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How Columnist Marina Hyde Became Britain’s Chronicler-In-Chief

By Olivia Marks

The UK is in the stifling, sweaty grips of a historic heatwave , but in the library of The Standard in London, a fire is roaring. It’s a slightly bemusing choice, but then, so is the hotel’s book arrangement – take the “Politics” section, which is housed next to “Tragedy”. “It’s not the classic Dewey Decimal system is it,” deadpans Marina Hyde, 48, surveying the room as she settles into a leather armchair in front of “Environmental Sciences” and “Despair”.

As settings go, it feels a little on-the-nose for a meeting with, arguably, this country’s foremost living satirist, one who – through Brexit, four Tory prime ministers, Trump and a global pandemic, via narcissistic celebrities, evil billionaires, disgraced princes, and, of course, spineless politicians – has become the chief chronicler of our stranger-than-fiction times.

Twice a week since 2016, Hyde’s dispatches for The Guardian have become the first stop for anyone looking for comedic peace of mind in a mind-bending news cycle. And, it turns out, there are many (her most popular columns can amass over a million page views). The hellscape has proved the making of Hyde. Her Twitter following has ballooned to almost half a million, with everyone from Grayson Perry and Gary Lineker to Phoebe Waller-Bridge among her devoted readers (“the most lethal, vital, screamingly funny truth-teller of our time” is how the latter describes her). Elton John – who’d previously threatened legal action against Hyde for a spoof diary entry she’d written – recently called her up to let her know how much he’d been enjoying her work. “Total mensh,” she grins.

A “mad fever dream” is how she describes the past six years when we meet to talk about her upcoming book, What Just Happened?! , which brings together many of her most electric columns into a handy single volume. Split into chapters grouping political events by year, interspersed with others on celebrity and sport, it will offer, as Hyde explains in the introduction, a “record of an era in which… it often seemed like the UK had tumbled down a rabbit hole”.

“I have to say, I’ve been rather lucky to be paid to write my way through it,” Hyde says, sipping on a lemonade. “Because it has been total chaos. People do tell you to write down your feelings in a journal, mine just happens to be public.”

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In person, Hyde crackles with the same non-stop energy as her writing, but with fewer of the wincingly acerbic barbs that made her name. She is effusive and self-deprecating (she insists that her line of work “is a trade, not an art”), and is conscious of the impression she is creating. Before we meet, she fires off several emails. “hello to you, olivia!” screams the first, in which she wants me to know that, in the event she’s late to our interview (she’s not), she isn’t pulling a Mariah Carey (“goddess, obviously, but not too punctual”), which is followed by another containing a styling suggestion for her upcoming British Vogue shoot – a link to a £15,500 Moncler Genius padded gown by Pierpaolo Piccioli that resembles a floor-length sleeping bag. “Thinking something super low-key,” she writes.

Her outfit for our interview is a tad more understated: printed red dress and sculptural gold hoop earrings, the long blonde bob from her byline picture – one of very few images of her that exist on the internet – unchanged. For such a media stalwart (Hyde has written a regular column for The Guardian for 20 years, first covering celebrity and football – she is the only woman to have won sports writer of the year at the British Sports Journalism Awards – before pivoting to politics) she is largely absent from the public eye. You won’t see her on quiz shows or news programmes or panels. “You’ve heard of a face for radio, this is an accent for print,” she says by way of explanation in, it has to be said, surprisingly plummy tones. There is fascinating incongruity with the arch banter she deploys to delicious effect for her left-leaning paper.

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So be it. The jolly hockey sticks voice can be traced to her upbringing: Hyde grew up in Hampshire, the daughter of Sir Alastair Edgcumbe James Dudley-Williams, 2nd Baronet and Diana Elizabeth Jane Duncan. Her paternal grandfather was the aviation pioneer and Conservative politician Sir Rolf Dudley-Williams. Have her columns ever caused any friction at home in the Tory heartland?

“Oh, my God, they couldn’t be more proud and lovely about all of them,” she says of her parents. “We’ve always had huge, great arguments and debates about all of these things all my life. My parents voted Brexit – I like talking to people who have different views. I much, much prefer that. I think we are going to have to get back to some form of – at least respectful – disagreement if any of this enormous mess is going to get solved.”

Hyde was “fascinated” by politics as a child, and initially wanted to pursue it as a career. So when she arrived at Oxford to study English in the late 1990s, she made a beeline for the Union. “Talk about 10th circle of hell,” she says. “It was so dreadful. In that moment, I had this terrible realisation that, actually, real politics was like this. It was a horrendous scales falling from the eyes. This thing I’d wanted to do all my life I no longer wanted to do at all, because of the people.” Half of them, she notes, are now “probably in the cabinet”.

Sweater dress and shirt, Tod’s. Leather boots, Jimmy Choo. Bicolour gold and diamond earrings, and gold and diamond necklace, Jessica Mccormack. Ear cuffs, Marina’s own.

Instead, she temped as a receptionist (not a secretary she points out, because, ironically, she “wasn’t quick enough at typing”), which is how she ended up at The Sun in the late ’90s answering the phones on the showbiz desk. She found it utterly intoxicating.

“You’d have someone ring up and say, ‘I’m in bed with Robbie Williams, do you want to write the story?’” she recalls, breathless with excitement at the memory. “I mean, it was absolutely hilarious. It was constant mayhem.” Up until then, the world of newspapers hadn’t been a consideration, but in 2000 she landed her first proper gig at The Guardian , writing its Diary column, before starting the cult, long-running celebrity column Lost in Showbiz.

“It was a real sandbox,” she says. “I could do what I wanted with it – I definitely wouldn’t be writing about politics in the way I do if I hadn’t done that.” It is her ability to draw from popular culture and sport, alongside history and politics that make Hyde’s columns so appealing. “Most people don’t know all these obscure political references, but everyone likes [Taylor Swift’s] ‘Blank Space,’” she reasons. “I get very annoyed by people who will pretend not to know who Kim Kardashian is,” she groans. “Nobody ever says, ‘Who’s Cristiano Ronaldo?’”

Now, she does much of her work at 5am, bashing out her columns from the West London home she shares with her husband of more than two decades, Kieran Clifton, the BBC’s director of distribution and business development, and their three children (“I can see the Russian embassy out of my window, so there’s always something to watch.”)

“Anything good” she’s ever written has, she says, come after having kids (she had her first at 36 and the third three-and-a-half years later), “because I became far more organised and efficient.” She likes to surround herself with people “from every decade” – one of her great friends is 80, they walk together once a week – but she will never “go to any social occasions with politicians”. She says, “I think it’s really difficult to write dispassionately about people with whom you share some form of social life.”

Indeed. I’m not convinced she’d receive a particularly warm reception (or invite) at, say, Chequers with descriptions of the former PM that include him looking like “Chucky if he’d borrowed a suit for a court appearance, or a Yewtree version of Worzel Gummidge”. Of Theresa May, she wrote that she mostly resembled “a Quentin Blake drawing of an unravelling postmistress”.

Surprisingly few ever complain though. But then, “it’s a terrible show of weakness to have read [the column]”, she says with a laugh. “Johnson always when I’ve seen him has gone –” she looks down and gruffly shakes her head. “I think that’s absolutely ridiculous. What he should really do is pretend that he’s never seen it at all.”

Besides, it is precisely not her job to paint flattering pictures of those in power. And they make it fabulously easy. Compared to New Labour, says Hyde, when “they were so scared that Alastair Campbell or Peter Mandelson would put a bullet in their head if they said one wrong thing, this is the Wild West. You’ve got Nadine Dorries saying mad things, Jacob Rees-Mogg on Twitter – all these people who will say anything for attention. So much of it is about attention.”

“I think the calibre of politicians is very, very badly depleted,” she continues. “The Conservative Party has been in a constant election cycle, but to do what? You feel they just want to be in power. They don’t seem to have any form of programme or any idea of how to achieve it. I find it really depressing.”

For all the abject absurdity of 2022, so too is there much rage and terror. On the precipice of fuel poverty and looming recession, with a government mostly obsessed by its own machinations, how does Hyde stop the bleakness edging in?

“I’ve always felt the best way to do things is to kind of keep that angry voice out in general,” she says. “The less ostensibly serious my columns became, the more they were able to make serious points.” Now, as we enter autumn and a new administration, she is desperate “for some new characters”, she says. “Who’s in our fall collection?” she smiles, a glint in her eye. “Who have we got? I’m dying to know.”

What Just Happened?!: Dispatches from Turbulent Times by Marina Hyde is out on 6 October

Hair: Tomi Roppongi. Make-up: Crystabel Riley. Nails: Sabrina Gayle. Digital Artwork: Mammoth Retouch

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‘Out of the inferno, into the shark attack’: Marina Hyde on capturing six years of political chaos

From Brexit to Boris, Trump to Truss, there’s been no shortage of material for the Guardian columnist. But as the omnishambles becomes a permacrisis, even she wants it to stop …

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The past few years have been an age of abundance for the news columnist. For pretty much everyone else, they have been an age of gathering chaos and rising disbelief. The news gods are so deeply committed to providing their own metaphors that our septic isle is now literally lapped at by tides of sewage. I don’t know if future historians will officially slap the permacrisis label on us, but as someone whose job it is to write about the news, I need hardly point out there hasn’t exactly been a shortage of material. Even I am on the point of launching a “ S top the news ” campaign, and will inform you of how to join the push for total stasis as soon as I get membership badges sorted.

This has been a period when it often seemed like the UK (and beyond) had tumbled down a rabbit hole. Or gone through the looking-glass. Or maybe got trapped in the ancient curse: “May you live in interesting times.” Things seem to have become permanently “interesting”.

When I came to select columns to include in my new book, I was struck by how many confusing and frequently still-unresolved twists and turns there have been. That’s why I’ve called it What Just Happened?! I’m told they call a question mark and an exclamation mark together an “interrobang” – and I hope my use of one conveys the sheer, category-five “answer TBC” of what we’ve all lived through. In recent years, many of you will have sent news stories to your friends and family accompanied only by that punctuation mark: ?! It’s very much the age of the interrobang, where one’s reaction to almost every development is a mildly strangled, “Really?! Really ?!”

Weirdly, I discovered when going through the 47 trillion words I’ve written since 2016 that I often don’t even have a memory of writing half of them. It slightly felt like I had written a book I hadn’t read. A bit like Katie Price – only instead of not having even skimmed a single one of my seven autobiographies, I was completely in the dark about other stuff. Take the whole week of daily columns in March 2019, focusing on something called “indicative votes”. What in the name of sanity were they? I’ve heard of past-lives therapy; maybe I need past-columns therapy. Just as distinguished Hollywood crazy Shirley MacLaine is convinced she previously walked the earth as Charlemagne’s Moorish peasant lover, so I could be assured that I really did once, only last year, turn out 1,100 words on how Boris Johnson had literally swapped bodies with his dog . I mean, it sounds like something I might have done? And I don’t think I have an alibi for it?

In the end, those columns are just my record of an era in which so many of us – but not all! – felt the news had become stranger than fiction. For instance, in the space of a very short time in early 2019, Tory MP Mark Francois and novelist Will Self had a spat about the size of Mark’s penis on a midday politics TV show; a Ukip leader wrote to the Queen and informed her she had committed treason when she signed the Maastricht treaty; and a Conservative MP stood up in the Commons and intoned to the house: “ This is a turd of a deal , which has now been taken away and polished, and is now a polished turd. But it might be the best turd that we’ve got.”

Let’s face it, you had to laugh. Indeed, I hope you got several belly cackles in the bank, because within a year we would be in the midst of a deadly global pandemic. Very, very interesting times indeed.

I know some people like to think of column-writing as an art, but, for me, it’s definitely not. It’s a trade. You get up, you write something to fill a space, and you hope it’s not one of your worst shots and that readers enjoy it. Maybe some columnists are out there imagining they’re writing the first draft of history, but I feel like I’m just sticking a pin in a moment. In fact, I often feel that if I wrote my column in the afternoon, it would say something completely different from whatever I’d ended up writing that morning. “Do you still think this, six years on?” “Oh my God – I probably didn’t even think it by teatime that da y.”

I look back on plenty of my articles, particularly a couple from 2016 in the immediate wake of the Brexit vote, and think: “Oh, do get over yourself, luv – do you have any idea how histrionic you sound?” Like I say, columns are just a moment in time – and in those cases, perhaps some howl of entitled despair that liberals like me had to work through. After all, as was made abundantly clear from 2016 onwards, we were no longer flavour of the century. Yup, we’d got home to our ivory tower to find the locks had been changed. We had, in the immortal words of Chris Morris to Peter O’Hanraha-hanrahan in The Day Today , lost the news.

Having lost the news so decisively, I did think the sensible thing to do was to get out of the business of making predictions. Now, you might have noted this decision was not unanimously adopted by my profession. I can’t remember exactly when it hit me, but at a certain point I noticed how often political journalism was about predicting what was coming. We were suddenly awash with discussions about how the various stories were going to play out. Don’t get me wrong, I read and very much enjoyed most of it. But with the best will in the world, I’m not totally sure it’s the job of a journalist to tell you what’s going to happen next, as opposed to what’s just happened. Let’s be clear: the stuff that actually was occurring was wild enough. Even so, increasing amounts of content – particularly about where Brexit would end up – seemed to be a kind of futurology, with speculation about potential scenarios occasionally crowding out analysis of existing developments. I think it comes back to that thing of having lost the news. There was almost a cargo cult element to it all. If we just lay out the flowchart, if we just set out our logical case for how things should develop, then somehow – somehow! – the old familiar certainties will be airdropped back to us.

They haven’t been yet – but soon, no doubt. Any day now …

They say all comedy and tragedy flows from character – and looking back over the past six years, we’ve certainly been blessed/cursed with an eye-popping ensemble of characters. I haven’t just had politicians to write about – I’ve had wicked advisers, celebrities, Hollywood sex offenders, a queen, various princes and duchesses, reality TV monsters, billionaires, philanthropists, fauxlanthropists, judges, media barons, populists, police officers and all kinds of other heroes and villains. It’s been the full fairytale, in fact. Sometimes pretty Grimm. We’ve had bullshit purveyors from Gwyneth Paltrow to Nigel Farage, disaster artists from Boris Johnson to Donald Trump, PR meltdowns from Brad Pitt to Rebekah Vardy, miscast geniuses from Dominic Cummings to Richard Branson, and misunderstood “real victims in all this” from Prince Andrew to Harvey Weinstein. And Gregg Wallace . I sometimes feel we’ll always have Gregg Wallace.

To anyone kind enough to read them, I hope my twice-weekly chronicles have captured how the news felt to some of us, as we were put through it, seemingly on an endless wringer cycle. The Americans got Trump; UK citizens got the seemingly interminable Brexit wars. Everyone got plunged into a pandemic. How would you rate your satisfaction at your news journey, on a scale of one to the survivors of the USS Indianapolis? Those sailors got through the worst naval disaster in American history when their ship was torpedoed by the Japanese in 1945, and were then left bobbing in the Pacific Ocean. Subsequently, and over several days, they were subjected to the worst recorded shark attack in history. That has been the experience of the news cycle in recent times – out of the inferno, into the shark attack.

This year, horrifyingly, war has broken out in Europe. Unimaginable scenes that seem plucked from the darker parts of the 20th century have played out live on our TV screens. Elsewhere, Trump is once again the favourite to win the Republican nomination. Johnson was finally seen off – only to somehow already be the bookies’ favourite to succeed new prime minister Liz Truss as Tory leader. Meanwhile, the omnishambles era looks like the good old days, as we officially enter the realms of omnicrisis. And last month, the death of Queen Elizabeth II removed someone many saw as the last constant of British public life – and the last embodiment of a set of virtues increasingly absent from it.

Things will calm down. Won’t they? A non-scientific “most” people in the UK had absolutely had enough of politics by about six months after the Brexit vote in 2016. On the other hand, had we really? We supposedly hated it, but couldn’t stop rubbernecking at it. The BBC Parliament channel had never rated so highly. Westminster seemed to reach far beyond its bubble. A friend of mine was doing a comedy tour in September 2019, and I remember going to Worcester to see his show there. Having put my bag down in my hotel room, I went downstairs to the bar and beheld a selection of people at separate tables completely and utterly glued to the Sky News feed from the supreme court, where arguments on the lawful or otherwise prorogation of parliament were being heard. It was 3pm on a Tuesday afternoon. Without wishing to go out on a limb, it was difficult not to conclude that something quite odd had happened to the UK.

Having said that, I do have one small theory about what has happened both here and beyond. I think that reality television – the overwhelmingly dominant and highest-rating entertainment genre of the early 21st century – became reality politics. Instead of sitting back and having entertainment done to them, audiences in the reality TV heyday were given buttons to press and voting lines to call, and were invited to change the narrative themselves. They loved it. The X Factor had “kind of given democracy back to the world”, its supremo, Simon Cowell, noted mildly . At the height of his light-entertainment powers in 2009, Cowell was convinced that his next big will-of-the-people format would be “a political X Factor”, a “referendum-type TV show” in which viewers would vote on hot topics. No 10 would then be challenged to phone in to the studio and explain its position. Well, now … Be careful what Simon Cowell wishes for.

And, as shows like The X Factor and Strictly matured, a new phenomenon could be observed: people were taking increasing delight in voting for talentless or disruptive candidates, convinced they were sticking it to the experts. Wagner in The X Factor , John Sergeant on Strictly – maybe UK politics has just become the sort of dadaist space where people keep voting for the governance equivalent of Jedward. “We don’t care if some respected twat in London thinks we shouldn’t like these candidates,” voters seemed to be saying. “Indeed, the fact the respected twat doesn’t like them makes us like them all the more.” Muscles were being flexed. Control was being taken back.

Meanwhile, just as Big Brother or Survivor bookers once had, daytime TV shows started picking guests from the extremes because it made for better “conflict”. And in fairly short order the news programmes decided they wanted in on the drama, too. Adversarial punditry was in. Katie Hopkins started off as an Apprentice candidate, then moved on to the This Morning sofa to insult children with “common” names, eventually graduating to “alt-right” politics like it was the most seamless journey in the world. I don’t believe it’s a coincidence that the biggest reality TV star of the era eventually ended up in the White House.

I almost feel bad admitting it, but in general I have found writing about these turbulent years rather cathartic. Instead of having what we might call “unresolved news issues”, I have simply had to sit down, open a blank document and – on a good day – try to work out a way of making people laugh about some current events. This routine is pretty therapeutic. In fact, I think therapists do often recommend writing stuff down – which, news-wise, is pretty much my job. Indeed, in some weeks, things were so hilariously batshit that I did feel I was merely a stenographer.

It’s also helped that I’ve never thought of myself as a proper journalist or political writer or anything grand and professional like that. I started out in journalism entirely by accident, when the secretarial temping agency I worked for sent me to answer the phones on the Sun’s showbiz desk for a few days. I loved it – it was so much more hilarious than answering the phone in various banks, which is what I’d been doing for a long time before. But maybe because of that odd entry path I’ve never felt entirely “formal” on the old hackery front. After a long while in the trade, I finally realised this could be an asset. Or at least I gained the confidence to treat it as such. I stopped trying to emulate other people’s voices and found my own.

The first column I think I managed that with was a celebrity one I started in the Guardian called Lost in Showbiz . The mid-2000s was an amazing time to be writing about celebrity culture. I also had a sports column, which I’m afraid to say was vanishingly rare for a woman back then, and would go and cover live things like the World Cup and the Olympics, where that male-female imbalance among the press pack became even clearer. (It’s much better now.) So I always felt rather outsidery on the sports pages, too, and gradually realised that this actually gave me a lot of leeway. I didn’t have to cover things in some “expected” way, so I learned, on the job, to do my own thing.

In fact, I can now see that this is what helped me to find a way of writing about politics that I hoped would be more accessible. I tend to think very associatively, so for me the reflexive way of making sense of a lot of things is by using references to other things. I’m forever internally analogising. When it came to applying that to politics, I found drawing comparisons with political history and philosophy less amusing than drawing them with stuff like pop music or movies or football. For instance, I do feel that both Theresa May’s risk-averse approach to her calamitous 2017 general election campaign is best understood when you think that José Mourinho once advanced to the Champions League final after a game in which his side had had only 19% possession. The football writer Diego Torres once codified Mourinho’s style, concluding: “Whoever has the ball has fear. Whoever does not have it is thereby stronger.” (I fear this could also describe what I’ll call Starmerball.) Anyway, I just thought there might be a fun way of writing about politics that filtered it through the prisms of things people actually liked, given how many of them seemed to dislike politics itself.

People often ask me if I get feedback from those mentioned in my columns, and I have to say … no. It’s possible there are a couple of horses’ heads Royal Mail tried to deliver while I was out, but if so they’re decomposing somewhere in a sorting office. I do get absolutely wonderful feedback from Guardian readers, who send everything from jokes to poems to detailed alternative policy suggestions. One of my favourite strands of feedback comes from overseas readers, who often write in and say they have no idea who any of the people I’m writing about are, but very much enjoy the characters in the soap opera. The UK: now the world’s leading telenovela.

Even now, I always feel like more of an old-style blogger (albeit one lucky enough to be paid). I don’t really have any special access – once a year I might do something mad and masochistic like go to the party conferences – but in general I watch it all from the sofa at home, just like everyone else. Or, to put it another way, as far as political writing goes, I’m a cook, not a chef. So over the past few years I’ve tried above all to be a companion to any reader – to be a sympathetic friend, as opposed to an expert or educator. The latter is definitely a job for finer minds than mine. I can, however, do you fellow feeling and a few jokes. Just watched Michael Howard casually threaten war with Spain (April 2017)? Come and sit down next to me, and we’ll have a slightly deranged laugh about it together.

But – and with apologies to all the serious-minded big hitters out there – the companionable laughter space is a pretty great one to be in. As the past few years have gone by, more people have been kind enough to read my columns. And when a new one gets published, I’ve noticed an increasing number of readers saying that they’re saving it to read with a cup of tea or glass of wine. And that, honestly, is the nicest thing I can possibly imagine. If anything I write can be a brief but pleasurable part of someone’s downtime or relaxation, then that is my absolute honour. Saving me for a drink? Yes please! More than anything else in this entire crazy world, I want to be the journalistic equivalent of a chocolate digestive or packet of salt and vinegar crisps.

Quite heavy on the vinegar. Obviously.

• This is an edited extract from What Just Happened?! Dispatches from Turbulent Times by Marina Hyde, published by Guardian Faber (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com . Delivery charges may apply.

• Marina will join Guardian Live events in Manchester (4 October) and London (11 October, with Richard Osman ) to discuss her book.

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How Columnist Marina Hyde Became Britain’s Chronicler-In-Chief

By Olivia Marks

We may earn a commission if you buy something from any affiliate links on our site.

The U.K. is in the stifling, sweaty grips of a historic heatwave , but in the library of The Standard in London, a fire is roaring. It’s a slightly bemusing choice, but then, so is the hotel’s book arrangement—take the “Politics” section, which is housed next to “Tragedy.” “It’s not the classic Dewey Decimal system is it,” deadpans Marina Hyde, 48, surveying the room as she settles into a leather armchair in front of “Environmental Sciences” and “Despair.”

As settings go, it feels a little on-the-nose for a meeting with, arguably, the country’s foremost living satirist, one who—through Brexit, four Tory prime ministers, Trump, and a global pandemic, via narcissistic celebrities, evil billionaires, disgraced princes, and, of course, spineless politicians—has become the chief chronicler of our stranger-than-fiction times.

Twice a week since 2016, Hyde’s dispatches for The Guardian have become the first stop for anyone looking for comedic peace of mind in a mind-bending news cycle. And, it turns out, there are many (her most popular columns can amass over a million page views). The hellscape has proved the making of Hyde. Her Twitter following has ballooned to almost half a million, with everyone from Grayson Perry and Gary Lineker to Phoebe Waller-Bridge among her devoted readers (“the most lethal, vital, screamingly funny truth-teller of our time” is how the latter describes her). Elton John—who’d previously threatened legal action against Hyde for a spoof diary entry she’d written—recently called her up to let her know how much he’d been enjoying her work. “Total mensch,” she grins.

A “mad fever dream” is how she describes the past six years when we meet to talk about her upcoming book, What Just Happened?! , which brings together many of her most electric columns into a handy single volume. Split into chapters grouping political events by year, interspersed with others on celebrity and sport, it will offer, as Hyde explains in the introduction, a “record of an era in which… it often seemed like the U.K. had tumbled down a rabbit hole.”

“I have to say, I’ve been rather lucky to be paid to write my way through it,” Hyde says, sipping on a lemonade. “Because it has been total chaos. People do tell you to write down your feelings in a journal, mine just happens to be public.”

By Irene Kim

By Audrey Noble

In person, Hyde crackles with the same non-stop energy as her writing, but with fewer of the wincingly acerbic barbs that made her name. She is effusive and self-deprecating (she insists that her line of work “is a trade, not an art”), and is conscious of the impression she is creating. Before we meet, she fires off several emails. “hello to you, olivia!” screams the first, in which she wants me to know that, in the event she’s late to our interview (she’s not), she isn’t pulling a Mariah Carey (“goddess, obviously, but not too punctual”), which is followed by another containing a styling suggestion for her upcoming British Vogue shoot—a link to a £15,500 Moncler Genius padded gown by Pierpaolo Piccioli that resembles a floor-length sleeping bag. “Thinking something super low-key,” she writes.

Her outfit for our interview is a tad more understated: printed red dress and sculptural gold hoop earrings, the long blonde bob from her byline picture—one of very few images of her that exist on the internet—unchanged. For such a media stalwart (Hyde has written a regular column for The Guardian for 20 years, first covering celebrity and soccer—she is the only woman to have won sports writer of the year at the British Sports Journalism Awards—before pivoting to politics) she is largely absent from the public eye. You won’t see her on quiz shows or news programs or panels. “You’ve heard of a face for radio, this is an accent for print,” she says by way of explanation in, it has to be said, surprisingly plummy tones. There is fascinating incongruity with the arch banter she deploys to delicious effect for her left-leaning paper.

So be it. The jolly hockey sticks voice can be traced to her upbringing: Hyde grew up in Hampshire, the daughter of Sir Alastair Edgcumbe James Dudley-Williams, 2nd Baronet and Diana Elizabeth Jane Duncan. Her paternal grandfather was the aviation pioneer and Conservative politician Sir Rolf Dudley-Williams. Have her columns ever caused any friction at home in the Tory heartland?

“Oh, my God, they couldn’t be more proud and lovely about all of them,” she says of her parents. “We’ve always had huge, great arguments and debates about all of these things all my life. My parents voted Brexit—I like talking to people who have different views. I much, much prefer that. I think we are going to have to get back to some form of—at least respectful—disagreement if any of this enormous mess is going to get solved.”

Hyde was “fascinated” by politics as a child, and initially wanted to pursue it as a career. So when she arrived at Oxford to study English in the late 1990s, she made a beeline for the Union. “Talk about 10th circle of hell,” she says. “It was so dreadful. In that moment, I had this terrible realization that, actually, real politics was like this. It was a horrendous scales falling from the eyes. This thing I’d wanted to do all my life I no longer wanted to do at all, because of the people.” Half of them, she notes, are now “probably in the cabinet.”

Instead, she temped as a receptionist (not a secretary she points out, because, ironically, she “wasn’t quick enough at typing”), which is how she ended up at The Sun in the late ’90s answering the phones on the showbiz desk. She found it utterly intoxicating.

“You’d have someone ring up and say, ‘I’m in bed with Robbie Williams, do you want to write the story?’” she recalls, breathless with excitement at the memory. “I mean, it was absolutely hilarious. It was constant mayhem.” Up until then, the world of newspapers hadn’t been a consideration, but in 2000 she landed her first proper gig at The Guardian , writing its Diary column, before starting the cult, long-running celebrity column Lost in Showbiz.

“It was a real sandbox,” she says. “I could do what I wanted with it—I definitely wouldn’t be writing about politics in the way I do if I hadn’t done that.” It is her ability to draw from popular culture and sport, alongside history and politics, that make Hyde’s columns so appealing. “Most people don’t know all these obscure political references, but everyone likes [Taylor Swift’s] ‘Blank Space,’” she reasons. “I get very annoyed by people who will pretend not to know who Kim Kardashian is,” she groans. “Nobody ever says, ‘Who’s Cristiano Ronaldo?’”

Now, she does much of her work at 5 a.m., bashing out her columns from the West London home she shares with her husband of more than two decades, Kieran Clifton, the BBC’s director of distribution and business development, and their three children (“I can see the Russian embassy out of my window, so there’s always something to watch”).

“Anything good” she’s ever written has, she says, come after having kids (she had her first at 36 and the third three-and-a-half years later), “because I became far more organized and efficient.” She likes to surround herself with people “from every decade”—one of her great friends is 80, they walk together once a week—but she will never “go to any social occasions with politicians.” She says, “I think it’s really difficult to write dispassionately about people with whom you share some form of social life.”

Indeed. I’m not convinced she’d receive a particularly warm reception (or invite) at, say, Chequers with descriptions of the former PM that include him looking like “Chucky if he’d borrowed a suit for a court appearance, or a Yewtree version of Worzel Gummidge.” Of Theresa May, she wrote that she mostly resembled “a Quentin Blake drawing of an unravelling postmistress.”

Surprisingly few ever complain though. But then, “it’s a terrible show of weakness to have read [the column],” she says with a laugh. “Johnson always when I’ve seen him has gone—” she looks down and gruffly shakes her head. “I think that’s absolutely ridiculous. What he should really do is pretend that he’s never seen it at all.”

Besides, it is precisely not her job to paint flattering pictures of those in power. And they make it fabulously easy. Compared to New Labour, says Hyde, when “they were so scared that Alastair Campbell or Peter Mandelson would put a bullet in their head if they said one wrong thing, this is the Wild West. You’ve got Nadine Dorries saying mad things, Jacob Rees-Mogg on Twitter—all these people who will say anything for attention. So much of it is about attention.”

“I think the caliber of politicians is very, very badly depleted,” she continues. “The Conservative Party has been in a constant election cycle, but to do what? You feel they just want to be in power. They don’t seem to have any form of program or any idea of how to achieve it. I find it really depressing.”

For all the abject absurdity of 2022, so too is there much rage and terror. On the precipice of fuel poverty and looming recession, with a government mostly obsessed by its own machinations, how does Hyde stop the bleakness edging in?

“I’ve always felt the best way to do things is to kind of keep that angry voice out in general,” she says. “The less ostensibly serious my columns became, the more they were able to make serious points.” Now, as we enter autumn and a new administration, she is desperate “for some new characters,” she says. “Who’s in our fall collection?” she smiles, a glint in her eye. “Who have we got? I’m dying to know.”

What Just Happened?!: Dispatches from Turbulent Times by Marina Hyde is out on October 4.

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Give the gift of anytime, marina hyde talks to alan rusbridger, what just happened dispatches from turbulent times, hay festival 2023,  saturday 3 june 2023.

No other writer is more suited to chronicling the absurd times in which we live. In What Just Happened?! Marina Hyde slashes her way through the hellscape of post-referendum politics, where the chaos never stops.

Clamber aboard as we relive every inspirational moment of magic, from David Cameron to Theresa May to Boris Johnson. Marvel at the sights, from Trumpian WTF-ery to celebrity twattery. And boggle at the cast of characters: Hollywood sex offenders, populists, sporting heroes (and villains), dastardly dukes, media barons, movie stars, reality TV monsters, billionaires, police officers, various princes and princesses, wicked advisers, philanthropists, fauxlanthropists, telly chefs, and (naturally) Gwyneth Paltrow. It's the full state banquet of crazy - and you're most cordially invited.

Drawn from her spectacularly funny Guardian columns, What Just Happened?! is a welcome blast of humour and sanity in a world where reality has become stranger than fiction. Hyde talks to editor of Prospect magazine, Alan Rusbridger.

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• Marina Hyde

Marina Hyde has worked at the Guardian since 2000, where her weekly columns have won her a reputation as one of the most admired journalists in the UK. The recipient of multiple awards, including the 2020 Edgar Wallace Award for writing of the highest quality, she has been named Political Commentator of the Year for the past two years by the Society of Editors, and Commentator of the Year at the Press Awards for the past three years running. She is the only woman in 45 years to receive the Sportswriter of the Year award from the Sports Journalists’ Association. She lives in London.

Relive the delusional fever-dream of the modern era with Britain’s favourite columnist: the Sunday Times Bestseller.

Relive the delusional fever-dream of the modern era with Britain’s favourite columnist.

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Marina Hyde in conversation with Jonathan Freedland

Join two of the Guardian’s lead columnists, Marina Hyde and Jonathan Freeland, at a special event, live in London and livestreamed.

Described by Phoebe Waller-Bridge as “the most lethal, vital, screamingly funny truth-teller of our time”, Marina Hyde’s incisive wit takes no prisoners. From skewering Boris Johnson (“third prize in a competition to build Winston Churchill out of marshmallows”) to lampooning Brexit, she is the chief chronicler of our stranger-than-fiction times. What Just Happened?! is a collection of her writing over the past six years, covering not just Westminster politics but a whole circus of outrageous characters, from movie stars to royals, media barons and reality TV monsters.

Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist and the host of the Guardian's Politics Weekly America podcast. He also presents BBC Radio 4's The Long View and is the author of the award-winning The Escape Artist, along with several thrillers under the pseudonym Sam Bourne.

This summer, they will meet to discuss Marina’s book, and to give their verdicts on the latest stories to make the headlines. Since the last twelve months alone gave us three prime ministers, a self-inflicted financial meltdown, Matt Hancock’s trip to the jungle and a tax scandal involving the chancellor, there is sure to be plenty to talk about…

You can also attend this event in person in London. Marina Hyde will be in conversation with Gaby Hinsliff at Leeds Playhouse on Wednesday 7 June and with Gary Younge at the Theatre Royal in Brighton on Tuesday 13 June.

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Richard Osman and Marina Hyde team up for ‘The Rest is Entertainment’ podcast

TV star and author Richard Osman has teamed up with The Guardian columnist Marina Hyde for new podcast ‘The Rest is Entertainment’.

With years of experience and an enviable network of contacts, Osman and Hyde are set to bring a unique blend of knowledge, humour, and insight as industry insiders to this new weekly series. They’ll talk television, films, books, music and celebrity gossip as well as offering an enticing peek behind the curtain of the world of entertainment.

With Osman’s producer’s eye and charismatic presentation alongside the razor-sharp journalistic analysis of Hyde, together they’ll unravel the mysteries and unveil the hidden gems within the vast landscape of blockbuster movies to indie gems, bestselling books to underground music scenes, no corner of the entertainment realm will be left unexplored.

In each episode they’ll discuss what’s hot and what’s not in the world of pop culture. Listeners can expect engaging discussions, entertaining views, and outrageous gossip. They’ll also suggest what to watch on television, the best streaming box-sets, and books and magazines you must not miss.

Speaking on the new show, Osman says: “About 6 months ago I started thinking about how I could hang out with the brilliant Marina Hyde every week. This podcast is the successful culmination of that plan.”

Hyde adds: “Movies, TV, books, music, celebrity, scandal – all the fun stuff, and I honestly can’t wait to talk to Richard about them every week.”

Tony Pastor, Executive Producer and co-founder of Goalhanger Podcasts, said of the latest addition to the ‘Rest Is’ stable of podcasts: “Marina and Richard were our dream combination for this podcast. If you love TV and movies and keep falling down celebrity rabbit holes on social media this is the pod for you. Some of our other podcasts might describe the rise of populists, or debate their influence on society, ‘The Rest Is Entertainment’ will discuss their ability to eat kangaroo testicles on national TV.”

Find out more and subscribe to the podcast at https://lnk.to/ZpgoXU .

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Piers Morgan won’t care where the Baby Reindeer saga goes. But Netflix should

An interview with the woman who allegedly inspired the stalker character has been the latest jaw-dropper in the hit show’s afterlife

W hat will happen next in the still-mushrooming Baby Reindeer saga? Probably one or more of a number of bad things. Latest bad thing to happen (at time of writing) was Piers Morgan’s decision to pay the so-called real-life Martha – reportedly the inspiration for the stalker character in the Netflix programme – what she claims was £250 so he could interview her on his YouTube show . I always feel the most disingenuous gambit in journalism is the one that goes: “We just want to give you the chance to tell your side of the story …” Anyway, the resultant encounter dropped on Thursday night and was an object lesson in wild-west TV, which has already sparked condemnation from a number of angles. Let’s hope it doesn’t spark real-life events of its own.

Clearly mindful of the criticisms that would be levelled at him for featuring someone UK news outlets had largely avoided even naming, Morgan approached his interviewee wearing a veneer of empathy. Ultimately, though, the Martha character’s enterprise would surely seem low-grade to all the people who edited tabloid newspapers in the not-too-distant past. After all, if you want someone relentlessly pursued, you just get the news desk to do it. Or a private detective. Or – but no. We daren’t all operate under the heroic “uncensored” banner.

For now, a quick refresher. Baby Reindeer is the Netflix show written by and starring Richard Gadd, and a massive and critically acclaimed hit for the streamer. It tells Gadd’s story of being stalked, as well as his abuse at the hands of an exploitative TV figure, and is prefaced with the words: “This is a true story”. Not “based on a true story”, or “inspired by real events”, or all the other get-outs / get-ins that have made “based-on” crime an intellectual property genre all of its own, with Netflix particularly drawn to the tag.

Within a sensationally short time of the show dropping, “Martha” had been identified from her own previous posts, while the TV figure plotline turned into one of those super-fun rapist guessing games, with some men wrongly identified and forced to call the police. Within the TV industry, particularly the five former analogue channels, jaws were dropping. This was surely a mega compliance failure?

In a list of telly’s unsung heroes, broadcasters’ compliance departments would be right up there, ensuring that shows conform to standards and codes, for instance when they involve vulnerable or “real-life” people. When the Baby Reindeer controversy first kicked off, I joked to someone that I pictured the Netflix compliance department as just a single phone ringing out in a cupboard. I would like to expand on that comment by saying I’m pretty sure the compliance department at Piers Morgan Uncensored is a single 4ft-square tickbox on a wall beneath the slogan “WILL IT GET ME CLICKS?”

But I guess that’s YouTube for you. And I have sympathy for channels and streamers creating shows in a world where social media platforms evidently couldn’t care less about ethics. However, this is the world we currently live in, and into which they knowingly put their shows, so more realism is urgently overdue from certain purveyors of real-life stories. You can find plenty who believe that “Martha” now receiving death threats and having people on her own doorstep is a form of just deserts. But ceding control of justice to the TikTok or X algorithm was grim in the Nicola Bulley case and others, and it’s grim now.

So yes, without wishing to spaff Netflix’s billions for them, I think that if you paid your co-chief executive $49.8m last year, you can probably afford a half-arsed compliance department. The BBC pays the director-general, Tim Davie, £527,000 a year, and has a belt-and-braces compliance department. As Russell T Davies – who knows one or two things about writing drama based on real events – said this week , the BBC would have been “much stricter” about compliance in Baby Reindeer than Netflix. “Compliance and editorial policy drives us mad here,” he reflected, “but I sleep at night.”

I’m guessing Netflix executives responsible for Baby Reindeer sleep the sleep of people who have just delivered a record-breaking international hit for a streamer that probably couldn’t give a toss about this sort of local handwringing. This isn’t the line the Netflix public policy director floated in front of a select committee on Wednesday, of course, with Benjamin King telling MPs that Netflix and the production company, Clerkenwell Films, had taken “every reasonable precaution in disguising the real-life identities of the people involved in that story”. Er … no. Admittedly, it was particularly tricky in the case of this material, with Gadd having addressed it in pre-existent Edinburgh fringe shows where the identification risks are obviously infinitely smaller than they are with a Netflix hit. But when the BBC made I May Destroy You with HBO and the production company Various Artists, I’m told meticulous care was taken to support Michaela Coel in telling the story of her sexual assault and her attempts to process it. There were independent lawyers, there was extensive pastoral support, and the defining characteristics of the real people were unidentifiably different. Did Netflix do this? Evidently not all of it.

Strange, all things considered, that the government has spent much of the past few years honking that everything from the BBC to Channel 4 to the NHS should be “more like Netflix”. Meanwhile, if Baby Reindeer had been a BBC show, the resultant furore would have been framed vastly differently. Davie would have been forced to resign at least a week ago – his demise having been bayed for by many of the papers now cheerily covering the identification fallout. None of those news outlets would ever even dream of calling for Netflix’s Ted Sarandos to resign, of course. No, these big fish much prefer the feeding frenzy of the small pond. True story.

Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist

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