Marina Hyde - What Just Happened?!

Hello to you, dear reader!

If you are holding this book in your hands, you have set your sights on adventure. Not for you the elective comfort of simply forgetting that any of the past few years happened in the mind-boggling way that they did. No. Instead, you have opted to clamber inside the news simulator and relive every inspirationally chaotic moment all over again. You have chosen to be reminded that the path to the sunlit uplands goes right through shit creek. Youre all Oooh, whats a Wuhan wet market? It sounds fun! You have chosen to reload the concept album Chris Grayling. You have said yes to all this. I dont pretend to understand it but I do respect it.

In case you skipped the cover, its called What Just Happened?! like I have the first fricking clue. Thats what the exclamation mark is for. It says: this is the opposite of a rhetorical question. Guys, I genuinely have no idea! And, encouragingly, I discovered when going through the 47 trillion words Ive written since 2016 that I often dont even have a memory of writing half of them. It felt like I had written a book I hadnt 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 focusing on something called indicative votes. What in the name of sanity were they? Ive 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 Charlemagnes Moorish peasant lover, so I could be assured that I really did once 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 dont think I have an alibi for it?

In the end, these pages are just my record of an era in which so many of us but not all! felt the news had become stranger than fiction. Here follows a series of contemporaneous dispatches from a period when it often seemed like the UK 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 seemed to become permanently interesting. 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 Marks 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 weve got.

Lets 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.

*

At this point, I should say something about the whole idea of a book of columns. Can I confide in you? It worries me. In the olden times, anything written in a newspaper mercifully and quite rightly disappeared within a day of it being published, ideally ending up wrapped round your fish and chips. (And, yes, newspapers have turned out to be even less sustainable than cod.) These days, of course, newspaper content lives on seemingly for ever, acquiring rather more permanence than many of us journalists deserve. Particularly someone like me. In fact, I often feel that if I wrote my column in the afternoon, it would say something completely different to whatever Id ended up writing that morning. Do you still think this, six years on? Oh my God I probably didnt even think it by tea THAT DAY.

I know some people like to think of column-writing as an art, but for me, its definitely not. Its a trade. You get up, you write something to fill a space, and you hope its not one of your worst shots and that readers enjoy it. Maybe some people are out there imagining theyre writing the first draft of history, but I feel like Im just sticking a pin in a moment. All of which is a long way of saying that I cringe at quite a few bits in the earlier columns in this book. (You, however, may wish to reserve your shudders for the later efforts.) When I was putting together this selection, I read a couple of them and just thought, Oh, do get OVER yourself, luv. Do you have any idea how histrionic you sound?

Clearly I didnt. But times a great teacher, and on reflection I thought it was best not to airbrush all of those little embarrassments out. Like I say, theyre just a record of a moment in time 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, wed got home to our ivory tower to find the locks had been changed. We had, in the immortal words of Chris Morris to Peter OHanraha-hanrahan in The Day Today, LOST THE NEWS.

Other potential potholes? If there are any predictions in here, please forgive them, because in recent years I have tried to steer clear of all that. I cant 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. Dont get me wrong, I read and very much enjoyed most of it. But with the best will in the world, Im not totally sure its the job of a journalist to tell you whats going to happen next, as opposed to whats just happened. Lets be clear: the stuff that actually was occurring was wild enough. Even so, increasing amounts of content 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. 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 havent been yet but soon, no doubt. Any day now

*

To talk briefly about the format: I thought about doing all the politics in themes, before realising I dont have anything so highfalutin as those. What I do have and what weve all had is characters. So this book doesnt just have politicians; it has a queen, various princes and duchesses, celebrities, wicked advisers, reality TV monsters, billionaires, philanthropists, fauxlanthropists, Hollywood sex offenders, judges, media barons, populists, police officers and all kinds of other heroes and villains. The full fairy tale, in fact. Sometimes pretty Grimm. In the end Ive grouped the political columns together, with each year given its own chapter. And Ive broken those years up with columns about things like sport or celebrities, because we all need an interlude/respite.

Ideally itll all be a deeply unpleasant and staggeringly unwelcome reminder of how the news felt to some of us as we were put through it, seemingly on a permanent 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