Waking up on the morning of 24th June 2016, Jonathan Coe, with 30 years of satirising politics behind him, must have known that, eventually, it would all have to go into a novel. Coe’s novels, What A Carve Up!, tackling Thatcherism, the City, and factory farming – and The Rotters’ Club, a bildungsroman-come-meditation on Irish Nationalism and unions in 70s Birmingham – had established Coe’s reputation as Britain’s foremost political satirist. Middle England – Coe’s most recent novel, released on the 8th of November – is inevitably about Brexit. 

Middle England is a diorama of public and private narratives, where Coe extends the characters from The Rotters’ Club and 2005’s The Closed Circle to an unplanned third. An academic art-historian – exiled from cosmopolitan London for a teaching fellowship in her home-town Birmingham – marries a driving instructor after speeding to catch the train back to the capital; a political journalist gets the inside line on Cameron and May in Downing Street; Benjamin Trotter, the hero of The Rotters’ Club, has bought a house in Shropshire, where he writes the novel that will make his name. In the background, recent history rolls on: Clegg and Cameron, the Olympics, the 2015 election and Brexit.

I met Jonathan Coe in Chelsea on a Wednesday afternoon, where we drunk coffee; preparing for the release of the new book with profiles in The Times and Guardian features, he’s pleased with it. “I think it’s one of my best books,” he said. Coe’s most recent release was Number 11, a hilarious and acerbic take on the social and cultural contradictions of British society in 2015. I read it in one sitting; if Coe’s anything, he’s supremely readable. But Number 11 was also perceptive and – ultimately – disturbingly moving. Coe’s novels have the rare ability to mix real humour with insight. “There’s this cliche that all comedy writers are morose people and it’s pretty much true in my experience.” he said. “Myself included. It’s because writing funny stuff is difficult.”

What drives Coe’s humour is the ebb and flow of daily life, and all the mundanities of being a person, in a family and in the world; “I don’t have a theory – it’s not a polemic thing that books should be funny – but I find that I try to convey the texture of real life as accurately as I can, and laughter seems an important part of that to me.” Coe’s books are also intricately constructed, with a Dickensian eye for narrative architecture; “The whole fun of it for me  – the buzz I get from it – is from the connection process. This is why I don’t write short stories. The idea of taking discrete scenes and treating them separately as someone would do if they were writing a book of short stories doesn’t appeal to me.”

Middle England’s plot is a web closely woven around the idea of English provincialism; it concerns the clash between the Metropolitan south and the post-industrial provinces north of Birmingham, where automobile factories are replaced by department stores and garden centres selling sheds colonise roadsides. I asked Coe about the plot’s provincial dynamic:  “The woman [the novel’s main character] very much feels that London is her home but is living in Birmingham with her husband and commuting down a few days a week.” he told me.”That tug between the first and second city is felt very strongly in the book,” he continued “and gives it a lot of it’s tension. It’s a huge subject, and the Referendum has shown that. The Referendum was a provincial vote.”

We spoke briefly about Brexit. Coe – who speaks slowly, with a sense of cautious consideration – is as confused by it all as the rest of us: “I think what frustrates me most and what makes me most crazy of all is this fact is that come March 9th, next year, there will be no majority for Leave in this country. Demographically, enough elderly voters – who overwhelmingly voted Leave, will have passed and enough young people, who would have overwhelmingly voted Remain will have come of age.”

Jonathan Coe does not support Brexit – so much is clear. But much of what’s best about Middle England is it’s refusal to take an easy or obvious side. In one section, Coe depicts an elderly Brexit voter and former factory worker in British Leyland’s Longbridge plant, realising – in his old age – that the factory where he spent his working days is gone. It’s an unexpectedly moving scene – it brought me closer to tears than anything else I’ve recently read: characterisations of elderly Brexiteers as anachronistically patriotic and regressively reactionary frequently miss the emotional difficulties of living in a country different from the one which brought you up.

And then the main character, Sophie, an Art History lecturer, is disciplined for a seemingly harmless comment to a trans student, and almost loses her job; the situation is unfair and it’s hard not to feel deeply angry for her and on her behalf – until a scene where other characters discuss trans-suicides statistics. After reading Middle England I was reminded that nothing is simply right or wrong; I left it wary of the over-generalisations which foment, too slowly to notice, into careless prejudices.

Coe was himself born in Birmingham, where he attended the prestigious King Edward’s School – remodelled as King William’s for The Rotters’ Club. Then he went to university. “Suddenly I was at Cambridge.” he told me. “What it seems to me now is that I was so young then that I didn’t understand anything that was happening at Cambridge until years after. It was a procession of intense experiences which are only beginning to make sense to me now, years afterwards. I was meeting Harrovians, Etonians, and kids from Westminster and St Paul’s. The intellectual and social snobbery was quite striking.”

“Also,” he continued, “we were provincial and a lot of these public schoolboys and girls – London was already their playground, and I’d only been to London a handful of times. It’s a big and scary place.” 

After Coe left Cambridge – where he attended an impressive total of four lectures, as he told me – he begun a PhD on the novelist Henry Fielding, in Warwick. “I had it very easy in retrospect.” Jonathan said. “I wrote two novels while I was in Cambridge, and managed to emerge with a 2:1. I wrote two more novels while I was at Warwick and managed to finished my thesis, and then I moved to London in 1986 and moved to a council flat I was paying £8 a week for and lived quite comfortably on the dole, writing.” I asked him if he thought that would be possible these days. “I didn’t feel any of this burden of expectation on me in any of those situations,” he responded, “whereas, though, the heat is on young people these days.”

Writing takes time, and thought, and a certain amount of leisure; in the 80s, when Jonathan was setting out, he had the time to turn ideas over in his mind, to let things develop. It’s hard to imagine even the laziest of Oxbridge undergraduates pulling together whole novels these days. “To speak very generally, I just feel the pressure on young people to do well in school, to do well in University, to do well afterwards, seems much stronger than it was in my day.”

Henry Fielding, the 18th century comic novelist of Shamela and Tom Jones’ fame remains an central influence for Coe’s work; Henry Fielding was a satirist and humorist who laid the foundations for the British sense of humour; “Henry Fielding remains my icon, I guess – for his geniality, his generosity of spirit, his ability to combine public and private narratives, his sense of the architecture of a book as being the most important thing.”

Despite Coe’s deep foundations in the English traditions – with humour, lyricism, and grand, interconnected plots, his books sell well on the continent – particularly in France, where he was awarded Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters in 2016 and is described as the most popular British author. I asked him why he thinks this is; for a writer with an undeniably British slant, it surprises me that his writing has sold so well in translation. ‘It’s a total mystery,” he said. “Traditionally the British sense of humour has exported quite well to other European countries, particularly the more physical, slapstick stuff – they love Mr Bean, they love Benny Hill still, they love Monty Python, and I guess the humour in my books is very British. Whatever that means.”

His work is British in more than just it’s humour; Middle England frequently adopts a lyrical and elegant tone almost reminiscent of Hardy’s sense of Wessex, and at points – when a pregnancy unites a formerly fractured marriage, or when the elderly man discovers the factory he knew so well has gone – we hear resonances of the broader tradition in English, of George Eliot, and EM Forster. But Middle England ends in France, where Benjamin Trotter buys a mill-house with his sister, and the novel’s warmest scenes, in many ways, take place in the French Riviera. Middle England is a book about middle England – both the geographical midlands and the country’s social centre – but it projects an international and European perspective on the country we are to become, one where former divisions slowly heal.

“Jacob is one of the new breed of serious students intent upon the maintenance of good old fashioned standards.” So read one column in a late 1980s copy of Cherwell, in which many of the current crop of big names at Westminster infamously and predictably feature in all their glory. I put this to Rees-Mogg as a opener, hoping to begin with the Jacob this University once knew. After all, rarely a moment passes these days without the Honourable Member for North East Somerset being splashed across the headlines on Europe. Where did it all begin?

“I am a Conservative,” he launches, “and Conservatives are in the business of preserving what is best about the present… and not changing for changing’s sake, so that would still be true.” Not exactly new terrain! In characteristic and historicised bluster, he assures me his trajectory to the centre of our politics is motivated by a desire to improve “the condition of the nation…in Disraelian terms.”

Rees-Mogg is undoubtedly and unapologetically as elite as it gets. Eton preceded Oxford, and investment management at Rothschild followed it. A backbencher since 2010, he now chairs the European Research Group, the main Tory organ of hard Brexit advocacy chipping away at the Government. To many, Rees-Mogg is the paradigm of the establishment, but at the same time he appears a maverick sniping at it on the main issue of our day. I ponder how he reflects on this contradiction.

“To some extent I know the establishment only too well, but perhaps because I know it well I know what’s wrong with it. I think the problem with the British establishment is that it has for too long thought that its main object was to manage decline.” This is recognisably Thatcherite in tone, those sympathetic might say admirably honest. “I think the Government’s negotiations have been much too much about [this] than about getting the Brexit prize. The excitement of politics is to make things better all the time, its looking for constant improvement.”

In the last weeks, EU leaders have again met to discuss the latest state Brexit negotiations. The border in Ireland remains unsolved as a flashpoint of the talks, haunting Mrs May. Just before we speak, Rees-Mogg’s European Research Group threw their weight behind a Canada-plus arrangement as an alternative to Chequers. The retort from Downing Street had predictably followed, insisting that no third party trade deal has ever reduced hard borders.

This is risible, insists Rees-Mogg. “To say no trade deal has ever reduced hard borders is simply untrue. The European Union is in essence a trade deal which is what it began with, which is why the EU has complete control over our trade policy at the moment. Whichever Downing Street spokesman said that should be sent off to Oxford to have a remedial history course, they might not make such silly comments.”

What about the claim that the stockpiling of medicines and a new food supplies minister is a sign of an impending cross-border trade disaster? Rees-Mogg offers a retort of his own: “It’s Project Fear on speed…this is all hysterical, and shouldn’t be taken seriously.”

Amidst the political dogfighting and bravado that dominates Westminster, Rees-Mogg insists his Brexit can uphold the sovereignty of the nation. I wonder how this is possible given the apparent need for customs controls between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK in any Canada style trade agreement. “The definitely would not happen,” Rees-Mogg claims, citing the precedents already applied by the EU on its other external borders. He simply adds, rhetorically: “We’re one country, the EU cannot be allowed to chop up the United Kingdom.”

Few would dispute that endlessly repetitive sloganeering across the spectrum has done little for the quality of the debate, other than supply ministers a veneer of conviction behind which they can hide. It seems the campaign for a Peoples’ Vote is starting to pierce through this, backed here now of course by Oxford SU. Activists amassed in London on the recent march for a Peoples’ Vote. There is of course no need to establish Rees-Mogg’s position on another vote, but what of his justification? Nothing is undemocratic, surely, about confirming public support on the precise details of the deal agreed. In any case wouldn’t it be better for advocates of Brexit to ratify the ideas they seem so confident about?

“Well what’s your question?” Rees-Mogg answers combatively, audibly irritated at this challenge. “You’re asking the question, you’ve got to specify, what type of referendum are you asking people to sign up to?”

After a to and fro as to what’s on the ballot paper, I insist its about keeping options open to the public. This receives little recognition. “People have voted to Leave, they’ve made that decision. They made that decision two years ago.”

“Can we then have another vote a year later to decide whether we are going to stay in the European Union? Make it the best of three! What you’re saying is that the people who lost want us to keep on voting until they win, and then they want to stop voting. My answer to that is this is simply an abuse of the democratic process…the only people who want a second vote are people who lost the first time round, that don’t accept the democratic decision that was made in 2016.”

We become so engrossed in the back and forth on Europe that we almost lose sight of my opening enquiry into Rees-Mogg’s university days. I return to his mantra of “not changing for changing’s sake.” ‘Change’, of course, is among the first words off the lips of many MPs when the topic of Oxford rears its head. After all, there are more students from Westminster School than there are black students in last year’s intake. The top twelve independent schools outnumber all state comps. I wonder whether Rees-Mogg sees this as a ‘social apartheid’, like his colleague David Lammy MP.

“No, I don’t agree with that. I think that Oxford exists to have a complete focus on academic excellence…you see it across the country with people being told they shouldn’t apply to Oxford…that’s wrong and Oxford is right to get out and about.”

This is perfectly acceptable in theory, but in practice resources for teachers and students have been stretched across the country since at least the start of the decade. One can hardly argue that there is an equality of opportunity nationwide. Surely, we’ll unfairly miss some of the best and brightest, and restrict our University’s diversity and inclusion? I put the case for more lenient entry standards for those from disadvantaged and underrepresented backgrounds.

“That is the wrong approach, that is a desperately condescending approach,” he shoots back, the most animated in our discussion so far. “The issue for Oxford is to increase the numbers applying from diverse backgrounds rather than trying to fill quotas which would damage the academic excellence of Oxford, as if it were just a quota machine.”

It’s clear Rees-Mogg cares about this place and its traditions. After all, he is still the Honorary President of OUCA, in the news of late for the controversy surrounding banning the Bullingdon Club. He also sits as a Trustee of the Oxford Union’s parent body, having been Librarian. Once a keen student politician, Rees-Mogg’s stand on free speech seems especially pertinent. So often the lightening rod for criticism of students, I wonder how this noted debater will react when I explain some in Oxford will likely forward an argument that to no-platform him and his views would the right step.

“That is the beginnings of a totalitarian regime. Not only are they threatening free speech which is a good thing in an academic setting, but they’re also threading the fundamentals of the Constitution.” With such dramatic rhetoric its clear Rees-Mogg joins the choirs of onlookers who cry ‘crisis’ and ‘fiasco’ at student debate. He adds: “It always used to be that there used to be a very strong tradition of defending free speech on the Left.”

This seems the appropriate moment to bring up the controversial social views Rees-Mogg has himself shared with television and student audiences across the country. There seems a disconnect between his outwardly polite and affable nature, and his positions on gay marriage and abortion that many find abhorrent. To the challenge that such views are homophobic and misogynistic, he shoots back: “I think that’s simply wrong. Whenever people resort to abuse in terms of an argument, they have lost the argument.

“They need to put counter argument that deal with the substance of what is being said. The issue with abortion is that there are two lives and you have to consider both lives…life is being ended and that is not something that can simply be ignored. If you look at opinion polling, you seem to see that more women have concerns over abortion than men, whatever it is it’s not an anti-women view.”

Whilst many of us might find Rees-Mogg’s views unappetising, it’s clear he won’t be retreating from view any time soon. We cannot ignore his viewpoints. I wrap things up wondering what optimistic message he can offer to young people on our current political state. Perhaps this will initiate some kind of common ground?

“For young people this must surely be the most exciting opportunity because who would you rather decide who leads your life: you or somebody else? Surely you want to decide how your own life is led? We’ll do it better than anyone else will do it for you…”

This of course remains to be seen. As our and our country’s future is deliberated for us away from view, I hope Rees-Mogg pauses to consider the strength of feeling among most young people; that the step we’re about to take is both wrong and deeply upsetting. I really do.