Presidential Address delivered by Jonathan Coe at The Birmingham and Midland Institute on 26 February 2020.

I shall begin with a couple of apologies. First, apologies for the tardiness of this talk. By this I don’t mean that I think 6.30 is particularly late in the evening for this kind of thing. I mean that I am finally giving my Presidential Address at a time when my own year-long tenure as President has already expired. The fault is entirely mine, and I must ask forgiveness both from the Institute itself, and from its current President, Carl Chinn, whose term of office I’m now encroaching upon.

Secondly, I must apologise for the highly personal nature of much of this talk. I have thought long and hard, over the years, about the reasons I might have chosen the peculiar profession of novelist (I call it a profession – you can use the word vocation, if you prefer), and the only conclusion I can come to is that like many other people who go on to become scientists, or journalists, or political analysts, or historians, I’m driven to make sense of the world as best I can, but the only method that works for me is to personalise things, to tell stories, and to root everything in the subjective, in my own experience. An egocentric way of doing things, I admit, but all writers are egotists, even the shy ones. In fact sometimes they are the most egotistic of all.

And so even though I will, if everything goes according to plan, end up generalising, and trying to take a broader perspective at the end of this talk, I am going to use the bulk of it as an opportunity to reflect, in a highly personal way, on my early years in Birmingham and my early years as a writer. This will involve looking back on texts that I wrote when I was a teenager, and when I was in my early twenties, that have never been published, that I haven’t looked at for decades, and are currently in storage with the rest of my so-called archive. But in order to show that I’m not a total egomaniac I shall try to mention at least one other Birmingham-based writer as well.

Actually, in no sense can I call myself a Birmingham-based writer these days. I was born in the upstairs bedroom of a detached suburban house on the Lickey Hills – the same bedroom where my mother still sleeps every night, 58 years later. I lived in this house for 19 years, until I went to university in Cambridge. After that I spent three years in Coventry, then moved to London in 1986 and have lived there ever since. For years I resisted calling myself a Londoner but that’s undeniably what I’ve become.

The Lickey Hills stand at the very edge of the Birmingham conurbation, and during my childhood, my family’s gaze was always directed southwards, away from the city. We shopped in Bromsgrove and on Sundays we drove into Worcestershire, to walk on the Malverns or the Clent Hills, or to have picnics on Kempsey Common. For the first six years of my education I went to what was then Lickey County Primary and Middle School, where a wonderful teacher called John Devine taught me how to play the guitar and instilled in me a love of books, especially The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings by J R R Tolkien, whose descriptions of Mirkwood and Lothlorien were of course – although I didn’t realise this at the time – inspired by those same woods and glades on the Lickey Hills where my parents would often take me walking on weekend afternoons.

The atmosphere in my parental home at this time was conservative with both a small and a large C. My maternal grandparents – as I realised a few years later – were both socialists and Labour voters, and this put them on a collision course with my father who was a Tory through and through. But being totally ignorant of politics, and totally uninterested, I was blithely unaware of this for a long time.  At home we took both the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail, and the latter in particular had a strong effect on me, in that its most famous cartoon strip – Fred Bassett, ‘The Hound Who’s Almost Human’ – conveyed what seemed to me at the time a perfect example of what the middle class, suburban, English nuclear family should be like. With their regular trips to the golf course, and the husband’s weary but reliable return home from the unspecified ‘office’ at the same time every day, Fred’s surrogate ‘parents’ – for that was clearly what they were – seemed an absolute mirror image of my own.

I never quite understood why my parents decided that state secondary education was not the right thing for me. All I knew was that, at the age of ten, I was suddenly having to put in shifts after school at the unfamiliar house of a slightly frightening woman who lived further down our street, to receive extra private Maths tuition. This was in preparation, as it turned out, for the entrance exam to King Edward’s School in Edgbaston, an exam which I passed. The transformative effect of this event was two-fold. First of all, it set me on a path of educational privilege. Secondly, in geographical terms, it had the unexpected effect of separating me from my family in an important way: while they continued to look south towards Worcestershire (my brother by now was at a school in Droitwich) and almost never ventured into the city centre, I began to follow a different course. Every day I took the number 62 bus north into Birmingham itself, through Northfield and Selly Oak towards Edgbaston.

The bus route took me past the British Leyland factory in Longbridge: I would pass it every day at about eight o’clock in the morning, and watch in fascination as workers turned up in their hundreds and thousands and poured in through the factory gates. (None of my family actually worked there; many of them did work, instead, at that other great Birmingham employer, Cadbury’s in Bournville. Our closest connection with the Longbridge factory was that most of the car batteries my father helped to design for Lucas Industries in Shirley would end up there.)

That was my morning commute. Even more important, as I got older, was the fact that owing to the eccentricities of the timetabling arrangements at King Edward’s, on Wednesdays and Thursdays my lunch break would be more than an hour and a half long. Plenty of time to hop on a number 61, 62 or 63 bus into the town centre to visit the record shops: Virgin Records on Broad Street, Cyclops Records in Piccadilly Arcade, Reddington’s and the Diskery when I was feeling more adventurous and, later on when I was getting into classical music, Vincent’s Records in Needless Alley. If time allowed I would also make my way to John Madin’s wonderful brutalist construction, Birmingham Central Library, where the record section would also be my first port of call. Sometimes, if I could contrive a way of getting out of sport on a Wednesday afternoon, I’d take in a weekday matinee at the ABC Bristol Road. This was how I managed to watch Monty Python and the Holy Grail three times in its first week of release, and also caught up with what I believe to be Hammer Studios final production, and certainly one of the most horrific and disturbing films in their canon: namely, the feature film version of the TV sitcom Man About the House, of which I was a great devotee at the time.

Music and films were two of my passions. The third was books. Under the brilliant guidance of the second of my inspirational teachers, Tony Trott of KES, I was starting to read widely, and I was also continuing to write: for I had been producing book-length narratives ever since I was eight years old. While still at King Edward’s I had begun a would-be satirical novel which used the school itself as a microcosm for the country as a whole – rather in the way that Lindsay Anderson had done in his classic film If …. (Not that I had seen it or heard of it.) This sophomoric attempt was abandoned after about fifty pages, but it sowed the seeds for what would later become my novel The Rotters’ Club. And then, in the spring of 1980, in that strange interval between the so-called ‘seventh term’ (in which we had taken our Oxbridge entrance exams) and my going to Cambridge and leaving Birmingham behind a few months later, I started a book which I called The Sunset Bell.

I didn’t have the stomach to read it all again, in preparation for this talk: this Kingsley-Amis-esque novel about a lovelorn graduate who comes back to his home town of Birmingham, moves into a bedsit in Moseley, takes a job at an arts centre which seems to be a mash-up of the old Arts Lab and MAC in Cannon Hill Park. Suffice it to say that the twenty or so publishers who turned it down, angry though they made me at the time, made the right call. But here, anyway, are the opening paragraphs:

Up above me, lights were already on in many of the offices; all around, people crowded the damp pavements, sprayed regularly by queues of traffic, headlamps lit. It had been a short summer, most of which I had not been there to see. Nevertheless, I think I may take it as a tribute to my generally optimistic frame of mind that even in the apparently unrelenting ugliness of Birmingham on a thoroughly wet and unpleasant September day I could discern elements in the scene which struck me as interesting and in some ways uplifting. Perhaps it was just the sight of so many contented people – although I should point out that contentment was not evident in their facial expressions, or tones of voices. I saw it, or at least what I define as contentment, in the fact that everyone was so well occupied with his little task or objective: so many people, hurrying home to derive pleasure from their purchases (books or clothes or cakes being carried from shops in wet paper bags), and in an environment – even if they never realised it – of such security and well-being that the bad weather could be considered a grievous inconvenience. Or perhaps it was just that, as in any large, dirty city, there were always sights and images which might for some reason strike me as memorable and which gave the whole place a sense of richness – whether it was a particularly dark, narrow street dripping with rain, or an old tramp sitting morosely on one of the benches outside the Town Hall.

            If I had had time to stop and think, I might have begun to wonder why it was that I found any of this exciting; and if (but this is not very likely) I had been thorough or systematic about it, I might even then have reached the conclusion that, in all that I saw, I was looking for something that did not exist, something of my own imagining. I was sure that everywhere I looked I could see the romantic, the dramatic, passed over or unnoticed by everyone except myself. It struck me, for instance, that almost any of the prospects which the movement and atmosphere of city life afforded me that morning would have made an excellent beginning for a book.

            I was not left to savour these sensations for long, however, for my narrative begins with an unexpected incident: the sudden arrival of a hand on my shoulder, whereupon I turned to find myself facing a former acquaintance of mine whom at first I didn’t recognise.

            He said, ‘Hello, Bob,’ thus giving me enough time to remember both his face and his name and to check that they matched to my satisfaction.

            ‘Ian!’ I said, in a voice containing inflections of surprise and pleasure. He was an an old school friend for whom I had nursed no great affection, although this did not now, I was slightly interested to find, prevent me from being pleased to see him.

            ‘How are you?’

            ‘Fine. What are you doing these days?’

            ‘Still working for the bank.’ I didn’t know that he had been in the first place. ‘Look, do you want to come for a drink? We’re going to get soaked if we stay here much longer.’”

I could read more; but you might be relieved to hear that I won’t.

A few things leap out at me, however. The first is that this early, clumsy attempt to romanticise the city of Birmingham is the beginning of a project which has continued to preoccupy me, on and off, for the last forty years. In this passage, it has to be said, I’m not making a very good job of it. I call Birmingham a ‘dirty’ city and write about its ‘unrelenting ugliness’. Putting myself, as narrator, in the position of someone who is uniquely capable of finding beauty in this scene is really just a way of glorifying myself, both as spectator and writer. But the other aspect of this passage I find a bit more interesting: the collision between the narrator (who we will later discover has just graduated from Cambridge) and his old school friend who didn’t go to university but now works for a bank. The awkward but touching friendship between them (well, that’s how I wanted it to be seen, at least) will go on to form the main theme of the novel.

Of course, King Edward’s School was, and still is, an elitist institution, and it’s clear that I was aware of this from an early age. Another item that I found while trawling through my archive the other day was a copy of the King Edward’s School Chronicle from 1978. This annual publication used to showcase some of the most precocious writing from the sixth formers. In this issue I contribute a short article about The Closed Circle – a secret debating society consisting of only sixteen members, of which I had recently become secretary. In the article I write of the sense of privilege you felt when attending these meetings, using the phrase ‘the warm and unaccustomed cerebral glow which can only come from being a member of an elite’. A few years later I believe the society was banned by some of the more progressive staff members. But the memory of it stayed with me, and I named one of my novels after it. That book was a sequel to my earlier novel The Rotters’ Club, set at King William’s School, Birmingham, a very thinly-disguised version of King Edward’s, in which the society is discussed during a bus ride home from school. The left-wing shop steward’s son, Doug Anderton, declares that ‘The Closed Circle is a nasty, divisive bit of elitist bollocks … It’s like a bunch of school kids pretending to be the masons. It’s high time someone did a proper expose of the whole thing and showed these guys up for the self-important wankers they are.’ To which his friend’s little brother, an annoying boy called Paul a few years younger than Doug, asks ‘Have you been asked to join?’ When Doug admits that he hasn’t, Paul taunts him: ‘Well, there you are then, you’re only jealous. You don’t fool me, with all that guff about elites. If you’re not an elitist, what are you doing at this school? Elitism’s a good thing. It leads to competition and competition leads to excellence.’

Of course, in an age of populism, such as the one we are living through at the moment, ‘elite’ becomes one of the most contested words in the language. Everybody is against the elites but nobody can agree who they are. Jeremy Corbyn, with his radical plans for ending austerity, was seen as elite by much of the electorate, while Boris Johnson, with his old Etonian background, was not. The cartoonist Matt’s recently drew a post-election cartoon in the Daily Telegraph (of all places) showing a car driving north and passing a sign which reads, ‘You are now entering Grimsby – twinned with the Bullingdon Club’. This pretty much encapsulates the bizarre situation we now find ourselves in.

Even though I was merely the son of a middle-income family, living a pretty ordinary life in a well-to-do suburb of Birmingham, it’s clear – looking back at those early novels of mine – that I felt myself to be part of an elite by virtue of the school I had been to. After The Sunset Bell I started – but didn’t finish – a rather similar novel called Paul’s Dance in which this issue comes even more clearly to the fore. The story concerns two friends, Paul and Richard, who return to their native Midlands during the long vacation following their first year at Cambridge University. An awkward third member of the friendship group turns up in the form of Philip, who (just like Ian in my previous novel) works in a bank – in this case what is clearly the local head office of Barclays Bank on Colmore Row. Robert starts hanging out with the two Cambridge friends and listens with some amazement and envy to their talk of May Balls, college chapels and punting sessions on the river Cam. If I had felt like a member of the elite because of the school I’d attended, this was something I obviously felt even more strongly now that I had gone to university, and not just any university but Cambridge.

Let me read you a short passage from Paul’s Dance, which survives as a handwritten manuscript of about 300 pages. In this scene Richard, home from university for a few months, goes down to his local Social Security office to sign on for benefits:

Monday morning: the walls an off-white, broken by posters advertising supplementary benefit and free school meals: a clock, thirteen minutes slow. At one counter, a girl sat thumbing through cards – piles of cards taken from a cabinet and, eventually, returned to the cabinet. Every few minutes she would extract a card with an expression of icy triumph and lay it to one side (a new pile, growing slowly): a notice, ‘Position Closed’ kept guard in front of her. At the other counter, a queue of five men, a woman and a child stood waiting.

            ‘How long you been out, mate?’ said a man – a young man, of about Richard’s age – offering him a cigarette.

            ‘Sorry?’ said Richard.

            ‘How long you been out?’ After a pause: ‘Of work.’

            ‘Oh! Oh, well I’m not … strictly speaking I’m not out of work.’

            ‘No? What you here for, sick benefit?’

            ‘No, actually I’m a … student.’

            ‘Oh, one of them,’ said the young man, contemptuous but without malice. ‘You have it really tough, you lot. On holiday then, are you? How long for?’

            ‘About four months.’

            ‘Four months, Jesus! I suppose you wouldn’t take a job if they found you one.’

            ‘Well, that depends.’

            ‘Christ. I’ve been out eighteen months. Ever since I left school. Never had a job in my life. Unskilled, you see: I’ve got nothing going for me.’

            Richard wanted to dispute that but couldn’t think of a way of doing it. Instead (he was very angry with himself afterwards), he said:

            ‘Quite quiet in there this morning.’

            ‘Well, there’s no signing on on a Monday. I’m only here to get a holiday form. Me and my girlfriend are going to Wales for a week, you know, camping.’ A few moments later he said:
‘Hey, did you see that film on telly last night?’

            ‘No, what was it?’

            ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday ­– Glenda Jackson and what’s his name, Peter … Finch.’

            ‘I’ve seen it before.’

            ‘What a load of crap, eh? When them two blokes – Peter Finch and the other bloke, what’s his name, you know, were kissing and stuff, going to bed together. Two blokes! I nearly fell of my seat laughing! Peter Finch and this other bloke, kissing, in this film. Bloody stupid! Me and my girl friend couldn’t stop laughing. It’s stupid, isn’t it?’

            ‘Yes, I suppose it is.’ – This reply, which neither expressed what Richard believed nor carried the least tone of conviction, satisfied nobody. Richard was glad to get out of the Social Security office, and outside he wondered, since his commitments for the next two weeks were now fulfilled, what he was going to do next. The morning was threatening to become sultry. He took a bus to the city centre and lay in the sunshine in St Philip’s Square, watching the passers-by.

Funnily enough I have a vivid memory of the real-life conversation this was based on, which took place not in a social security office but in the aforementioned local head office of Barclays Bank on Colmore Row, where I was briefly employed in the summer of 1980. It was a conversation between me and one of my colleagues, who was indeed talking about the previous night’s screening of Sunday Bloody Sunday, and had reacted to it in roughly the way I described. It’s interesting that it made a strong enough impression on me for me to put it in a novel: and interesting that I used it in this passage, very crudely, to make a connection between differences in educational background and differences in social attitude, making a link between lack of university education and socially conservative values.

Let’s move on to another writer, and another novel, which addresses similar themes but does so much more adroitly and with much more maturity. Two or three years after I had struggled to get my feelings about Birmingham and my place in it down on paper in The Sunset Bell and Paul’s Dance (feelings which consisted largely of romanticising the city, through the filter of young male narrators who are tortured and embarrassed by their own sense of privilege, and whose experience of Birmingham life is obviously and painfully monocultural) – two or three years after that, as I say, David Lodge published his novel Nice Work. I don’t think I need to offer much of a plot summary of this celebrated book. It is the classic novel of town versus gown, of academia versus industry, in which a young female academic at Birmingham University, Robyn Penrose, has the job of shadowing Vic Wilcox, the owner of a Midlands factory. Two people whose world-views could hardly be more different.

I referred to Birmingham University, but of course this is not what David Lodge himself calls it. As with the other novels in his campus trilogy, he uses the name ‘Rummidge’, and slyly explains in an introductory note that ‘Rummidge is an imaginary city, with imaginary universities and imaginary factories, inhabited by imaginary people, which occupies, for the purposes of fiction, the space where Birmingham is to be found on maps of the so-called real world’.

(This is the major difference, I would say, between the ways that David and I have written about the city. From my very earliest Birmingham fictions – and especially in The Rotters’ Club – I took a conscious decision to particularise as much as possible, to fill the books with the names of real streets and real districts. Both ways, although they seem diametrically opposed, are attempts to create a kind of mythology of Birmingham through fiction, and both ways, I would hope, are equally valid.)

The difference between Robyn’s and Vic’s ways of looking at the world are brought out vividly in a scene where they are driving through the Midlands landscape and pass a series of billboards advertising Silk Cut cigarettes. The posters consist of a single, wordless image – ‘a photographic depiction of a rippling expanse of purple silk in which there was a single slit, as if the material had been slashed with a razor’. As Robyn explains to Vic, ‘The poster was the iconic representation of a missing name, like a rebus. But the icon was also a metaphor. The shimmering silk, with its voluptuous curves and sensuous texture, obviously symbolised the female body, and the elliptical slit, foregrounded by a lighter colour showing through, was still more obviously a vagina.’

This explanation provokes an immediate reaction:

Vic Wilcox spluttered with outraged derision as she expounded this interpretation. He smoked a different brand, himself, but it was as if he felt his whole philosophy of life was threatened by Robyn’s analysis of the advert. ‘You must have a twisted mind to see all that in a perfectly harmless bit of cloth,’ he said.

            ‘What’s the point of it, then?’ Robyn challenged him. ‘Why use cloth to advertise cigarettes?’

            ‘Well, that’s the name of ‘em, isn’t it? Silk Cut. It’s a picture of the name. Nothing more or less.’

            ‘Suppose they’d used a picture of a roll of silk cut in half – would that do just as well?’

            ‘I suppose so. Yes, why not?’

            ‘Because it would look like a penis cut in half, that’s why.’

            He forced a laugh to cover his embarrassment. ‘Why can’t you people take things at their face value?’

            ‘What people are you referring to?’

            ‘Highbrows. Intellectuals. You’re always trying to find hidden meanings in things. Why? A cigarette is a cigarette. A piece of silk is a piece of silk. Why not leave it at that?’

I want to come back and consider a couple of the details in that passage in a moment. But let’s fast-forward a few decades first. My most recent novel, Middle England, published just over a year ago. contains a small homage to David Lodge’s book. My central character, Sophie, is a young art historian whose relationship with the world is not so different from Robyn Penrose’s. While enjoying a little freebie as guest lecturer aboard a cruise ship which is touring the Baltic states, she encounters a fellow-passenger, an industrialist from Lancashire, who is not so different from Vic. In fact he is even called Wilcox. Like Vic, my Mr Wilcox is not especially impressed with Sophie’s take on things. In many ways, their conversations could easily have come straight from the pages of Nice Work itself. But there is a slightly different tone, a different edge, in the way that they talk to each other, and a new phrase has entered Mr Wilcox’s vocabulary in the thirty years since David Lodge’s novel was published. They argue, among other things, about Sophie’s husband, whose name is Ian. Ian has just been passed over for promotion. The job has gone to a colleague of his called Naheed. On paper, they were similar sorts of candidates: similar qualifications, similar experience. But different in one respect – ethnicity. Naheed is an Asian woman. As soon as he hears this, Mr Wilcox decides that he understands the whole situation. ‘We all know what it’s like these days,’ he says. ‘How it works. People like Ian don’t get a fair crack of the whip any more.’ ‘When you say “people like Ian”,’ Sophie says, challenging him, ‘I suppose you mean white people.’ When Mr Wilcox all but admits that this is what he means, she argues: ‘Maybe they just gave the job to the better candidate.’ At which point, the killer phrase, the inevitable phrase, enters the conversation: ‘I think you’d better decide which is more important to you,’ Mr Wilcox says. ‘Supporting your husband, or being politically correct.’

This conversation is supposed to take place in 2014, two years before the Brexit referendum around which the whole of my novel pivots. Since then, Brexit has happened – in theory. Boris Johnson and the Conservatives won a substantial majority last December, and promised to ‘get Brexit done’. On January 31st we left the European Union and now you almost never hear the word ‘Brexit’ on the lips of a government minister any more. But Brexit is not over – not just because we have a complex trade agreement to negotiate in less than twelve months, but because ‘Brexit’ – in the sense of Britain’s decision to leave the European Union – was only one of the things we were all arguing about in the referendum of 2016, and probably not the most important. Brexit was, and is, simply a proxy in a culture war which has been building up in Britain over the course of many, many years, and which erupted in 2016 because a number of politicians and campaigners very skilfully channelled people’s manifold and various resentments in one direction, one which happened to suit their purpose: that is, in the direction of leaving the EU. It would be a simplification, but possibly a useful one, to describe this culture war as a war between the Wilcoxes and the Penroses. When Vic Wilcox, after all, tells Robyn Penrose in the course of that brilliant scene in Nice Work that the problem is with ‘highbrows’ and ‘intellectuals’, it sounds highly reminiscent – to me, at any rate – of  what was perhaps the single most potent and revealing statement made during the referendum campaign: not Dominic Cummings’ clever slogan about ‘taking back control’ or the promise of extra funds for the NHS painted on the side of a bus, but Michael Gove’s famous remark that ‘We’ve had enough of experts’.

Much analysis of the Brexit vote has concentrated on the so-called left-behind voters of Britain’s Northern post-industrial towns. But, as Simon Kuper argued in a recent piece for the Financial Times, this misses an important part of the picture. His article was entitled ‘the revenge of the middle-class anti-elitist’. It’s a fine piece and I’m tempted to quote it in full, but this is how it begins:

Here’s a character rarely mentioned in the contemporary political debate. He (he’s usually a man) lives in a suburb or small town. He wasn’t born with a silver spoon, and he worked his way up, which wasn’t always fun. Now he owns his home and earns above-average income. He is scathing of big-city elites with posh accents who got easy lives handed to them. In short, he’s a middle-class anti-elitist.

 You find him across the western world: in New Jersey and Long Island, around the English south-east, the Milan agglomeration and in the quiet suburbs of Rotterdam. The comfortably off populist voter is the main force behind Trump, Brexit and Italy’s Lega. Yet he’s largely ignored, while the conversation about populism revolves around an entirely different figure: the impoverished former factory worker. Pundits are forever explaining why poor Sunderland voted for Brexit, but rarely why wealthy Bournemouth did.

 In most developed countries, populism is less a working-class revolt than a middle-class civil war. So why do well-off people vote against the system? The statistics reveal the middle-classness of populism. About two-thirds of Trump voters in 2016 had household incomes above $50,000, according to the American National Election Study. Most British Leave voters lived in the south of England, and 59 per cent were middle class (social classes A, B or C1). In the Netherlands, two-thirds of supporters of far-right Thierry Baudet are moderately or highly educated.

 Imagine one of these voters, a small business-owner or accountant in Britain, not in London, earning £60,000 a year. He isn’t keen on positive discrimination for women or people of colour, or on high taxes. In fact, he doesn’t want anyone to get “handouts”. In a recent study of the Brexit referendum, “affluent Eurosceptics” were the segment of the electorate least likely to have financial troubles, and most likely to be anti-welfare.

 This man’s advance has been slow. He has never been invited into the fast lane of life: the top universities, the biggest firms, the major corporations. He feels, with some justification, that his exclusion has been unfair — based on his accent, schooling, clothes and unfamiliarity with trendy conversational topics. He realised years ago that so-called meritocracy is a fraud. Big-city professors, journalists and civil servants with fancy degrees — people who strongly resemble politicians such as Hillary Clinton, Elizabeth Warren and Ed Miliband — seem to him manifestly full of shit. Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson’s right-hand man, captured this sentiment when he evoked “Oxbridge English graduates who chat about Lacan at dinner parties with TV producers . . . ” . Yet whenever our man has got anywhere near these frauds, they have snubbed him. The British Conservative grandee Ken Clarke’s dismissal in 2014 of Ukip voters as “elderly male people who’ve had disappointing lives” was typical.

I confess that, before reading this article, I hadn’t come across this quotation from Dominic Cummings before. ‘Oxbridge English graduates who chat about Lacan at dinner parties with TV producers’. It could almost be Vic Wilcox himself, scathingly dismissing Robyn Penrose and her academic ilk. And in case you think that Wilcox (and Cummings) are just being touchy, are just feeling some personal slight or discomfort and building it up into something way out of proportion, remember what David Lodge wrote in Nice Work, when Robyn infuriates him by transforming a simple cigarette advertisement into a whole theoretical rigmarole about penises and vaginas. He doesn’t just disagree with her, it is far more fundamental than that. Quote: ‘it was as if he felt his whole philosophy of life was threatened’.

*

The comedian Alexei Sayle recently defined austerity as a political philosophy based on the belief that the global financial crash of 2008 happened because there were too many libraries in Wolverhampton. Perhaps it is equally fanciful, and equally simplistic, to say that Britain’s ongoing culture war – in which the Brexit referendum has merely been the biggest skirmish to date – can be boiled down to the age-old mistrust and rivalry between town and gown. Britain, after all, has become a tribal country, divided into many different sectarian groups who, despite all the means of communication technology now offers us, have great difficulty talking to each other or understanding each other. Young versus old is one of the most obvious of these; you also have the metropolis versus the provinces, and the big cities versus the countryside. But a growing body of research is starting to show that, in the Brexit referendum at least, the educational divide was the most important one. In their paper ‘Education and the Geography of Brexit’, for instance, Robert Calvert Jump and Jo Michell of the University of West England use statistical models to show that ‘educational attainment alone can correctly classify up to 92.24% of local authorities by voting outcome’ and conclude that ‘the classification success of educational attainment is remarkable, and emphasises its importance as a key predictor of Britain’s vote to leave the European Union.’

If this were simply an intellectual divide, however, the divisions would not be so bitter and so rancorous. The dialogues between Robyn Penrose and Vic Wilcox in Nice Work often show Wilcox smarting in the face of her confident intellectual superiority, but the comedy is essentially good-natured, and their differences are finally resolved after a fashion through dialogue and closer mutual understanding. Thirty years later, as my Mr Wilcox argues with Sophie on their cruise liner, the battleground has become moral rather than intellectual. It doesn’t bother her that he’s not as well-educated as she is, or that he accuses her of not living in ‘the real world’. What disgusts her is his racism; or rather his perceived racism, because as my novel tries to show, the subject of racism has become so difficult to talk about, and so quickly leads on to moral judgments which cut to the very heart of our core values and senses of personal identity, that very little meaningful dialogue on the subject is possible. It quickly becomes too painful or – a much more British (or perhaps English) quality – too embarrassing to talk about.

Robyn’s elitism and Sophie’s elitism are therefore not the same thing. The meaning of the word has changed in the intervening years. People have expressed amazement that someone as wealthy as Donald Trump, or as privileged as Jacob Rees-Mogg, can convince people that they are against the elites, rather than being part of them. But voters do not seem to regard wealth and privilege – even when both are inherited rather than earned – as the real signifiers of elitism.

Voters seem to have turned against Jeremy Corbyn because, however well-meaning his political programme was, they felt that he and the Labour Party were giving them lectures on morality that they didn’t respect and didn’t want to hear. By the same token, they were prepared to forgive Boris Johnson his many character defects because, for all of his very obvious faults, they did not feel that he was wagging his finger at them.

It won’t surprise you to learn that I’m not going to offer any solutions to the intractable social dilemma we seem, as a country, to have locked ourselves into. It’s often been said that the job of the novelist is to ask the right questions rather than to provide answers: either a profound statement of authorial philosophy, or a useful cop-out, depending on your point of view. But I would suggest taking another look at David Lodge’s Nice Work, which contains many pleas – both implicit and explicit – for more dialogue, more engagement, between the intellectual elites (as represented by Rummidge University) and the less extensively educated. ‘Universities,’ as Robyn Penrose puts it in one of her more evangelising moments, ‘are the cathedrals of the modern age … The trouble is, ordinary people don’t understand what they’re about, and the universities don’t really bother to explain themselves to the community. We have an Open Day once a year. Every day ought to be an open day. The campus ought to be swarming with local people doing part-time courses – using the Library, using the laboratories, going to lectures, going to concerts, using the Sports Centre – everything.’ She threw out her arms in an expansive gesture, flushed and excited by her own vision.” It might sound naïve in our current cynical age – and Vic Wilcox certainly wastes no time before pooh-poohing the speech – but her idealism sounds preferable to the tribal bubbles and cliques – ever tighter, ever more exclusive – towards which social media (among many other factors) has driven us in the intervening years.

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Finally, on a more personal note, I would just like to say that it’s been a pleasurable and valuable experience – if sometimes a painful one – digging out my early attempts at writing the great Birmingham novel from my archive. It’s been rather like discovering a long-forgotten photograph album and dimly recognising your youthful self beneath the appalling 1970s fashions and terrible haircuts. Interesting to see how clearly, even back then, I saw myself as having been elevated to a position of privilege by my educational background, but also how self-conscious that made me, how nervous at the thought that I was being set apart from the people I rubbed shoulders with every day on the streets of this city. Touching, too, to see how naively eager I was to romanticise the city of Birmingham itself. Which just goes to show how much I loved it, I suppose. And that’s why it’s been an honour to hold the title of President of this Institute, which represents so much that is best about the spirit of this great city. Thank you for choosing me, thank you for waiting so patiently for this long-overdue Presidential Address, and thank you, above all, for coming here tonight and listening.