Читать книгу Left for Dead? - Lewis Goodall - Страница 6

I work in a profession in which my working days are essentially a series of sugar hits. In TV news, our deadlines are short, our working days long but our time horizons truncated. While most people’s jobs and projects can spread out for weeks, if not months at a time, in ours the complications, the highs, the lows, the screw-ups are compressed into a single day. For us, a week is a long-term gig. As a consequence my brain has been rewired by a thousand two-minute lives, three hundred three-minute packages, ten score of online instant analyses.

Writing a book then, all 130,000 words of it, was a major challenge, the ultimate slow burn. And then, every time I was able to concentrate for long enough, everything would change. In the time I’ve been writing, Jeremy Corbyn has gone from zero to hero (and some would say back again). Every time I thought I understood what was happening, political life would find a way of making me reach for the delete button, once again. In four years, the Labour Party has moved from extinction to the precipice of government, and therefore this book, its premise and its contours have fluctuated almost as much as Corbyn’s reputation. What began as an obituary became a living history of rebirth. At the same time, and to my surprise, it became infused with my own history. For this I am indebted, principally to my family, especially my mum and dad, for giving more political insights and wit and wisdom than I could glean from a lifetime in Westminster. I also have to say an enormous thank you to Tom Killingbeck, my editor, for encouraging me to strike out beyond my working life, beyond Westminster and the corridors of power, and for encouraging me to explore my own story – and how both were mutually reinforcing. I owe him special gratitude for his patience – especially given he inherited the book from his colleague Joe Zigmond, to whom I am very grateful for believing in the idea in the first place. The same is true of my agent Claudia Young – she took half an idea, in the Newsnight green room, and helped develop it into the book you’re holding. Iain Hunt, also of William Collins, handled the final stages of the edit brilliantly. I’d also like to thank the dozens of people, politicians, journalists, aides, activists and the rest, who spared the time to be interviewed. I hope they feel everyone, of every opinion within the Labour Party and without, has had a fair shake.

Special thanks must go to Sky News, especially the former head of politics Esme Wren and her successor Dan Williams, for giving me the space and time to write the book – and so many opportunities more generally, many of which have fed into the contents of these pages. In that vein I’m also grateful to the whole of the senior Sky News management team, especially Esme’s successor Dan Williams, Jonathan Levy, head of newsgathering, and John Ryley, the head of Sky News, for their interest and willingness to throw me new challenges. My colleagues, too, in the Millbank bureau were too many to mention, but were a never-ending source of inspiration, humour and fun. They made me, in so innumerable ways, a better journalist. After three years at Sky News, I can say without hesitation how extremely proud I have been to work for an organisation which reports politics without fear or favour and which, in my entirely impartial opinion, has the best political team in Westminster. In particular, my colleague and best friend in TV, Zach Brown, now doing his best impression of Woodward or Bernstein (or at least their teaboy) at the Washington Post. My best work – especially on matters Labour – has been with him. Long may it continue.

I’m grateful too to my friends, many of whom have contributed ideas to the book – apologies in advance if I’ve stolen them. In particular I’d like to thank Marc Kidson and James Stafford, two brilliant minds, who over the years since our Oxford days have helped shape my thinking on so many things. If you read something here that makes you think, chances are one of them had a hand in it.

As you wade through these pages, there is one man who looms large. My dear grandad, Alan. It is no exaggeration to say that without him there would be no pages to read. A more thorough tribute is reserved for him at the end – but it would still be remiss not to mention him here. His imprint, his essence, is in every bit of what you’re about to read. I only wish he could read them for himself.

Since the publication of Left for Dead, so many have written to me, tweeted me or told me face to face that they enjoyed reading about his story, that he sounded like a wonderful man. Indeed he was. And I cannot tell you how much comfort it is to me that so many people who will never have met him have read about his story. It is the story of a good man, whose life was blighted by much injustice, the story of a life less full than it should have been. It is the story of countless millions and I am just lucky that I was able to tell a small portion of his.

Lewis Goodall

London, September 2019