The Opening Salvo

What I am about to do makes me more nervous than any other piece of writing I have embarked on since my first forays into journalism in the late 1980s. During most of my career I have had the luxury of writing for “people like me”: the sort of middle-class liberals who read the Guardian or the Observer and carry those publications under their arms as the outward symbols of their right-minded decency. I spent 15 years writing for one or other newspaper. I was deeply honoured during the run-up to the Iraq war in 2003 to be described as a “liberal eurotrash” on the right-wing Drudge Report website. Until last month I was the political editor of the New Statesman, the iconic magazine of the Fabian left and damn proud to be so. It was a job I loved and it gave me a freedom  that few journalists are permitted: I had the space to write whatever I liked every week for a readership that shared my political outlook (mostly).