of his middle eastern tour. before his arrival a senior figure in saudi arabia's ruling establishment, prince turki al—faisal, criticised the us decision to withdraw its troops from syria, describing it as a "very negative development". the mayor of the polish city of gdansk is in serious condition after he was stabbed on—stage in front of thousands of people during a charity concert. pawel adamowicz has served as mayor of gdansk since 1998. a suspect was arrested at the scene at least five people have been killed in the alps this weekend after heavy snow. three germans died in an avalanche in austria and a fourth is still missing. parts of austria, france, sweden and germany are at a standstill after severe snowfalls closed roads and trapped people in their homes. more snow is forecasted. it's liz30am. now on bbc news, hardtalk‘s stephen sackur speaks to writer jonathan coe. welcome to hardtalk.

i'm stephen sackur. in case you hadn't noticed, britain is in the grip of a protracted meltdown known as brexit. to leave or to remain? it has divided families, generations and communities. everyone seems to be shouting. no—one seems to be listening. well, that's not quite true. my guest today, jonathan coe, has been listening to — and writing compelling fiction about — contemporary britain for decades. so can this novelist help us understand ourselves and brexit, better than a parliament full of politicians? jonathan coe, welcome to hardtalk.

thank you. your latest novel is called middle england. now, it's notjust about brexit, but brexit sits at the centre of the story. was that by design and intent, or was it simply that you couldn't avoid it, even if you wanted do? i think with the kind of novel i had already told myself i was going to write there was no avoiding brexit. it's a novel which features characters from two of my earlier looks, the rotters‘ club and the closed circle. the closed circle was published in 2004, so i haven't written about these characters in 12 years,

but they were at the back of my mind. i always say that when i put the final full stop in a novel, the characters are dead to me, and i don't think about them again. that didn't happen with these characters, especially the central one, benjamin trotter. i started to think i wanted to revisit them. i wanted to put them in contemporary britain and see how they were getting on. i knew they would be in their mid—50s by now. so those thoughts were kind of flitting through my mind in the early months of 2016. and then, you know, david cameron called the referendum, the referendum took place, everything changed, the government went into meltdown, and suddenly, if i was going to write about these characters at this moment, there was no avoiding brexit. it would have been absurd to try to write a novel which didn't deal with it at all. it does preoccupy the nation. what i find interesting about even that description of how you came to it, you are continuing a journey with these characters which began, well, we have seen them going all the way back

to the 1970s and 1980s. yes, absolutely. so they have lived their british lives, and it has culminated, at least for now, in brexit. there is a continuity there. i wonder if that is your thought about brexit itself. we are tempted to see it as a phenomenon that began with the referendum, or the decision to call the referendum, in 2015, 2016 — you place the roots and origins of its much further back. well, the novel begins in may 2010 with the general election of that year. it seems like ancient history to talk about a general election which was david cameron versus gordon brown, and which ended in britain's first coalition government. times are moving so fast and so dramatically that this seems like a long time ago. but it was kind of an arbitrary decision, really. it struck me as a significant moment, in many ways, because it was just after the financial crisis.

it was just after the mps expenses scandal of 2009, which i actually think played quite an important part in laying the groundwork for brexit, although it doesn't get talked about very much. and there was also that kind of historical moment when gordon brown messed up while his microphone was still on, and referred to a potential voter is a sort of bigoted woman... a woman who didn't like immigration, and he came out and said, that bigoted woman. i want to pick up on that. what you describe in this novel, in your characters, are british people who no longer have, it seems to me, any commonality, any common ground 01’ any sense of common identity or purpose. immigration is one of the key issues over which they look at each other from time to time. i am thinking of two female characters, sophie, the academic who wants to be london—based but isn't, and her mother—in—law, helena, who's provincial, small—c conservative and deeply against immigration. these two women look at each other and simply cannot understand or even really talk to each other in the same language.

is that your view of what has happened to britain? i think everybody, certainly everybody i know, has had this kind of terrible conversations with friends or family over the last few years, even before the brexit referendum, where certain issues come up and the conversation just grinds to a halt. and the absence of common ground and the depth of feeling with which they cling to their positions, or inhabit their positions, is very, very powerful. immigration is one of them. helena, the elderly mother—in—law in middle england's, says straightout at one point — which is a phrase or a sentence that i have heard from many people over the last few decades — she says, "enoch was right." referring to enoch powell.

referring to enoch powell and the rivers of blood speech in 1968. suddenly sophie, who as you say, is from a different generation, different background, a whole different outlook on life, just kind of freezes in her seat and thinks, how can this conversation even proceed? those are the sorts of divides... i havejotted it down, it is so telling. you say, "they look at each other, they live cheek byjowl in the same country but they live in different universes, universes separated by a wall, infinitely high, impermeable, a wall built out of fear and suspicion." i wonder if you as a novelist, if you feel that this book and your ruminations on britain today are about trying to break down that wall, or to mix the metaphor, to build some sort of bridge between two sides which, frankly, if you look at parliament today, just yell at each other and have no ability to listen and find common ground.

yeah, i don't know. i am skeptical about the direct political effect that fiction can have. i am sceptical that people really change their minds very radically or change their beliefs very radically after reading a novel. but fiction can do something, several things, actually, which journalism can't do, which political speeches can't do. the muscle that it makes us exercise is our imaginative muscle. it makes you more imaginative, to read novels. and imaginatively crossing over and trying to inhabit the mindsets of people with whom you disagree, that is one of the most important tasks we face, i think. we in britain right now are less able to make imaginative leaps then we used to be. because we are now so consumed by this tribalism, in or out, us or them, black or white. it may be a failure of imagination.

it may be, you know, a failure of the public discourse or the online discourse, a kind of online way of thinking which reduces everything to like or dislike, to binary oppositions. i am not sure what it is, really. but i feel that a novel has, can have, a constructive role to play, even if not a tra nsformative role. where do you, jonathan coe, sit in all of this? i am mindful of your background. you call the book middle england, and specifically it is about england rather than britain. in a sense, itjuxtaposes london metropolitanism with provincialism, as identified in the second city of birmingham, which isjust down the motorway from london. you are personally from the birmingham area. you know the provinces very well, and i guess the books you have written suggest you understand the provinces pretty well. but you have actually chosen to live your life in the heart of metropolitan chelsea in london.

yes. so who are you? i'm both, which i think is what puts me in a position to be able to write this book. probably the only advantageous position that my background will ever give me, i suspect. one of the most influential things on my thinking that i read when i was preparing this book was anthony barnett‘s book about brexit, the lure of greatness. he divides the united kingdom up into five entities: northern ireland, scotland, wales, england without london, and london. and he says that brexit was won by england without london. i thought, right, that is the area i want to write about. not just write about, but set in some kind of opposition to london itself. you feel a loyalty to that england beyond london? because it's where you're from. yes, i do. not where you now live. you have said, i don't want to get

particularly into your views on brexit and the politics of now, but you have said that you voted remain, you are a remainer, and i am just wondering whether you feel out of love with that england that you knew as a boy, as a young man, that you left behind, ina way? well, it has taken me a long time to describe myself as a londoner. i have lived in london for 32 years. and actually, it is really only since the referendum that i have started to identify as a londoner, and to think, yes, this is where i feel most comfortable now. but, you know, the midlands, the provincial midlands, they're what formed me. that's where i grew up. and the attitudes that i observed and imbibed when i was growing up, not all of which by any means are reactionary or unprogressive, you know, have formed me and stayed with me. and when i go back there, which do quite often because i my mother still lives in the same house where i grew up, and i go and visit herfairly regularly, then i feel a kind of homecoming. a different kind of homecoming than i feel when i returned

to london, but it's still a homecoming. so i feel absolutely rooted in both places. and in a way... there is an ambivalence in you. there is a great ambivalence. in a way, i wrote middle england to try to reconcile those two things, those two aspects of my personality. let me ask about your writing in a somewhat different way, to get away from brexit specifically. just talk about your style. you use humour. your books are funny. but it seems to me something has happened in the last few years,

that writers who use humour and satire, such as yourself, are beginning to wonder whether — given everything that is happening around the world, whether it be brexit or donald trump or the rise of nativism and populism in so many parts of the world — whether satire really is sufficient any more. is that the best way of registering dissent from what is happening around the world, or should there be more outrage involved ? well, i think the british — and again, let's talk about the english specifically — take a great pride in their sense of humour, and a great pride in their ability to deal in a kind of self—mockery. this has always been one of the selling points of britain, ifind, when i go abroad. and my books in particular, readers say to me, "we love your books because they're so english and the sense of humour in them is so english." nobody can ever really define what they mean by this, but they say it. yet actually, in my books, i have moved away from satirical humour, i think. i wrote a novel a couple of decades ago called what a carve up, which was a savage attack on thatcherism and the politics

of the 1980s. rather naively at the time, i thought people would read this book and smack their brows and say, "i've been wrong about thatcher is all this time!" —— thatcherism all this time!" satire can make a difference. here is a quote for you, armando iannucci, a great writer of comic film and fiction, he said this recently. he said, "any attempt to present a fictional version of today's events would never be as crazy as the real thing. the truth in washington, london or moscow is much more demented than fiction." and that represents a crisis for comedy writers. yes, i think that is true. particularly in the case of the kind of comedy that armando deals in, because what he is so brilliant at is observing the mechanics of politicians in action, and the backroom scenes among spin doctors and policymakers. that kind of thing. my focus is different.

i don't write about those people much because i don't know them and i don't move in those circles. i write more about how politics impacts upon ordinary people, for want of a better word, everyday life. a little bit of the humour in middle england of which there is a lot, notjust kind of satirical humour which is designed to change the reader's mind about anything, it's more of a relief, a safety valve that the characters retreat to. just to cope with daily reality. it's more in this book. the everyday comedy of human interaction. it's interesting how you describe it. humour is diffusing anger. it was a quote from george orwell, "everyjoke is a tiny revolution". that would be covering the notion that by telling jokes, you are doing something interesting

and important in terms of dissent. john 0'farrell recently turned that on his head and said, i think these days everyjoke is instead of a tiny revolution. yes, i think i'm kind of more inclined to agree withjohn 0'farrell on this one. i mean, freud, if we're going to get deep into the psychology of humour, thought that a joke was a kind of mental shortcut. it took you from a to z but instead of taking you through b, c, d, e, etc, etc, the logical process, it whisked you from one place to another and the energy that was saved thereby, expels itself in laughter and you have a great sense of release. that energy that gets released through political humour could otherwise, if the conversation writer was serious rather than humorous, be channelled into anger. if the conversation around it was serious. 0r man the barricades. yes. but you are not a man who would ever contemplate going to the barricades.

not at the moment, though. we'll ask you something else about the divisions that are so apparent in contemporary society. we talked about brexit but i want to talk to about something else which you made a point of writing about which is gender and the whole debate about gender identity, sexuality, you say that actually, this is an issue upon which you've noticed deep and real divisions even within your own family, between the mindset you bring to it and the mindset of your children. i'm interested what you mean. well, there appears to be a revolution taking place in the way that we think about gender and the way in which young people think about gender in particular. and i don't want to be one of these people who gets more reactionary as i get older. you think there is a danger of that? there was always a danger in that, you get set in your ways of thinking and i try to be progressive in most areas, i think i am, but something i've noticed, but don't disagree with,

but not on the same wavelength instinctively as my teenage daughters is gender, where they are much more comfortable with fluid non—binary concepts of gender than my generation and i think we can come around to their point of view and see things their way, but it's a generational divide at the moment. particularly on campuses who describe themselves as woke, concerned and militant about not allowing language that offends particular groups to be used and defend people and we interviewed another person, jordan peterson,

the canadian academic, with a movement of people who think pc culture and identity politics and what he calls cultural marxism have gone too far and are repressing free speech. where do you sit on all of that as a writer? as a writer, myjob is to listen to these debates and observe them and dramatise them as best i can as i do in middle england where my academic character, sophie, makes what she thinks is a perfectly innocent yet rather gauche and awkward joke to a transgender student and suddenly finds that a twitter storm has erupted, that her seminars and lectures are being boycotted and she loses herjob, basically. she gets it back again eventually. it's interesting because you've written entertainingly about sophie,

but is that partly about jonathan coe himself having to police his own language and writing, in a certain way too, to use a phrase your kids might use, check your entitlement? it's interesting the kind of vocabulary you start to get into. you talk about policing your language. already it has a kind of slightly repressive, slightly authoritarian ring to it. i want to know if you look deep down inside yourself, do you do it now? i wouldn't use the word police but i think much more carefully about what i wrote on certain issues than i would have done decades 01’ even years ago. can you give me an example? there is a novel i wrote more than 20 years ago called the house of sleep which i am scared to reread now because it's about, among other things, a man who decides to change gender

and the reason he does it is because he's in love with a gay woman and he wants to sleep with her, he wants to be in a relationship with her. that is a much thornier subject today than it was in 1997. to be blunt about it, are you saying that if you had a blank piece of paper today, you don't think you would be able to write the novel that you wrote 20 years ago? i'm sure i wouldn't write it in exactly the same way and i'd be more careful. i know there are some novelists who maintain that kind of carefulness, what you referred to as self—policing as the enemy of creativity. i don't think it is necessarily. creativity is extremely bound up with carefulness as far as i'm concerned.

every aspect of writing a novel you have to be careful about. and making sure that you not don't offend people, but treat the point of view of every character in your novel with respect, which is what this all is down to. that's part of the novelist‘s job from the word go. you referred in talking about the way in which these things have become so controversial, in academia and sometimes in the literary world, you referred to twitter and the role of social media. how people can pile on when somebody says something offensive. howard jacobson, another leading writer who was on this show, he says he finds the world of the internet and the constant 24—7 information flow and the screen being a compulsive feature, he finds it completely negative and says, quote, twitter will make children illiterate in 20 years. are you worried by what is happening with the internet and with screens? i'm not as pessimistic

as howard jacobson sounds about it. i kind of envy people who can turn their back on all that. have you tried? no, because i'm as addicted as anybody. apart from anything else, i find the internet and incredible information source and social resource. i like being in dialogue with my readers on twitter and that kind of thing. it's become a very important part of my working life in my career. you don't feel it is sucking up creative energies you otherwise might have employed writing 3,000 words of the next novel? don't think so. this is a word novel i wrote in ten months and i was on twitter the whole time. qed, i rest my case. a final thought for you and we've talked a lot about your own identity and your rootedness.

you have won a lot of prizes outside of britain, more so than in britain and you have a loyal audience but you seem to have a certain amount of self—hate for the writer's life. benjamin trotter, one of your most famous characters, is an absurd figure in a way. the whole world of literary festival and literary prizes, you mock it mercilessly. are you sick of being a writer and is it time to do something else? i can't do anything else. why not? i don't have the option, i have no other skills. i mean, i've written books since i was eight years old, i wrote my first full—length novel when i was 16 and it's the only thing i seem to have any time for, really. i could teach, but i run into people every day are much better teachers than i would ever be. sitting in a room listening to imaginary conversations and putting them down on paper is what i do, and it is a kind of absurd way for a grown man to spend his life,

really, but somehow i've kind of spun it out to a career. i might as well see it through. jonathan coe, we must end it there, but thank you very much for being on hardtalk. thanks. hello again. it's been a mild winter so far and one thing we've not seen a great deal of is snow. however, over the last few hours, behind this cold front, we have seen some snow showers push in across shetland, so if you're heading outside over the next few hours, you might see more of these coming and going. there will be some clear spells between, and a cold wind.

in scotland, it will be cold enough for patches of frost to develop but otherwise, there is too much wind around, too much cloud and still a few showers too. so it's not especially cold for england and wales and northern ireland — temperatures for most between 6 and 8 degrees celsius for the early risers. that takes us into the first part of monday morning, and still a lot of cloud around, still some passing showers. probably some sunshine for scotland but a frosty start here before thicker cloud works in from the west and we'll start to see some rain arriving. also we'll see some of that rain getting into shetland. the mildest weather across western and southern parts, temperatures into double figures, but noticeably cooler across eastern parts of the uk, with temperatures 3 in lerwick and 5 in aberdeen. the cold weather, though, doesn't last long. a warm front pushes through during monday night and then for tuesday, we've got this slow—moving, wiggling weather front targeting western scotland, bringing some heavy rain to the highlands. here, we could see around 50—100mm of rain up over the mountains — it is going to be quite a wet spell of weather.

elsewhere, a lot of cloud, a few limited bright or sunny spells, but it's milder. temperatures for most of us between 10 and 11 degrees celsius. notice those temperatures coming up in shetland, so the threat of any snow receding with that milder weather arriving. through tuesday night, our slow—moving weather front is still there, bringing rain in scotland, will eventually push southwards, bringing the wet weather from scotland into northern ireland, across parts of england and wales as well. now, to the south of our weather front, which is the cold front that continues to move in during wednesday. we should see still some reasonable temperatures in the south with highs expected to reach about 10 celsius or so, but noticeably colder further north — cold enough for some hill snow there across northern parts of scotland temperatures into single figures. that colder air continues its journey southwards wednesday night and by thursday, we've got the winds coming down from the arctic. with that comes a lot of dry weather and sunshine, but it will be cold with a sharp frost and there will be showers around as well.

those showers are likely to be wintry with some snow showers coming into the north of mainland scotland and we could see an odd little bit of sleet in the showers down the north sea coast as well. a cold day then. temperatures between 3 and 7 degrees celsius. that's your latest weather. goodbye. this is the briefing. i'm sally bundock. our top story: a day before the crucial commons vote on her brexit deal, britain's prime minister warns mps not to play games. heavy snow claims more lives in the alps as parts of europe grapple with the worst winter weather for decades. a shocking attack on the mayor of gdansk, stabbed in front of thousands of people at a charity event in poland. and gearing up despite the pain — andy murray's on court later in what may be his last australian open. in business briefing,

driving change — we'll bring you the latest from the north american auto show as carmakers adapt to shifting consumer tatses.