Working Class Zeroes 23 - Kevin Maguire

Something about Kevin Maguire, political journalist and associate editor of the Daily Mirror, really gets up my nose.

Not very interesting for you if I just leave it there. But fortunately, I think the hackles he rises in me are quite fascinating ones. There must be, I pondered as I compiled the roster of Working Class Zeroes, a deeper and particular reason for my irritation with him that’s worth digging into. So here goes.

Absolutely no ambiguity about the social class of the subject this time. Our Kev was born in 1960 in South Shields, County Durham, and was one of six kids. His mum was a cleaner and his dad a miner at the local Westoe Colliery, which was one of the last pits to close, in 1993. Kevin attended the local grammar, and went on to study politics at Hull and journalism at Cardiff. From there it was a swift rise from local papers to the Telegraph, the Mirror and the Guardian. In 2005, he doubled back to the Mirror where’s he’s been ever since. He is a very familiar face on television, popping up almost every day for those kinds of comment segments that often turn into little (and occasionally big) squabbles. He is a big, bluff chap who has the enviable aura of a person with settled views and very little doubt.

I must make clear that Kevin Maguire is not, I think, a rotter, like many of my other subjects. (He is, in fact, an amuse-bouche positioned here at Number 23, before the final pair of ratbags that will bring this project to its spectacular conclusion.) There’s even something, I must admit, quite likeable about him, in a perverse way.

I think that’s because of his utter predictability. Familiarity can be crushing, but it can also be oddly reassuring. Anything you can depend on, even if it’s an irritating thing, has an appeal after a number of years.

I remember coming back to Britain after a disastrous foreign holiday - this was long ago, before the age of easy international communications - and being positively overjoyed to hear the voice of Dave Lee Travis wittering from the speaker of a radio in WH Smith’s at Gatwick. Maguire has that kind of quality, like an uncomfortable chair in the kitchen of a friend you haven’t seen for months. He feels like family - not in a sickly heartwarming way, but in an eye-rolling ‘and there he goes again, always exactly the same since 1972’ way.

Let me focus now on the specific nucleus of his irritant factor. Maguire is annoying in a very old school way. He is an avatar of tribalism in its simplest, stupidest form. The vibes he emits are those of a pre-Blair Labour left-winger, appropriately enough for a 1960s colliery town child and 1970s politics student. There is a hint of the Len Murray or Vic Feather (ask your mam) about him, the weather-beaten northern trade union bigwig here to cut down soft southern Tory gits. This is a dying breed, but such is Maguire’s tribal loyalty that he approves of many of the barmy progressive policies and actions of the modern era, which would have been anathema to those Murrays and Feathers.

In his demeanour, Kevin is the left wing equivalent of Lee Anderson. Like Anderson, who is of a similar vintage and background, Maguire’s tactic on squabble TV is, nearly always, to reply to an imaginary archetype - the ‘typical’ right-winger in his case, the typical left-winger in Anderson’s - rather than address the person actually in front of him.