The world according to Iain Dale
How to say an awful lot and still say very little
Have I Said Too Much? Asks the title of Iain Dale’s new memoir. For a book whose first 100 pages concern growing up in Saffron Walden and frequenting gay saunas in Battersea, this is an unfortunate title. Yet faced with praise from the likes of David Cameron and Giles Brandreth, the common reader is bossed into persisting.
Dale, in their telling, is a political wit and bon viveur. An Oscar Wilde cum Walter Cronkite for a Britain that might have been had Brexit never happened and Cameronism reigned happy and glorious. “Be afraid, be very afraid” teases Sarah Vine on the front cover. But the only fright the reader gets from this bizarre self-composed hagiography is the realisation that, reading any further, one might simply lose the will to live.
Who is Iain Dale and why has he come to be famous? This is a question that seems to haunt the memoir and one that is never quite resolved. Dale is like a Forrest Gump for all the dreary sagas and careers that ran from the fall of Major to the rise of Cameron. He starts off by hosting A Night With Neil and Christine Hamilton. A book deal comes in the form of a compilation of Margaret Thatcher quotes. Soon he’s mixing with the brightest and best. He throws Martin Amis and Ian McEwan out of his political bookshop for smoking. He smells Tony Blair’s “stinkingly bad breath” and has his buttocks caressed by Mo Mowlam. One day, he wakes up and discovers that he is called upon as a political commentator.
Dale, like most broadcasters, writes how he presents: with the pomp and harangue of assumed authority. Readers soon find themselves trapped in the garish prison of an LBC studio, forced to listen to an entire life recounted via the inane patois of a Tripadvisor review. “Many people turned up early,” he remarks of his civil partnership and the most important day of his life, “which was good as it meant there was a chance to speak to everyone properly”. Countless episodes, from meeting Cliff Richard to the murder of Lee Rigby, are recounted with the same fastidious register. Readers are introduced to the latter murder outside Woolwich Barrack with the entire radio transcript that won Iain a SONY award for his troubles.
Flicking to escape this tedium, we stumble upon Trump (“I asked him about Scottish golf courses”), Boris Johnson (“he had it in him to be a great prime minister”) and depression (“mental health issues come in all shapes and sizes”). Dale’s opining shows no remorse. Some of the sentences, surely the dullest ever written in the service of memoir, are so tedious they take on a surreal fascination. “When I am in the studio, I have my laptop open in front of me,” we learn on page 286. “I love a breaking news story. The adrenaline flows.” By the time you have reached halfway, Dale’s command of language and syntax makes you question the written word’s very ability to convey human emotion.
Dale is a doyen of publishing, broadcasting and the Conservative Party. He has sold more than a million books. What does that make of the world that produced him? I don’t think Dale is a bad broadcaster or a bad person — he is merely a distillation of all that Middle England now represents. Dale Land stretches from Wimbledon to the High Weald and is a dreary, downward spiral of garden centres, ABBA concerts, hatred of Farage, bond market explanations, pompous sentimentality, grandiose moralising and unhinged eruptions. As Conrad said of Lord Jim: “he is one of us”, and in this country that this is not an endearing thing to say.
One of Dale’s most revealing moments came on Brighton Seafront, when he tackled a protesting pensioner to the ground for having disturbed his interview with Damian McBride. As Gareth Roberts has noted, this was a curiously graceful assault, one that could be “set to the 2nd movement of Gorecki’s 3rd symphony.” I think this is fundamental to understanding not just Dale and his audience, but the various notables of British media and politics who flock around him. There is a sense of a noble and contingent fury in service of the following sentiment: Why won’t you take me seriously anymore?
What really stands out most in Have I Said Too Much? is the sense of a paradise lost. Once upon time, Dale would be free to potter about provincial theatres indefinitely, dining out on anecdotes about Edwina Currie. But now this dreary slumber is awakening into something new entirely. There are villages in Oxfordshire who want to secede because of boat migrants. Boring on about fiscal responsibility and the conservative case for gay marriage makes you a dinosaur. This might explain why the book is totally anaemic when it comes to anything resembling political insight. Across the 400-plus pages, despite having led Britain’s conversation for nigh on a decade on LBC and interviewing seven of its prime ministers, there is not a single quote or piece of analysis worth mentioning.
Instead, the entire period is a groggy daze of live-on-air Theresa May Brexit mishaps and late night spats with Isabel Oakeshott. An entire, painful chapter is devoted to Dale’s misunderstood defence of Carol Thatcher’s use of the term “Golliwog” and the subsequent campaign to “destroy one of Britain’s leading bloggers.” The book’s main purpose is the usual apologia for mass broadcasting in the age of division, but this only serves to unintentionally draw back the curtain on the grubby machinations of British broadcasting: an inner-ring of gossiping, non sequiturs, petty vendettas, and the sense of being constantly being blindsided by the actual news.
The problem is not that Dale might have said enough; it’s that like most of his club he has never really said anything at all
Yet still Dale has listeners. Frequently they are evoked with solemn respect, like spirits of the dead, as if to justify this mammoth feat of career self-indulgence. Dale’s programme, he insists, has saved people from suicide, anal fissures and allowed them to talk about being sexually abused as a child. This is all nice and reassuring. But it also raises the question of what kind of society have we created, where someone called Dave finds himself confessing his suicidal thoughts while driving home on the M25 to Iain Dale?
We live in an age when people mourn the loss of mainstream broadcasting, and a time when politics was sensible and LBC was the voice of reason. But what did this world really ever produce to prop it up? The problem is not that Dale might have said enough; it’s that like most of his club he has never really said anything at all.
