Laura Kuenssberg's Pay Attention: A BBC Veteran's Howl at British Politics

Laura Kuenssberg swore she would never write a book. Now the BBC's former political editor, turned presenter, has published Pay Attention, a muted but heartfelt howl of frustration aimed at politicians "who have looked like an absolute shower for a long time" — and, sotto voce, at voters she wishes would take things more seriously.

Kuenssberg has covered Westminster since the late noughties. That weight of experience anchors her central claim: the abnormal is becoming normalised in British politics. Once, she points out, a cross-party understanding kept politicians from inflaming racial tensions at sensitive times. Now masked men can roam Belfast seeking foreign-born people to burn from their homes — and Nigel Farage still says they should not be called far right.

The evidence she assembles is broad:

• The Greens, Tories and Reform all selected candidates for this year's council elections who had previously expressed startlingly flaky views.
• The rapid turnover of prime ministers over the last decade is, she argues, not normal.
• Nor was the behaviour causing it — from the boozy loucheness of Boris Johnson's Downing Street to Keir Starmer winning a whopping majority with no mandate, having never made a case for what he wanted to do.

This is a serious, earnest book, not a gossipy insider's tale. It focuses on failures of governance that have radicalised what Kuenssberg argues is not naturally a radical country. She describes a politics paralysed by fear, with MPs afraid to tell an angry public hard truths they will happily discuss with her once the camera stops running. Nobody she talks to, apparently, thinks government operates effectively or spends money well.

What does the book say about journalism?

Kuenssberg also turns her gaze on her own trade, which she shows struggling to hold politicians accountable amid shrinking attention spans and Trumpian resistance to scrutiny. She is notably sniffy about fluffy interviews that focus on a politician's colourful backstory rather than their policies.

She deconstructs Farage's techniques for dodging disliked questions: expressing total conviction even when he does not know the facts, turning questions back on the interviewer, and claiming persecution by the media when cornered. Corbyn adopted the same incendiary tactic, and Zack Polanski is beginning to use it — though Kuenssberg says Polanski at least has a "swagger and a bluntness" that means he will usually answer a straight question. When a politician lashes out at the mainstream media, she argues, pay extra attention to what they are actually doing: it is often a distraction.

Where did Farage's opening come from?

Kuenssberg identifies the weaknesses in mainstream politics that, she believes, created it. Ten years ago, she argues, it would have sounded "distressing and insane" to predict mass small boat crossings of the Channel. She traces the shift to eastern European migration in the 2000s, which some communities struggled to absorb, then the 2015 exodus of refugees from war-torn Syria and European leaders' impotence in what she calls a "massive migration crisis". Politicians reacted first too slowly, then too bombastically — promising to stop the boats and smash the gangs when that was not realistically possible.

Notably, this is one of the few moments she feels strongly enough to advance an actual argument, creating a discernible tension between her BBC duty of neutrality and a book's need to say something beyond the obvious. Some readers will be outraged she does not take a stronger stand against extremism; others will think she has outed herself as a centrist merely by noting that ideas now advanced by Reform and the Greens would once have been considered completely off the wall.

Kuenssberg knows better than most that you cannot win — though that does not mean it is not worth trying. Her book's quiet achievement is saying in plain English that British politics is neither normal nor healthy. Whether paying attention alone can bring sanity back is another question entirely.