I met with Tom Bradby the day before Osborne’s axe was set to fall. A stressful time for any political pundit, let alone ITV News’ top man in Westminster. Bradby, though, is remarkably laid back. The former student actor has a reputation as a bit of a smooth operator. No doubt this has something to do with his looks, which seem more Hollywood than Holyrood. Indeed, as I found out, he was (partly) inspired to go into journalism by Mel Gibson.

His primary motivation, however, is a desire to be present at era-defining events: “I love history, and my driving force is that every time I studied any period of history, I found myself thinking, god I wish I’d been there. Take the Russian revolution. How amazing would it have been to be in Peterograd when that broke out? Why wouldn’t you want to be there for the great events in your own lifetime? [Journalism] is a great life, and I’ve seen many extraordinary things – not always nice things, but extraordinary.”

As a younger man (Bradby is now 43), he says that he was attracted into foreign affairs by the film The Year of Living Dangerously, in which Mel Gibson plays a foreign correspondent who becomes embroiled in a Communist coup in Jakarta. “Being a foreign correspondent is inherently more glamorous. Ninety-five percent of the time you would not believe how anyone could possibly be paying you to do this – staying in fancy hotels, hanging out under palm trees, riding in helicopters, seeing incredible things. Unfortunately, the five percent that’s really horrible is really, seriously horrible.”

I wonder if the danger is simply too great. “If you get to the stage where I was, by the time I was a fully-fledged correspondent I had three young children. I just found myself thinking, on numerous occasions, I don’t particularly want to die here. You think of your kids who hardly know you, and your wife, and imagine someone asking ‘who was your dad?’. I found that quite difficult to deal with. And then I got shot. In a way, it made it easier, because you always dread something like that happening, and if it does happen, you think: I’ve survived, therefore I must be invincible.”

Bradby was shot in the leg with a flare gun while covering riots in Jakarta. I ask him whether this experience has given him a sense of perspective in his political journalism. “It’s definitely more frightening than interviewing Gordon Brown. I don’t get scared by politicians. I think if you did this job and you allowed yourself to be intimidated, you wouldn’t get very far very fast. Sometimes interviewees get ugly though. Politicians tend to get annoyed if you keep asking the same question.”

Bradby denies that it’s his job to rile politicians up, saying that he doesn’t “go out of his way to create conflict”. So why does it look that way? “If I ask a straight question, it’s very important to get a straight answer. The other day, I asked David Cameron if it was fair that somebody earning £46,000 was losing their child benefit whereas a couple living next door earning £83,000 combined were keeping it. He kept on answering a different question, so I kept repeating the original question. They don’t like that.”

When not subjecting politicians to interrogation, Bradby spends his time writing historical thrillers. He is currently working on his seventh (in eleven years), and claims to rewrite his books eighteen to twenty times each. “I think the main thing about writing is you have to get on and do it. You’ve just got to say ‘I’m going to write between 9 and 12’ and get on with it. I mean, obviously if it’s not there in your head you can’t do it, but the answer is to sit down and start trying to write something. Filling the blank page is always the hardest thing.

Rewriting something is always much easier than writing it down.”
Bradby believes quite strongly that there is no set formula for writing a blockbuster thriller. “I have a personal theory, which is that all great thrillers are kind of flukes. If you look at it, not many people have written more than one or at most two brilliant ones. Thomas Harris wrote Silence of the Lambs, which is a brilliant thriller, but the next book he wrote [Hannibal] was absolute drivel, I mean terrible, awful. It didn’t work at all.”

Tom Bradby’s predecessor at ITN was Nick Robinson – notoriously the president of OUCA while at University College. I ask Bradby whether he has any similar skeletons in the closet. “No definitely not! I’ve never done anything that is overtly political in any way, shape or form. I’m sort of the anti-activist. Every single time I go to every party conference, every year, there’s a moment when I watch people queueing up, and I think – what are these people doing? I mean, obviously I understand that we need politicians, and we need political activists, I just don’t have a set of views that is coherent from one hour to the next. That’s not to say I don’t have strong opinions on things; I probably think quite to the left on some things, and quite to the right on others. I just don’t really view myself as anything.”

I am curious to know how Bradby’s peers at Edinburgh University would have reacted to the Browne review. “Oh incredibly badly. The Scots would have been manning the barricades.” Bradby, who had covered the Poll Tax riots as editor of his student paper, went on to mourn what he sees as the effective dying-out of student militancy: youthful idealism has, to some extent, migrated from the streets to the Facebook group. This prompted Bradby to express regret for our generation: “University used to be much less a sort of jobs factory, and much more of a place to find yourself. There was less pressure on it. It was a time to kick back, be yourself, and enjoy life. With debt hanging over you it loses that sense of carelessness. It’s less attractive now.

There’s a horrible sense that some of us have in some way let down your generation. I do feel that. We had it pretty good, we had more or less free university, we had good jobs when we left, some of us got into final salary pension schemes for a while. You or the next generation of students are all going to leave university with massive debt, you’re never going to be able to afford to buy a house, because they’re hideously expensive, you’re never going to have a decent pension and you’ll have to work till you’re about 80. There’s not a lot to be joyous about, is there? Unless you go into investment banking, you’re just going to struggle on through life. I don’t know anyone of my age group of any political persuasion who thinks that’s anything other than bloody unfortunate, really.”

Debt and struggle make for a grim forecast. Looking for something positive to say about being a student, I ask Bradby whether he remembers his freshers’ week. “God, I do! I remember- I tell you, I’m a reasonably gregarious person, but freshers’ week is the only time in my life when I’ve literally gone up and said hello to people I like the look of – I don’t mean girls I like the look of per se – just people who look like they’d be good fun. I’ve never done that before and I’ve never done it since. It’s quite liberating, in a way, to walk up to anyone and say ‘Hi, I’m Tom, how are you?’. From doing that, I’ve ended up with some really good friends, who are still really good friends now.” We both decided that, at the very least, this had to be reason enough to go to University. Stuff the debt.

What happened?

Thursday. The High Street. Quietly bustling with tourists. Brasenose and Univites work solidly beneath the towering spires of All Soul’s. Suddenly (it was remarkably sudden) a great horde of a couple of hundred students, staff and random anarchists comes streaming down the street. They’re waving placards and making lots of shouty sounds. ‘Vince Cable shame on you, shame on you for turning blue’ was one. Alighting next to the Schools, the mobocrats mill around for about ten minutes. Some people were protesting against the Browne review which, as you surely know by now, proposes huge increases in tuition fees and cuts in university funding. Vince Cable, the Business Secretary, cancelled his talk in the Schools at the last minute. The protest was designed to coincide with this visit. The organisers decided to go ahead with it anyway.

What the papers say

It got on the BBC news. ‘Cable cancels Oxford visit’ drooled the press. Yet again, the Oxford angle is what makes the story.
What the dear old Cherwell had to say was more focussed on the protests themselves, or rather the reaction to them. Police were allegedly heavy-handed, perhaps excessively so. One St Hildan remarked, ‘I saw two cops trying to beat up a guy, I asked them to stop and a policeman grabbed me by the neck and threw me to the floor’. Sizzling stuff, especially when there were originally no scheduled plans for protests.

What now?

Unless Cable had actually been bludgeoned to death on arrival – not completely inconceivable given the violent SWP-themed protestors – it is hard to see what difference this will make to government policy. The sad thing is that if the protests hadn’t happened and Vince hadn’t cancelled, he would have been able to answer questions from an all-welcome student audience. This might have given him a better idea of what their views are. Instead he just sits in an office being told what the civil service wants him to be told. It’s a sad day for democracy: voices aren’t heard and there’s bugger all change. It was, however, a grand day out, and what’s also brilliant is that politicians were clearly too terrified to face the very people who use the services they want to cut. But by all accounts the a watered-down Browne review will pass the House of Commons and give future students an awful lot of debt. So for all the waving and shouting and being thrown to the floor, nothing will change.

What was the presidential election about?

The election of 2010 was a basically a plebiscite: did voters approve of the last eight years President Lula’s government? The answer was yes. Lula’s two terms in office were marked by strong economic growth, low inflation, rising personal incomes, declining inequality and a greater presence of Brazil on the international stage. In 2010, the outgoing President commands an 80% approval rating and the economy will grow by more than 7%. In opinion polls, large majorities of Brazilians expressed their hope that the next president would continue Lula’s policies. Not surprisingly, Lula’s preferred candidate, Dilma Rousseff, won handily.

Why has Lula’s Party been so successful?

Founded in 1980, the Workers’ Party (PT) defined itself as a “democratic socialist” party and as a “modern” party, meaning that it rejected traditional corrupt political practices. Over the next two decades it moved toward the centre-left not simply as a result of global ideological changes but also because of trial and error at the local level. By the time Lula won power in 2002, nearly a third of Brazilians had lived under PT mayors or state governors, and voters were familiar with the party’s reputation for innovative, transparent government. There is also no doubt that Lula’s charisma and leadership skills were hugely important. Lula taught the PT that the left could not govern alone, but only by making cross-party alliances with the centre and right.

What will it mean for Brazil abroad?

Brazil’s influence has grown in recent years partly because global power shifts (e.g. the rise of China, the decline of the U.S. economy) have provided new windows of opportunity. The country is fortunate to have a talented diplomatic corps which is particularly astute at acting within international organizations, so it has seized many new opportunities. But again, the respect accorded to the globetrotting Lula (“Bono with a beard”) has enhanced Brazil’s visibility and stature. President Dilma will maintain the general lines of Brazilian international strategy, without presidentializing the policy-making process. She is a managerial personality with a strong domestic impulse, and is more interested in focusing on Brazil’s infrastructure than on its global projection. Diplomats will once again step into that role.

What is the future for Brazilian democracy?

Brazil is a consolidated democracy. The system is based on intense competition and high participation, and there are no major anti-democratic forces. This was the fifth consecutive election fought between the same two parties (PT and PSDB), and once again the victor (Dilma Rousseff) has a strong mandate. But Lula is a tough act to follow. It is hard to overestimate Lula’s impact on national politics (one has to go back to 1960, to find a presidential election in which he was not a candidate), so all eyes will be on the relationship between the former president and his successor.

Tea, history and football are three things that Britain is world-renowned for. As I sat doing some history in Brasenose Library last Thursday, it suddenly dawned on me that the British are awful at protests.

Looking down on the High Street at the swathe of students marching against the Browne Review last Thursday, this was clear for all to see. Protesters were queuing and walking round with an air of politeness that the British public are world famous for. There were obviously no football fans in the crowd, either, because the chants were rubbish too. The protesters had no coherent idea about what they were protesting about. The spending cuts? Fee rises? The creation of a Marxist state? I honestly couldn’t tell you.
Unlike the Americans, the British do not do a good peaceful protest. We cannot muster up enough support to march peacefully and effectively. No Britain has a made an oratorical submission to the history of peaceful protest to rival that of Malcom X or Martin Luther King for African American Civil Rights.

Unlike the French, we cannot do violent protest either. In 1968, Parisian students, disgusted at a ban on having women in their rooms, decided to take over the city and came close to overthrowing the government. Now, there were some banners last Thursday which said ‘change the streets of Oxford into Paris’, but this simply isn’t the British way. Violent and forceful British protests usually lead to claims of police brutality from protesters and the police saying that they were just responding to violence instigated by troublemakers. It’s safer than Paris, though – there, they sent in the army and the president retreated to a nuclear bunker.

What was achieved by the Oxford protests? They stopped Vince Cable from visiting, they caused the Bod and Brasenose to shut down, and gave the Socialist Worker its widest circulation in Oxford since World War Two.

But, although they achieved little of value, the protests still provided me with light entertainment for the afternoon. They also provided great distraction from my essay and also proved that radicalism is not dead in Oxford just yet. We just need to put a bit more effort into it.

As I walked around Oxford yesterday, I was struck by the number of leaves changing colour: it seems as if everything’s changed from a week or two ago, when many fewer of those leaves had fallen and it still felt as if the vestiges of an Indian summer remained. Now it feels decisively like autumn. There’s a crisp chill in the air, a reminder that winter will soon arrive. And the coming of winter means many things to many people. To me, yes, it will mean colder weather and a greyer sky – but it also means snow, Christmas lights and holiday music, which I love. Looking ahead to winter, it might seem hard to choose – whether it is one’s favourite or most hated season?

The swirling of those leaves is an uncanny reminder of the day, very late in September, when I walked into Town Hall in my Connecticut town and sat down to vote early, an option given in my state at the time I was home (though, as they did not yet have ballots with the names of the candidates printed on them, I was given a list and wrote them in myself). It still felt like the end of summer then, but writing down names on the ballot provided, if temporarily, a glimpse into the future.

And the next day I got on a plane at Newark Airport and arrived in England, where the weather was already much cooler and autumn seemed to spring eternal. This physical relocation mirrored itself in the transformation of my mindset, now attuned, as were those of most Americans, to the midterm elections and to what they would bring to our country.

I consider myself an independent, probably leaning conservative fiscally, and a bit more liberal culturally. Without naming the candidates I voted for, suffice it to say that I looked past the parties they belonged to and focused more on the issues they stood for. This resulted in split-ticket voting, not pulling the lever straight down one party line. In a state like mine, you’ll see many more independently-minded members of both parties, because of the regional differences and disparate wings of both the Republicans and Democrats. And more extreme positions on many of the issues won’t fly.

At least, that’s what I’d thought. Throughout October, I would read the New York Times and Wall Street Journal and Washington Post online, headlines appearing every day about the triumph of candidates whose candidacy in any other year but this would have been unthinkable. The rise of the Tea Party and its influence on both the Republican establishment and the minds of voters across America marked a significant new wave in a swiftly rolling tide.
The Tea Party’s rise seems to have crested in this election. Charlie Crist, previously believed to be a shoo-in for the Florida Senate as a moderate Republican, last night finished a distant second to upstart Marco Rubio after dropping out of the Republican primary to run as an independent. Rand Paul, son of libertarian presidential candidate Ron Paul, managed a similar feat in Kentucky, defeating Trey Grayson (handpicked by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell) in the Republican primary and trouncing his Democratic opponent in the election.

On the other hand, Tea Party candidates whose campaigns proved more controversial and who seemed less qualified for office did not prevail. Harry Reid, who against any other Republican candidate probably would have lost his Senate seat in Nevada, prevailed over Sharron Angle. And in Delaware, Democratic candidate Chris Coons trounced Christine O’Donnell, confirming the belief of many in the political world that her initial defeat of Mike Castle in the Republican primary would cost the party a good chance at picking up another Senate seat.

So it would seem that just like the leaves swirling in the wind, marking an inevitable change in the season, the Republican victory this midterm signalled a decisive shift in the balance of power in Washington. Although the votes have not all been tallied at this time, the Republicans have picked up at least 60 seats to gain a majority in the House of Representatives, and at least 6 seats in the Senate, which they will not control. They’ve also picked up a multitude of governorships.

A race or two in my own state is still undecided, as are others across the nation, but the focus has now shifted to what this new Congress will do. Winter may be coming, but whether it will be one of grey skies and sleet, gloom and doom, or one of white snowflakes swirling to replace the autumn leaves and joyous holiday cheer remains to be seen, as does the direction of the action our government will take. One can only hope that its members will come together to put our country on the right track.