W hen I was a boy, my parents used to listen to Any Questions? on the wireless, as we then called it. I would sit through the programme in a state of consummate boredom, aware that this was grown-up business, and that the chance of there being a car crash or a gunfight in it – apart from a metaphorical one – was non-existent. When I was a teenager, I would listen with a slightly larger understanding, though now with a kind of amazement that people could talk so fluently, know so much, argue so lucidly. A question would be proposed, answers would flow effortlessly from the panellists, applause would follow. Now, more than grown up, I sometimes watch Question Time on television with much the same appalled admiration. No one stops for breath, no one doubts. And most of all – I’ve come to realise – no one ever changes their mind, or has their mind changed. No panellist is ever convinced by another’s argument. No one ever says, “Oh, now I see, of course you’re right and I was wrong.” Opinions, whether expressed by a male or female panellist, are like virility symbols, not to be surrendered.
Some people are brought up in families where politics is openly and noisily discussed, and where tribalism is as deeply rooted as support for a football team. I grew up in the sort of quiet, middle-class English family in which politics, like religion and sex, was almost never mentioned. Not that my relatives didn’t have political views. My maternal grandmother, for instance, was a Methodist who morphed into a socialist, and then a communist, and then – most original of all, especially in leafy Buckinghamshire – one who supported the Chinese rather than the Russians when the great Sino-Soviet split happened. Meanwhile, my grandfather was resolutely Tory. When I went to stay with them, Grandma would sit in her chair – in the red corner – tut-tutting over her Daily Worker, which exposed the fiendish iniquities of capitalism, while my grandfather sat in his chair – in the blue corner – reading the Daily Express and tut-tutting over the fiendish threats of communism. But they never argued – a truce had long since been called. As for my parents: my mother was, as she liked to put it, “true blue”, while my father’s beliefs, as far as I could divine them, were more liberal. My brother used to be a theoretical anarchist “of the Godwin/Spooner/Kropotkin sort”, but tells me he hasn’t thought about politics for decades and hasn’t voted in England since 1970.
I was slow to become interested in politics. I used to think, “A plague on all your houses.” I believed that the personal life and the artistic life were far more important than politics. Well, I still do believe that, just as strongly. I’ve never joined a political party, and have only marched in political rallies twice. But I’ve never not voted, and while I don’t believe in making it compulsory, as in Australia, I think it’s a personal as well as a civic duty. Even if you’re voting against rather than for something.
During the 60 years I’ve had the franchise, I have voted, in local, parliamentary and European elections, for Labour, Conservative, Liberal, Liberal Democrats and Greens; also for the Women’s Equality Party. I never contemplated voting for the SDP. I was once tempted in a local election to vote for a candidate whose name appeared at the bottom of the list. This position had been achieved by changing their name to something beginning with Z, while the party he or she was standing for was called None of the Above. But even this display of jaundiced wit didn’t deflect me, and I voted for the usual suspects.
I haven’t always owned up about my voting. I worked for the New Statesman in the late 1970s on the books and arts pages, and for more than a year didn’t let on that in the previous general election I’d voted Liberal. When I finally confessed, my fellow staffers treated my obvious simple-mindedness with surprising indulgence.
But though I’ve voted for six different parties in my life – and some independent candidates in local elections – I don’t regard myself as having changed my mind. Or not much. It’s the parties that have changed, swerving this way and that, dodging for votes; I, the voter, have remained a man of principle. And I suspect many of us think this. We keep the faith; it’s the parties that are faithless, promiscuous, short-termist, shamelessly flexible of principle.
Some people, as they get older, become more conservative; over the years, among my friends and acquaintances, I’ve sometimes heard the familiar soft-shoe shuffle to the right. Those idealistic principles they had in their twenties have been rubbed away by exposure to the realities of life. Or they’ve now got more money than they did and want to protect it, and hand it on. Or they start hating young people’s principles because they are remarkably similar to the ones they had in their own youth, principles they now realise are foolish delusions. Or they simply don’t want any more change in their lives, thank you very much. The European referendum of 2016 offered a departure from this last notion. While three-quarters of young people voted to remain in the European Union, two-thirds of older people voted to leave – which would result in considerable change to their lives.
Then there’s the Never Again factor, which applies both to parties and their leaders. “No, I couldn’t possibly vote for…” and then fill in the name of the party leader, be it Tony Blair or Michael Howard or Nick Clegg. The single time I voted Conservative was when the two main parties were led respectively by Harold Wilson and Edward Heath. This would have been one of the two general elections of 1974. Heath, much mocked for his wooden manner, was a liberal, pro-European, unposh Tory. He was also the only prime minister to have fought in the Second World War, and had therefore witnessed the consequences of European schisms. Wilson, even by the standards of politics, seemed to me – and still does – less than scrupulous: deviously shifting his party this way and that for short-term advantage, anti- or pro-European according to his parliamentary needs. And so that time I favoured Heath’s Conservative Party. My single vote, powerful though it was, couldn’t alas prevent Wilson from securing victory.
Similarly, in 1997, when I voted for Tony Blair’s Labour Party, this was mainly because it was necessary to evict the Tories. I’d interviewed Blair for The New Yorker when he became leader of the party, and hadn’t found him at all left-wing. I expected him, if he came to power, to be a kind of decent Tory. My old friend Anthony Howard, former editor of the New Statesman, liked to refer to him as “Little Boy Blue”. And so he proved.
Am I saying that, despite all my zigzags, I have never changed my political mind? Well, sort of, yes. I’m not claiming this as a virtue, particularly. It may be stubbornness, or laziness. If John Maynard Keynes changed his mind when the facts changed, I find that facts and events tend to confirm in me what I already believe. But another thing has been going on in my lifetime: the centre ground of politics has moved to the right. Mrs Thatcher, once asked what her greatest success had been, replied, killingly, “Tony Blair”. Whereas there had previously been little pendulum swings to the left and then the right, as Labour and Conservatives swapped power, Mrs Thatcher rehung the whole clock at a different angle on the wall. And so, by staying still, someone of my political beliefs has found himself moving further to the left as the centre moved away from him. Whereas 40 or so years ago, I might have seemed a right-wing Labourite, or perhaps a left-wing Tory – or, indeed, the capital “L” Liberal that I sometimes was – now I probably sound like a Corbynista. Indeed, I continued to vote Labour under Corbyn’s leadership in the 2019 election, despite my dismay at his vapid performance during the European referendum. But that is one of the functions of politicians – to disappoint us.
The historian AJP Taylor, applying for a fellowship at Oxford, was asked an anxious question by one of the dons interviewing him. He had heard that Mr Taylor regrettably suffered from a dubious condition known as Strong Opinions: was this the case? Yes, Taylor confirmed, he did indeed have Strong Opinions, but it was all right, because they were Weakly Held. (And he got the job.) Some of us have strong opinions weakly held, others weak opinions strongly held. I’ve always assumed that liberals like me have moderate opinions, moderately held. But I’m not sure that’s any longer the case. In fact, the older I get, the more convinced I am that I do have Strong Opinions, and they are Strongly Held.
“Changing My Mind” by Julian Barnes is published by Notting Hill Editions
[See also: David Hockney writ large]
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This article appears in the 10 Apr 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Spring Special 2025