Laura Kuenssberg's Book Exposes Uncomfortable Political Realities

Laura Kuenssberg's new book 'Pay Attention' arrives as readers seek insight from the veteran BBC journalist. The work chronicles her frustration with the normalization of extreme politics and governance failures, sparked by an unsettling personal encounter that made her reconsider a career of keeping counsel.

At a party conference, an unnamed minister invited Kuenssberg to his hotel room, where she expected to find him with an adviser. Instead, she found the minister sprawled on the bed with his shirt undone by several buttons and his partner also present. Kuenssberg swiftly finished her drink and left. Asked if she thought they were after a threesome, she told reporters: 'Well, maybe they were and maybe they weren’t. As I say, maybe they weren’t and I got it completely wrong. It was very uncomfortable.'

A career of handling hostile politics

Kuenssberg, the BBC's first woman political editor, kept her counsel for years amid vitriol. She rarely complained even when she needed security to do her job at a Labour party conference under Jeremy Corbyn or had to run the gauntlet of aggressive Brexit protesters outside parliament. She describes a politics paralysed by fear, with MPs afraid of telling an angry public hard truths. Keir Starmer secured a whopping great majority but no mandate, having never really made a case for what he actually wanted to do, she argues. Nobody she talks to thinks government operates effectively or spends money well. Kuenssberg said she has concerns about people's behaviour in Westminster and worries about young people being 'very vulnerable'.

Her book recalls other 'weird' or 'creepy' encounters, including a former minister who kissed her on the head every time he saw her. 'That was just weird. I never felt threatened. But it's just a strange thing to do,' she said. Someone else sent a 'really creepy text' complimenting her clothes on TV. Kuenssberg is clear on boundaries: 'I'm not friends with politicians. There are lots of politicians who are perfectly nice people, but I don't socialise with them.'

The state of modern British politics

Kuenssberg argues the current political climate is neither normal nor healthy. The rapid turnover of prime ministers over the last decade isn't normal. The boozy loucheness of Boris Johnson's Downing Street wasn't normal either. She traces a path to today's instability, starting with a wave of eastern European migration in the 2000s that some communities struggled to absorb, followed by the 2015 exodus of refugees from war-torn Syria. Ten years ago, it would have sounded distressing and insane to say there would soon be mass small boat crossings of the Channel, she notes. The reality of those crossings has changed alongside numbers of legal immigrants arriving and arrangements for housing them. Kuenssberg points to European leaders' apparent impotence in the face of what she calls a massive migration crisis. Politicians reacted first too slowly then too bombastically, promising to stop the boats and smash the gangs even when that wasn't realistically possible, fuelling the idea that immigration was beyond their control. She points out there was once a cross-party understanding not to inflame racial tensions at sensitive times, a norm that has eroded.

Media tactics and the Farage playbook

The book deconstructs the techniques used by figures like Nigel Farage to dodge scrutiny, noting a Trumpian resistance to questioning. Kuenssberg outlines the Farage playbook: express total conviction even when he doesn't know the facts, turn questions back on the interviewer, and claim persecution by the media when cornered. She observes that Zack Polanski of the Greens is beginning to use tactics similar to Corbyn and Farage, though she adds, 'at least Polanski has a swagger and a bluntness which means he'll usually answer a straight question.' When a politician lashes out at the mainstream media, she argues, pay extra attention to what they're actually doing: often it's a distraction tactic. This extends to figures like Farage saying masked men seeking to burn foreign-born people from their homes in Belfast shouldn't be called far right.

Why she finally decided to write

Laura Kuenssberg always swore she would never write a book. Her professional duty as a BBC journalist to remain politically neutral is in tension with the need for a book to say something beyond the bleeding obvious. Speaking about her decision, she said: 'I suppose over a period of months thinking about whether or not I was going to write a book, having put it off for years and years and years, it sort of occurred to me that we were reaching a moment where I think I needed to come up for air.' She cited the period after Brexit and the rise of social media as key. Some readers will be outraged she isn't taking a stronger stand against extremism, she acknowledges. Others will think she has outed herself as a moderate centrist merely by pointing out that ideas now advanced by both Reform and the Greens would once have been considered completely off the wall. The Greens, Tories and Reform all selected candidates for this year's council elections who had previously expressed startlingly flaky views. Kuenssberg is notably sniffy about fluffy interviews that focus on a politician's colourful backstory, not their policies. She knows you can't win, though that doesn't mean it isn't worth trying. It will take more than paying attention to bring sanity back, she suspects. But saying in plain English that politicians 'who have looked like an absolute shower for a long time' is an important part of holding the line.