Jonathan Coe

speaker

74 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 4 Jul

Jonathan Coe’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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The Pat Kenny Show · Jonathan Coe on a tumultuous period in UK politics · 4 Jul 2026 podcast

And they kind of do it to try and endear themselves to their supporters, but it can also backfire on them and make themselves look kind of ridiculous, I think.

I mean...

It's funny that you mentioned Flann O'Brien because I was thinking of him this morning, as I often do, actually.

I'm wondering what he would have made of figures like Donald Trump and Nigel Farage and others.

You know, we could really do with some of that kind of incredible sense of the absurd and incisiveness now.

I think you just have to take a different approach.

I mean, in my new novel, The Proof of My Innocence, there are a lot of quotations from contemporary politicians, but I don't put words into their mouth.

I just use things that they've said in interviews and in speeches and let them speak for themselves, really.

And, you know, you only have to kind of juxtapose the statements, really, with the reality that they're supposed to be commenting on.

And the absurdity is there already.

It's

It is inherently comedic.

I mean, maybe I'm becoming a bit of a softy in my old age, but I also find something slightly poignant about it.

And when I reached the end of my novel, I realized that the heroine and the narrator of the novel actually had something in common with Liz Truss because they were both trying to tell stories to themselves and to other people to explain something that had happened to them that had kind of gone horribly wrong.

And I find it fascinating that she's gone so far down this rabbit hole of delusion and conspiracy theory in order to create a story for herself, to kind of explicate herself for what happened during her seven weeks in power.

I mean, I guess it is.

There was a lot of that behind the Brexit vote.

I mean, there were many complex and various reasons for why different people voted for Brexit, but I think there was a strong element of little England-ism in it.

And, yeah.

You know, I've just finished a new novel, actually, which is not set in the present at all.

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