ first appearance, in the Times, where I was then the literary editor.) It is not just that a trickle of those poems had appeared elsewhere, long before Birthday Letters caused a sensation, but that the material in the British Library (“thousands of pages”, Bate writes) offers a complex view of Hughes’s attempts to resolve the way in which he would tell his and Sylvia’s story. Bate tracks Hughes’s obsession with his late wife back and forth through the poet’s life, as he was vilified by feminists and dragged through the courts – the book begins with a deposition that Hughes gave in Boston in 1986 when a woman called Jane Anderson sued over what she felt was a defamatory depiction of herself in the film of The Bell Jar.

Certainly there is scholarship in this book: Bate brings his deep understanding not only of Shakespeare but also his feeling for the natural world and how it connects to the world of literature when he discusses Hughes’s 1992 opus Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being. The book was ridiculed when it appeared. Bate resurrects it, arguing that it was ahead of its time in engaging with the religious and biographical elements of Shakespeare’s work. Yet the focus remains on Hughes’s life: “The spectacle of Hughes reading Shakespeare is less interesting than that of Shakespeare reading Hughes.” The book-length poem Gaudete (1977) is a hypnotic account of the mystical path taken by one Rev Nicholas Lumb; “a sexed-up Lawrentian Under Milk Wood with an epigraph of the Parzival myth”, as Bate puts it. Moving on, he homes in on the book’s epilogue, which more closely fits the “elegiac” autobiographical road along which he directs the reader.

Throughout, Bate has little sympathy with Hughes’s interest in matters of the ­occult, although this way of thinking seems to have driven both his work and his life. It seems glib to refer to his “sometimes bonkers ideas about astrology and the occult” and to use terms such as “mumbo-jumbo” in referring to traditions that fascinated Hughes. Yet Bate is very good on the troublesome Crow (1970): “The poems are always grasping towards some dark mystery of the inner life: the creative tension out of which they are born is the incompatibility between the speaker’s ostensible mentality and what Hughes calls ‘the hidden thing’ which fleetingly escapes.”

But the dark mystery recedes behind the busybodyism that Malcolm put her finger on (and I am complicit, having written about Hughes and Plath). There is no getting away from how Hughes’s powerful sexual magnetism got him into a lot of hot water. I met him only once, briefly, towards the end of his life, but I can attest to his extraordinary charisma. As Olwyn told Bate, “Ted’s problem, when it came to women, was that he didn’t want to hurt anybody and ended up hurting everybody.” The account of Hughes’s sex life can obscure as much as it illuminates the work, as Hughes goes from bed to bed. Bate dissects Hughes’s poem “Last Letter” – published in the New Statesman in 2010 – which revealed that Hughes had spent the night with another woman, Susan Alliston, on the night of his wife’s death. So he had been unfaithful to Plath with Assia Wevill; he was unfaithful to Assia Wevill, too, even while Plath was still alive. “His infidelity to others,” Bate writes, “was a form of fidelity to [Plath].” Or not.

Just occasionally, there is something almost a little envious in some of Bate’s writing about Hughes’s love life, as he follows him running from one woman to another. “After the end of his first marriage, never again would he let a woman possess the whole of him. Never again would he allow himself to be fully caged.” This assumes that the reader will agree that marriage necessitates possession; that marriage is, perforce, a cage. It seems to me that thinking in these binary terms is simplistic and diminishing. Did Hughes see it this way? Does Bate? It’s not quite clear. He appears to be uncritical of the startling “draft constitution” that Hughes presented to Assia Wevill, giving conditions for the continuance of their relationship (no cooking for Ted “except! in emergencies”); when Olwyn’s husband, Richard Thomas, presented her with what seems to have been similar demands, they are evidence of Thomas’s perfidy.

There is no way to know what this book would have been like if the co-operation of the Hughes estate had been secured. Bate’s use of Hughes’s words is now necessarily more limited than it would have been; it’s a good idea to read the biography with the Collected Poems by your side. Sometimes it seems as if Bate’s exhaustive detail (“Then he ate some foul food at the airport Lyons café and took a bus to Clapham . . .”) replaces colourful quotation that had to be excised. And the presence of Carol Hughes is recessive. She feels almost invisible and one wonders, too, if that is the result of Bate’s dealings with the estate.

The book’s conclusion is that Hughes’s obsession with Plath never faded. “He loved her until the day he died,” Bate writes on the final page. Are you surprised to read this? I was not. And yet the journey to get there is a long one. In 1965 Hughes wrote to the poet Richard Murphy just as Ariel was published, thanks to Hughes’s efforts: “What an insane chance, to have private family struggles turned into bestselling literature of despair and martyrdom, probably a permanent cultural treasure.” He was not wrong and this book is another monument to the martyrdom of both Hughes and Plath.

"Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life" by Jonathan Bate is published by William Collins (662pp, £30)

Erica Wagner’s “Ariel’s Gift: Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and the Story of ‘Birthday Letters’” is published by Faber & Faber

This week, we discuss the end of Labour's party conference (and the start of the Conservatives') and a new biography of Ted Hughes. (Helen Lewis, George Eaton, Stephen Bush, Tom Gatti, Erica Wagner).

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Zac Goldsmith has won the Conservative mayoral nomination with 70 per cent of the vote in the first round, setting up a clash with Labour's Sadiq Khan. 

Goldsmith praised his Tory predecessor, Boris Johnson, saying that "London now leads the world in business, tech, media, art and culture" after seven years of Johnson in City Hall, and described London's housing crisis as "the greatest challenge" facing the capital. "We will need a step change in the number of homes built, and the manner in which they are built." Johnson repaid the compliment, describing the Richmond MP as "fizzing with ideas".

Goldsmith polled 6,514 votes, against his nearest rival, the MEP Syed Kamall, with 1,488. Deputy mayor for policing and crime Stephen Greenhalgh polled 864 votes, while Andrew Boff, a member of the London Assembly, got 372 votes.  The low turnout will be a disappointment for the Conservatives. Of the five Labour contenders for mayor, all but Christian Wolmar, with 4729 votes, and Gareth Thomas, who polled 1,055 votes, got more votes in the first round than Goldsmith did in victory. Johnson, when he was selected, got 15,661 votes.

He will be remembered as the man who published a book accusing David Cameron of doing something unspeakable. But it is Lord Ashcroft’s post 2005 election report Smell The Coffee: A wake-up call for the Conservative Party which is worth revisiting now as we see the Labour Party battling over what it should be doing to shape its future over the coming years.

Much has been written about why elections are won and lost, but the central recommendations from “Smell the Coffee” stand up well for any party looking to win a general election. Most importantly, these conclusions were formed on the basis of making the party electable again, not pushing a right or left agenda

I have reframed each of them here for a more general audience:

1. A party must target their scarce resources at people who are more likely to vote in places which are more likely to decide elections.
2. A party must campaign hardest on the things that matter most to people, rather than things they hope can be made to matter.
3. There are number of parties competing for voters. It should never be assumed that one party’s unpopularity directly translates into support one other single party.
4. A party must not simply indulge the instincts of its core voters. The core is, by definition, not big enough to win an election on its own. By endorsing their views and tactics (e.g. classist, inverse-snobbery) too strongly a party risks alienating wider sections of the public that are needed for electoral success.
5. There are a number of different types of voters that must be brought together under the umbrella one party’s support. They are likely to have some diverging interests but it is the managing of your loyalists with the persuadables that is key to avoiding become an unelectable rump.

While these are general points for any party, they can easily be applied to the Labour Party today.  

On the first point it seems Jeremy Corbyn has not learnt from the mistake of his predecessor. His announcement at conference that Labour will be focussing on getting people on the electoral register will do little to increase the number of people voting Labour. It is a tactic that failed for Ed Miliband, despite a major drive to sign people up to the electoral roll. There is a strong pattern in history that those people who have not voted before are far less likely to vote in future. Not being on the electoral register is not the main barrier for them, a lack of political engagement and motivation are a bigger problem. Winning their vote requires significant more effort: getting them registered in the first place, then getting to the polling station and finally getting them to put their “X” beside your party.

Point five is as relevant to Labour as it ever was to the Conservatives. Labour must regain the election-winning coalition of traditional Labour voters, cosmopolitan urbanites, and aspirational commuters. The definitions of these groups can be debated, (both Liz Kendall and Andy Burnham can attest that the word “aspirational” has not aged well), but you cannot win elections with just one section of the electorate.

Leadership spanning the divide

In the febrile debate about the future of the Labour Party, it is easy to get caught up in tags of Blairism, Red Toryism or centrism. But the truth is that these rules have been followed by successful politicians of left, right, and centre. Most successful leaders of big parties must be centrists in the sense that they have to be adept at weighing up competing sets of ideas. Not every situation will call for a left- or a right-wing solution.

The problem with this pragmatic, big-tent centrism is that it is very hard indeed to keep all the people in the tent happy and productive. This is where leadership comes in.

A strong, successful leader will allow their party to hold onto their base but either personally come from the centre or have the air of competence that appeals to centrist voters, almost masking some of the less palatable wings of their party.

Tony Blair and David Cameron are recent examples of this strategy working. Both leaders – and Prime Ministers – are often described as not being natural members of their party. This is exactly the point. They could personally appeal to a new or different set of voters than the traditional wing of their party. The skill comes in successfully managing the party and not losing the appeal with a broader group of voters. Of course, winning always helps to keep otherwise disgruntled MPs happy.

Labour did not lose the 2015 election because it was too left-wing. Ed Miliband simply didn’t pass the credibility test.

It is interesting therefore to note Jeremy Corbyn’s own credibility ratings. While twice as many people think David Cameron would make a better Prime Minister than the Labour leader, this is almost exactly where Ed Miliband stood the day before the general election.

Corbyn’s challenge

Jeremy Corbyn’s first conference speech as Labour Leader seemed to be one very much aimed at those in the hall, those who voted for him in the leadership contest, those already onside.

The opportunity for Corbyn is to change the perception of Labour being a party of politicians grown in petri dishes in hermetically sealed laboratories. 

However, if we return to the five principles of an electorally successful party, Corbyn’s Labour must override the temptation to build a popular movement of the young and disenfranchised. Rather he should focus on those people who will actually turnout on election day and those in key marginal seats. They must resist the urge to talk about toffs and bankers and fat cats so as not to frighten off those they need to bring into the tent.

While his own personal politics may appeal to the left of British politics, that is not enough on its own to ultimately deliver success. As a leader he will need to ensure he and his party can straddle the divide between the left-wing base and a wider coalition of voters. Labour under Ed Miliband was already seen as the party that stands up to big business and fights for the little guy. That was not enough in 2015 and it is difficult to see how it will be enough in 2020. 

In my old bedroom, again. This is, at least, a matter of choice. Monday evenings and Tuesday mornings are now spent in the family home so that I can keep my father company and give my mother a chance to go to her choir practice, on Mondays, and her art class, on Tuesdays. (I suddenly asked myself today: what if my mother were rubbish at these things? She’s not, though – especially not at the singing, as anyone who saw her on Broadway or NBC back in the day can attest. As for her art, I couldn’t paint to her standard even if I applied myself to nothing else for years.)

Anyway: I find myself, after a 12-year hiatus, once again intimately concerned about a close family member’s capacity to eat, sleep, and move without injury, only this time the concern is directed towards the previous generation rather than the next one. That’s the way it goes, and from the way events are moving, it looks as though I will have only the briefest of respites from such cares until the close family member whom I worry about falling over, or worse, will be me.

And as if this temporal confusion were not enough, I now find myself once again in the room where I spent the years 1972-85, from childhood to young adulthood, learning how to leave the room. I didn’t have an unhappy childhood, apart from the unhappiness I brought to it. Which was considerable, and not so much from a gloomy nature as from the early realisation that anyone who thought things in the outside world were just dandy really wasn’t paying attention. The chafing, constantly under-entitled condition of childhood itself didn’t make things any better.

The old room has been repurposed now as a kind of art studio: but the thick blue curtains are still there, there is a sofa-bed in place of my own old bed (on which my youngest son now sleeps, perhaps absorbing its melancholy, like radon seeping from the rocks, while he sleeps), but it is in the same place; the little sink in the corner, into which I would piss and occasionally puke, is still there, but the taps have jammed solid. The mirror is still there, though, into which I would, as Nigel Molesworth put it, gaze at my strange unatural (sic) beauty, and ask what purpose it served.

For the main thing that bothered me in that room, from 1975 on, was of achieving, in the Freudian phrase, full genitality– or getting laid. Once this question arose, it became impossible to dislodge, and when I say I spent every hour of every day worried that I would somehow die before I lost my cherry, I do not mean I thought about it once an hour. No: I thought about it through all of every hour, of every day. And night. Even my dreams had only one subject.

Of course, it wasn’t just the brute urges of the body. The heart, or the soul, if you wish, yearned, too; and the idea of finding someone who could satisfy both carnal and spiritual selves seemed so perfect that it also seemed unattainable. So, to distract myself, I would read; and once I was tall enough to peer over a bar without standing on tiptoe, I would go to the local pub and have a couple of pints of Guinness, which would be enough to get my 14-year-old body sozzled. (How on earth did I manage that? I was small for my age and shaving was as remote a prospect as sex, but somehow I had the kind of bearing which convinced barmen that it was OK to serve me. I wonder if it is somehow my fault that there are now signs everywhere saying you’re going to be asked for proof of age if you look under 25. Twenty-five!)

So, in 2015, as I retrace the familiar steps and retire to bed, I look for reading matter. Most of my books are dispersed (quite a few of them in boxes in the loft above, creating ominous cracks in the ceiling beneath), but there are a few survivors; a P G Wodehouse or two, a set of Wisdens, much loved, from 1974-85. I pull out the 1974 edition and read of the promising young Somerset players Ian Botham and I V A Richards and their proud captain, Brian Close. I had forgotten he’d captained Somerset. (This was a week before his death.)

I turn the light off. The curtains in my old room shut out the light; in the Hovel it never gets dark, the street never wholly quiet. East Finchley, at night, is as silent as the grave. And the lines from Marvell pop into my head before I fall asleep. You know the ones? “The grave’s a fine and private place,/But none, I think, do there embrace.”