Tom McTague is among the few mainstream British journalists who see politics through the lens of history and world affairs rather than just the Westminster lobby. He is best known for his writing on Brexit, work that sits somewhere between reporting and historical explanation. As Editor-in-Chief of the New Statesman and author of Between the Waves, he appears less interested in sudden moments, more in the longer arguments and themes that run through them. This instinct carries into the interview itself. We are speaking in his office at the New Statesman the day after the staff Christmas party, and it looks out over a rather quiet newsroom – the usual noise replaced by just a couple of journalists working on articles. The conversation begins with a focus on contemporary political figures, specifically those with whom he sympathises. He begins by clarifying what we mean by that: political agreement, personal understanding, or something else entirely?
He starts with Bridget Phillipson. They share a North East background; his parents were Labour activists there, and he recognises the culture of the party she comes from – its assumptions, its internal logic. There are parallels in their lives too: siblings of a similar age, children, the move South-East. “There are a lot of things there that I understand and sympathise with”, he says.
Andy Burnham is who he follows up with. McTague profiled him for the New Statesman back in September, but the mention appears more personal than professional. Burnham’s sense of himself as a “normal lad” from the North West, combined with a career spent in Westminster, feels familiar. McTague talks about the tension of moving south and ending up in a world that feels so distant from where you started. “He obviously has that ambition to go on. I often find with Andy that I know so many people like him – friends, my brother, some of my brother’s friends in particular – who are just like Andy Burnham. Everything about him, I immediately recognise and understand.” Burnham, he suggests, is “quite representative of a lot of provincial English people who then go to Oxford [Burnham studied at Cambridge] or move south”. He’s recognisable.
Keir Starmer is the next to be named, and he fits the same pattern. McTague has known him for years and describes him as similarly pulled between his upbringing and the office he now holds. “I have sympathy for Keir Starmer”, he says. “I got to know him over the years, and I think I can understand who he is as well – he’s pulled in a very similar way to Andy Burnham, between the sense of who he was growing up, his parents, and what he actually is now that he’s Prime Minister.” What links these three, almost starkly different figures, is by no means ideology, but experience: the strain of navigating politics whilst remaining attached to a past that doesn’t entirely fit.
This attention to background and detail also runs through Between the Waves, McTague’s book on Brexit and British euroscepticism. Asked why he wrote it, his answer begins – perhaps unsurprisingly – with journalism. He thought he had reached the high point of his career when he became political editor of The Independent on Sunday. Then the paper folded. Politico came next, along with new exposure to American journalism, which he describes as “fantastic”, and to Brexit at its most technical and politically fraught. “I had to immerse myself in Brexit, in my niche”, he says.
Reporting on Brexit highlighted a recurring problem. In Brussels, attempting to understand Eurosceptic arguments could mark you out as a Brexiteer; in London, the same writing might be read as reflexively pro-European. The assumptions attached to the work changed depending on who was reading it. McTague is clear about his intention in navigating this terrain: “I’ve always tried to write pieces that are, in some senses, not polemical. They’re an attempt to take things seriously and be balanced and intellectually curious.” The contradiction – and the effort required to sustain that position – appears to have stuck with him.
The conceptual starting point for the book came from American history. Reading Rick Perlstein’s Before the Storm, McTague was struck by just how wrong contemporary judgments had been. Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential defeat was meant to demonstrate the electoral limits of ideological conservatism. Instead, it marked the beginning of a political trajectory that would eventually reshape American politics. “That’s the story of the conservative revolution – how the conventional wisdom was all wrong, and how the losers of history had kind of ended up winning.” The parallel, he says, was immediately obvious: “I thought, wow – that is the story of the Eurosceptics.” The supposed losers didn’t disappear; they regrouped and won.
For decades, British euroscepticism lost arguments, votes, and internal party battles. Then, in rapid succession, it secured a referendum, won it, and reshaped the political landscape that followed. “They secured victory after victory, having spent decades losing”, McTague says. “There are all these moments in history where you could say it looks impossible that this would happen.” What fascinated him wasn’t Brexit as a rupture moment, but its part in a longer story. “I was intrigued by how history moves in a different way, actually, than politics suggests it does.” Political ideas persist despite repeated failure.
That sense of continuity matters to him. If Between the Waves had an argument, it’s not that Brexit was inevitable, but that political ideas endure far longer than their apparent defeats. Losing arguments, elections, or referendums doesn’t dissolve a worldview; it often consolidates it. This belief shapes not only his historical writing but his approach to contemporary politics: he’s wary of treating any political moment as final, decisive, or closed.
Finding a starting point, therefore, was difficult. He considered beginning in 1990, with “Margaret Thatcher in Chequers with her husband, family, friends on New Year’s Eve – this woman who had been bending history to her will suddenly finding that history is running past her and she’s no longer in control”. Thatcher, he notes, was trying and failing to stop the German reunification, to resist the European Exchange Rate Mechanism – to halt forces already in motion. “She couldn’t stop anything. And then she was going to lose power.” But that moment required her 1988 Bruges speech, which required the 1975 EEC referendum, which required Enoch Powell. Each start point demanded its own history.
Eventually, McTague arrived in Algiers in 1943. Reading Jean Monnet’s biography revealed an unlikely convergence: Monnet drawing up ideas for European integration; Charles de Gaulle thinking about France’s future; Harold Macmillan representing British interests; Enoch Powell also in the city. For a while, McTague admits, he became distracted by an assassination that occurred at the book’s opening. “I’ve got to calm myself down”, he recalls telling himself. “This is a story about Brexit, not about Admirals being assassinated.” The story reminds us both somewhat of our own history essays and the many, endlessly tempting rabbit holes we have to resist falling into.
Powell and de Gaulle emerge as the most revealing pairing. They share certain instincts – a very romantic patriotism, a scepticism towards American power, sympathy for an alliance with Russia regardless of its Communism, and an opposition to the kind of multinational citizenship which could create mass immigration to Europe, whether from the Commonwealth or French Algeria – but differ in their conclusions. De Gaulle saw Europe as a route to restore French influence; Powell wanted Britain disengaged entirely, uninterested in replacing the Empire with another form of power. McTague is clear about the limits of Powell’s worldview: “Powell is full of complete contradictions. He creates myths, and then builds what he thinks are perfect rational buildings on top of them – but the foundations are mythological.”
Asked what he might write next, McTague is cautious. Still, there are stories he hasn’t quite let go of. That assassination remains tempting, as does the Allied invasion of North Africa during the Second World War – a period he describes as “completely wild”. As he lists off submarines, clandestine meetings, shifting loyalties, and improvised diplomacy, it’s hard not to disagree.
Asked what he’s most proud of, his answer is immediate. “It’s the book. I’m incredibly proud to be editor of the New Statesman as well. Those two things – they’re good things to have”. What he hopes for the book’s future is less specific. He talks instead about “the sense of history not ending – not being predictable, being kind of chaotic”, and the danger of assuming that politics is moving in any fixed direction. “We might think now that history is destined to move in a certain way”, he says. “And it’s evidently not.”
He mentions other work he’s particularly proud of: “A piece for The Atlantic, travelling around Britain to capture the sense of the British state declining, and Britain declining”. There are others too – profiles of Starmer and Boris Johnson – though he still regrets one edit. “There was a line I wish I’d fought harder for”, he says, speaking about the Johnson article: “The chaos is the point. The chaos is performative and it’s real – he performs it on purpose”.
That experience feeds through into his advice: “You should be particular and proud about how you write. You should be pedantic and thorough. But you shouldn’t see editing as a battle.” Good editors, he insists, make your work better: “You shouldn’t be so proud that you think you know best – usually the editors will improve your work. It’s never infallible”.
He turns to his admiration for American journalism. McTague contrasts a British political press preoccupied with not missing “the line” with what he experienced in the United States, where papers place greater value on long-form reporting. The difference, he suggests, isn’t one of talent but of structure: time, access, and the willingness to let reporting develop without a predetermined conclusion.
“When American journalism is at its best, the access they demand – the on-the-record quotes – is superb”, he says. He references a now-hugely famous Vanity Fair feature on Trump’s inner circle, which was built on almost a year’s worth of interviews. “There isn’t a British equivalent – no one is spending twelve months talking to Morgan McSweeney, on the record, for ten thousand words. That’s something we should aspire to do.”
Finally, when asked about advice more broadly, journalism and life blur together. “They’ve melded into one”, he says. The answer itself is simple: “You need to write. Write and write and write. Do your trade.” Journalism, for McTague, comes down to curiosity – finding out things other people don’t know and writing them down clearly. It’s a modest definition, but one that fits his work: an attention to what outlasts the news cycle.
