Unlike most Britons, my life has not been dominated by a Conservative government. My parents emigrated to Australia in 1981 and we returned in 1997. First, under the Australian Labor Party and then New Labour, I benefitted from nearly 27 continuous years of social democracy. I now see I didn’t appreciate that as much as I might have done.
The Australian Labor Party was in power from 1983 until 1996. It was a period of prosperity. A liberalised economy funded a progressive social agenda. Prime Minister Bob Hawke’s dinky-di persona belied a prodigious economic brain. He was both a Rhodes scholar and the world record holder for drinking a yard of ale. Paul Keating was Hawke’s Treasurer, eventual successor, and my political hero. Keating left school at 14. He was a parliamentary pugilist and a private aesthete. He was the master of the bare-knuckled political sledge and a collector of antique clocks. Both men possessed subtle minds which could persuade or bludgeon as the occasion required. As a consequence, for 13 years, Australia’s conservative opposition was a feeble apology.
I was lucky to grow up in Brisbane in the 1980s. I was spared the grey, callous mismanagement of the Thatcher years. My childhood was full of backyard cricket, swimming in rainforests and fishing off jetties. It was a good place to be a kid. Australia shaped me in many ways, but England was always home. Within four days of finishing high school, I was on a plane to Heathrow, eager to breathe in Britishness and hitch-hike around Europe. That gap year extended into 18 happy and glorious months before it was time to return to Australia. But it was too late; I’d fallen in love with the UK and all I could think about was getting back as soon as possible.
A year after my return to Australia, the England cricket team arrived for that summer’s Ashes series. Trailing them around the country was a large and vocal cadre of England fans who soon became known as the Barmy Army. Rather than wear England colours, instead they each wore their own football club’s home shirt. It saved anyone having to learn names. Most were just known as ‘Pompey’ or ‘Stoke’ or ‘Leeds’. All summer long, this sweaty, overweight, drunken throng would take up a sizeable corner of each ground and sing themselves hoarse from first ball to last. As ever, the Gabba was the venue for the first Ashes test. I had a ticket for all five days. Australia were dominant and Shane Warne ripped through England’s second innings to wrap up the match early on day five. Standing on the outfield, drowning our sorrows, some of the 'army' asked me if I was going the next test in Melbourne. It didn’t take long to make up my mind.
A staunch Anglophile, my Dad had always made it clear that we supported ABA (Anyone But Australia). As directed, I used to wear my Union Jack shorts to cricket nets. I got a lot of practice facing the short ball. That summer, the songs which began on the terraces of Old Trafford and Elland Road were re-crafted and directed towards Mark Taylor and his men. The Aussie supporters took it all in great humour and used to sit amongst us, soaking it all in and laughing along. Culturally, at least, Britain was starting to swagger again. Definitely Maybe was on repeat in every backpackers’ dorm room. The call to get home only grew louder.
Then I met an Aussie girl in Sydney and everything got a bit delayed. She had a nice, comfortable life in Coogee, but somehow I’d managed to persuade her that February in Ilford was a good idea. For three years we shuttled between Sydney and London trying to make it work. In the end, painfully, I had to be here and she had to be there. When we finally went our separate ways, all the back and forth meant I’d only ever had a string of temp jobs in kitchens and on building sites. I'm an ordinary cook and terrible at DIY, so neither were ever going to be a career. I needed a degree. My best subjects were History and Economics, but I wanted to go into journalism. I enrolled to study English at Leeds.
Shortly before I started university, I came up to Leeds for the day to choose my accommodation. I’d never stepped foot inside Yorkshire, but I could feel something in my bones. Nothing you could call an authentic attachment, but a curiosity nonetheless. I’d read Fred Truman’s biography. I had a passing acquaintance with James Herriot. My nan watched Emmerdale. And with one grandad from Crewe and the other from Gateshead, I'm sort of half northern. Nevertheless, claims of blood and soil were flimsy to say the least. As we pulled into Leeds Bus Station I felt a strange sensation. It reminded me of a scene from Somerset Maugham’s novel, The Moon and Sixpence. The main character, Charles Strickland (based on Paul Gauguin) is working his passage to the south seas. He’s scrubbing away on deck one day and feels a weight over his shoulder. He looks up to see a shadow on the horizon. It’s Tahiti. It’s where Strickland spent the remainder of his life and painted his greatest works. Until then, Strickland had barely lived outside of London. At that moment, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, he knew he was home. Well, getting off the National Express in Leeds felt something like that, except with a Greggs.
What followed were three of the happiest years of my life. As a mature student, it was of course up to me to fund everything through part time work and student loans. I read 700 pages a week, wrote for the student newspaper and played a lot of sport. Like we all do, I made friends for life. All my romantic illusions surrounded me. Cobblestoned walks to lectures. Dusty libraries. Scratchy college scarfs. Eccentric professors. Autumnal redbrick quadrants. In Australia, my school was built from breeze blocks and tin, so to take seminars in oak-panelled studies at the top of creaking staircases was a daily indulgence. I can still remember the feeling of the smooth, hand-worn bannister against my palm.
I embraced student life. When I wasn’t playing cricket, I was getting fat with beer. Steve Redgrave had just won his fifth gold medal. Those lads looked pretty lean. Rowing during the winter seemed like a good way to stop the physical rot. Leeds University had a rowing team. I joined and was hooked within weeks. After the Olympics, everyone was thinking the same thing, so we had a good intake that year and I was fortunate to be part of a decent crew. We won our first race and just about everything else after that. Then our coach decided he wanted to concentrate on his dissertation. Seeing as I was considered ‘a bit competitive’, he asked me to take over. I duly tracked down a copy of the seniors’ training programme, set our guys some fitness targets, and then badgered the club president to let us row in a better boat. By Easter we were moving well and had caught up with the 1st VIII. They’d all learnt to row at school and had proper kit. None of my lot had been anywhere near a boat before the previous October, but we were big and we’d been successful in other sports. We were nothing special, but we were good enough. More importantly, I’d got a taste for leadership and I liked it.
Rowing is an all-consuming sport. We trained twice a day and pretty soon I was a better oarsman than I was a bowler. I was making progress and the following year I’d secured my seat in the top crew. The beer belly was gone. By my final year I'd made good progress, but I was under no illusions, I knew I’d come to the sport too late to row at a professional level. To cover my bases, I became a qualified coach. I had enjoyed the process of helping others realise their potential. Whether it was an arm around the shoulder or a hint at deselection, I liked working out what each person needed. I liked spreading the contagion of belief. I thrived on the pressure of responsibility, especially when the task seemed steep. Mostly, I liked that rowing was - and is - a sport of controllables; the harder you train the faster you go. Graft is the key ingredient.
Before I started my degree, I had decided I wanted to be cricket writer. Seeing as I was playing for the 1st XI, I wrote the match reports for the student newspaper. I then landed an internship with the Yorkshire Evening Post. I’d had the honour of ghost-writing Ray Illingworth’s column a few times. We used to take him for a pub lunch near his house where he would reel off stories of playing and captaining for Yorkshire and England. He was a man from a different era. He had a deep respect for those he'd played with and against. He taught me that good leadership should be grounded in humility. He recalled how the hard-as-nails Australian captain, Ian Chappell would insist that his players called him by his first name and not 'Skipper'. One story has always stuck in my head. Ray recalled the challenge of returning from England duty to play for Yorkshire. It was the days before central contracts and he was required to captain both sides, often back to back. He was always concerned that he couldn't adjust quickly enough from the pace and intensity of the international game to what was required to lead Yorkshire. It was important to him that he never gave the impression of being too grand to give Yorkshire his best. He would ask some of the senior Yorkshire players to keep an eye on him during the first few hours, to make sure he wasn't missing anything through fatigue or complacency. The strength in that humility left a mark on me. I'm not sure anyone would ever have accused Ray Illingworth of being a weak or uncertain leader. A great man. After that, the guys on the sports desk trusted me with interviewing the current Yorkshire players. Things were starting to come together. But then - maybe even because of my chats with Ray - something was starting to niggle in the back of my mind.
My appetite for competition was rubbing up against the reality of life as a journalist. One day I found myself standing outside the Yorkshire dressing room at Headingley Cricket Ground. I was waiting for the coach, Martin Moxon to come out for an interview. He was clearly busy and, understandably, didn’t want to talk. He made it clear that he had better things to do than talk to a young reporter. He was monosyllabic and barely made eye contact. I was a nuisance. My job was to write about his successes and criticise his failures. But I was aware it wasn’t my head on the chopping block. It wasn’t me taking risks. I wasn’t in the fight. All I could do was go back to the newsroom and make judgement. I didn’t want that. I wanted to lead. I wanted the successes to be mine. I wanted the failures to be mine too. I didn’t want to merely report on someone else’s effort. Win or lose, I wanted to be in the fray. Right then, I realised journalism wasn’t for me.
After University, I had tried to stay in Yorkshire and get a coaching job but, back then, Leeds was the only UK city without its own rowing club. The only way you could get a paid role in those days was either with the national squad or in public schools. With a heavy heart, I moved back to Kent, vowing to return north when I could. Soon after, I landed a job at King’s School Rochester. It was the first time I’d been anywhere near an independent school. It was, shall we say, an eye-opener. I sorely missed Leeds, but the career had to take priority.
Four years at King’s were followed by a decade working for a fantastic charity in east London called London Youth Rowing. Our mission was to get as many kids from disadvantaged backgrounds into a sport which had a reputation for being socially elitist. It was tough-going at first, few had heard of rowing, much less been given an opportunity to try. We persisted and, over the next ten years, we grew into the biggest junior rowing programme in the world. Some of our athletes ended up rowing for their country and most went on to study at leading universities. It was an incredibly rewarding time and I learnt a huge amount about the challenges faced by young people in our more deprived communities. It was then I joined the Labour Party.
And then I met Suzanne. Funny, pretty and whip-smart, she was also the most kind and considerate person I’d ever met. She was – and still is – a workaholic. So much so, that, after graduating from university, she’d found time for her career and little else. By the time she met me she’d just started to wonder if it was time to wind back a little. For once, my timing was good.
Originally from Edinburgh, the daughter of a fishmonger and nurse, she was a straight-A student and head girl. She was one of a handful of pupils in her school to go to university. By the age of 17 she was studying Economics at Newcastle where she cruised to a first-class degree. Before long she’d built a successful career in oil and gas where, by her early twenties, she was leading teams of 150 people. At the time we met she’d spent years travelling the world, fixing companies and living out of suitcases. For the first six months of our relationship she was in Mumbai and then Houston. When she got back to London she decided it was time to quit her job and move to the Yorkshire Dales.
“Sorry, what?”
“I want a cottage in the Yorkshire Dales. And a Westie.”
Needless to say, this caught my attention.
That Spring we set off on a driving holiday across the north of England. We drove up through Bakewell, Blackpool, Saltaire, the Lake District, and back across North Yorkshire. On the way home, I asked if we could drop in to see the new Leeds Boat House. I’d heard on the alumni grapevine that the University had finally moved their facility from where I used to train in York to a new home in Leeds. We pulled up at the end of an industrial lane in Hunslet and I peered through the locked gates. At the watersports centre I ran in London’s docklands, we would have hundreds of school children visiting every day. But here was this impressive new boathouse in central Leeds, standing empty. On the drive back to London I wrote a business plan in my head. One year later, after many trips up and down the M1, I was back in Leeds preparing to launch my own programme. Suzanne joined me a few months later and we moved into a little cottage in Ilkley. Then the hard work really began. Six years later, many thousands of children in Yorkshire have learnt to row and some have started to move into higher education. And finally, I’d come home.
To me, Yorkshire’s broad acres have always felt like the best of both worlds; English but with a blunt, no nonsense quality which reminds me of Australia. The people are straight-talking, confident and proud. All Australian cricket fans know it’s harder to beat England when it’s full of Yorkshiremen. The Aussies see us poms as soft in the centre and easy to intimidate. But towards Yorkshire players, they have an unspoken and mutual respect.
I’ve also detected a shared impatience with a certain brand of middle-class self-regard. For Australians, these pretentions are epitomised by the England captain from the Bodyline series - the hated Douglas Jardine. Until recently, many in Yorkshire would have had the same response to whomever was leading the Conservative Party. For a few years, that judgement was suspended and an exception was made for Boris Johnson. That was before he revealed himself to be just another entitled fake and the scales fell from our collective eyes.
Yorkshire is where I belong, but I am palpably aware I’ll always be on probation. The Aussie accent I adopted in my childhood never really took root. After years on the move, I have a sort of sludgy southern English accent which is neither RP nor Estuary. Suzanne’s lovely Scottish lilt gets a free pass, but I, quite understandably, get no such exemption. When I say ‘Grassington’ it still sounds like I’m inserting an ‘r’ after the ‘a’. I can – just about – get away with everyday words like ‘parth’ and ‘charnce’, but place-names bring me out in a cold sweat. On a normal day, I’ll be in a friendly conversation and it will all be going well. Then I get the sense my brain is forming a sentence my mouth isn’t sure about. I’ve tried shortening the vowels a bit, or fudging them altogether, but it just comes out as an awkward grunt and I sound even more ridiculous. I am tolerated with something between pity and polite contempt. Needless to say, I avoid Barnard Castle.
Nevertheless, I wake up every day scarcely able to believe my luck. Since 2016, I’ve been more settled than at any time in my life. Suzanne has her Westies and I get to spend plenty of time walking up the wet and windy dales which surround our cottage. My mother moved here after her retirement and has already been welcomed into Ilkley life with open arms. It’s easy to put down roots in such fertile soil.
After six years of all-consuming effort, the programmes I built in Leeds are ticking over nicely. I now have more time to devote to the place which has brought me sanctuary and hearth. That’s what I plan to do. That starts with doing my bit to restore the natural political order of my life: A Labour government. The challenges which face young people in Hackney, Morley, Chapeltown or Keighley are just the same. It’s about a first-class education, skills relevant to the 21st Century, and the opportunities which will allow them to build their own futures. It’s about investing in the necessary infrastructure, housing and lived environment, so that the most exciting option for a young person, is to stay and continue to shape the place that made them. Too many who have grown up in northern towns felt the need to move away to get on in life. That’s not right. It’s not good for those who needed to leave, nor for those who waved them goodbye. Most of all, it's not good for the communities which have been short-changed for so long.
I know how rootless life can be. For decades, I was always trying to get back to somewhere, but it took me a long time to find opportunity and belonging in the same place. In the end, I had to carve it out for myself. For some, such transience is what they long for. With its attendant freedoms and lightness of being, they are happy to be blown onto the next adventure. But I've always wanted to leave a heavy footprint outside my front door. I wanted to be grounded somewhere which changed a little but mainly stayed the same. It wasn't until I settled in Yorkshire that I really felt that sense of permanent rest. And now I walk down a high street which I will walk down for the remainder of my days. Perhaps you need to have been starved of that to truly understand how nourishing it can be. And all I want to do now is bring long term opportunity here so young people aren't forced to seek it out elsewhere. Community matters. Belonging matters. Home matters.
