Warning – article contains discussion of drug abuse and mental health issues.
John Crace is something of a one-off. As the Guardian’s parliamentary sketch writer, he is one of Britain’s foremost political commentators, and his columns, of which he pens 4 or 5 per week, can attract up to 250,000 readers. His level of acclaim (Press Gazette have him sandwiched between Andrew Marr and Owen Jones in their top 10 most famous UK journalists list) is not just the result of his erudite columns. He is also the author of several bestselling books on politics, literature and Tottenham Hotspur Football Club.
Yet his path to success has been far from conventional. John has battled a heroin addiction, multiple mental health crises, and, most recently, a heart attack. He also, as it happens, is an Exeter Alumni. I went to John’s home in London, to talk about his time at university, his career, politics and everything in between.
“I was a bit of a slacker really” – the early days
John’s interest in politics began young, and he came of age against a backdrop of political turmoil that almost makes the post-Brexit years look sane. Three day weeks, a double election year, oil crises, emergency loans from the IMF – it really was a shitshow. It was in this milieu that John began reading politics at Exeter University in 1976, at a time when the institution catered for only a few thousand students, and student fees were nothing but a twinkle in the eye of a young Tony Blair.
View of campus from Prince of Wales Road, 1970 (University of Exeter photo archive)
Unfortunately, we can’t claim John as an Exepose prodigy. Even if we had existed in the 70s, during his time as a student John steered well clear of extracurriculars – “I was a bit of a slacker really…I was just there to work and have a good time.” Yet Exepose isn’t the only Exeter institution that John pre dated. Tragically for him, he also graduated a few months before the founding of Wetherspoons. In the B.W. era, a night out for John typically meant a trip to the student bar – “The Ram was always the one…but there were also two discos in town named Tiffany’s and Bosun’s.” Today, these venues have become the Samuel Jones gastro pub and the Coombe Street Academy of Music and Sound. It’s the gentrification of Devon.
Some of John’s best nights as a student were when bands would come to campus, his favourites being the visits of The Clash (London Calling, Rock the Casbah, Should I Stay or Should I Go), and Bob Marley and the Wailers. Yes, you read that right. The King of Reggae really did play the Great Hall. If you’re interested, you can watch that very performance here.
After three years in the city, John would graduate Exeter in 1979 with a 2:1, before completing a postgrad in political sociology at the LSE. On the surface, it may seem as if he had it all figured out. But appearances can be deceiving.
“I thought I would probably wind up dead” – the heroin years
“When I was at Exeter, everyone smoked dope. But I kind of never stopped. I kept on experimenting. I finished my degree and my postgrad, but then I got a heroin habit and that was a kind of hell really. You’re spending your whole life trying to stop, trying to manage it, trying to fund it, and you feel you’ve got no self worth. There’s just this perennial sort of shame around you.”
“You feel you’ve got no self worth. There’s just this perennial sort of shame around you.”
“I literally had no idea of how to go about getting a job or anything. I sold ice cream, I worked in a bookshop for a bit. I ended up getting fired from everywhere. It was an intensely unhappy period – I thought that I would probably wind up dead – that’s where I was heading. I hit my rock bottom when I hit 30 – I looked back at my life and thought , Christ, I’ve wasted my entire 20s…I literally had nothing to show for it. After that, I started overdosing regularly.”
Thankfully, in March 1987, John was confronted by a friend who encouraged him into rehab. At a treatment centre, he came off the heroin and was put in touch with Narcotics Anonymous.
“It was an eye opener. I’d never heard of anybody recovering from drug addiction – people either died or just carried on going. Here was a whole world of people who did have drug problems, who were like me, who were now living their lives without taking drugs, without drinking, and I thought, yeah, I want a piece of that.”
“I just made an effort to get stuck in” – becoming a writer
Through Narcotics Anonymous, John met a reformed addict of three and a half years who offered him a room to rent, at a time when he was effectively homeless. Yet after so many failed starts, John still needed to find a new career – one in which he didn’t need to explain a ten year black hole in his CV. Inspired by his new flatmate, he decided to give writing a go. He sent a piece off to the Independent on Sunday, and, possibly because they confused him with the novelist Jim Crace, it was accepted. And so it was that John found himself as a freelance journalist, not the result of a burning ambition and careful planning, but because he had nowhere else to turn.
After freelancing for a few years, John acquired a permanent position at The Guardian in the early 90s. He told me, “I just made an effort to get stuck in. I was quite commercial about it. Every writer wanted to do a cover story in the Guardian – your big high profile piece. But the chances of doing that often are relatively small. I would target where the bar was a lot lower.” And it paid off. In 2000, he took over Digested Read; in 2010, Westminster Digested – satirical columns on literature and politics respectively. But the role for which John is best known is that of the paper’s parliamentary sketch writer – what John calls the “dream job for a satirist.” In this post, John has written hundreds of erudite, witty and biting columns on the daily cut and thrust of British politics.
John often works out of The Guardian’s office in Parliament (Terry Ott via Wikimedia Commons)
The timing of John’s promotion was such that ever since, he has barely been able to catch a breath. Acquiring the job in early 2014, within months John had to wrangle with the Scottish referendum, and soon after, the breakdown of the coalition, and then Brexit, May’s disastrous 2017 campaign, two years of parliamentary paralysis over Article 50, Boris, Covid, Cummings, Partygate, Truss, the mini budget, the chaos of Sunak, and on and on and on. Over this period, all sense of normality was comprehensively abandoned, the barrel was scraped on a near hourly basis, and for a satirist, every day was Christmas. As John succintly puts it, “it’s been absolutely mental.”
As John succintly puts it, “It’s been absolutely mental.”
But this veritable goldmine of content seems to be in danger of drying up. Keir Starmer’s accession has marked a clear turning point, the apparent return of serious, businesslike government – with ‘boring’ being, in light of recent years, a character trait to be embraced rather than avoided. I asked John if he was worried that he won’t have much to write about.
“Not really, because things happen. I thought Theresa May would be unsketchable when she took over, but I christened her the Maybot. I will hold the Labour government to the same standards that I’ve held previous Tory governments – the same level of scrutiny, and the same level of mockery as well. If they do things well you give them credit for it – it’s not just a knocking exercise – but it’s about holding power to account – that’s what decent satire should do.”
“Find your champions” – words of advice
John entered the newspaper industry when it was a growing business, but recent years have taken their toll. Print circulation has collapsed, ad revenues have fallen, outlets have shuttered and staff have been laid off – just last month the Evening Standard axed 150 jobs as they took their publishing schedule from daily to weekly. This down turn has primarily been due to the advent of the internet, but other factors, such as a decline in trust spearheaded by Donald Trump and his accusations of “fake news”, have certainly played their part.
Reading the runes can certainly give one a sinking feeling – but John feels that “second-guessing the future is hopeless.” It’s all about adapting to the times. If he were starting out now, John says he would be uploading to a blog – “It gets you into the habit of writing and you’ve then also got something editors can refer to. I don’t know how you go about getting paid these days – I’m sure there are any number of blogs now that will take what you’ve got to write for nothing – occasionally you want to do that for a sort of shop window, but you don’t want to be abused.”
He also emphasises the importance of finding your advocates. John got the Digested Read gig because an editor took an interest in him, and he says, “that’s one of the secrets – find people who champion you, who like your writing.”
“That’s one of the secrets – find people who champion you, who like your writing.”
For now at least, John isn’t too worried about AI taking all our jobs – “A friend asked ChatGPT – write me a political sketch in the style of John Crace. It was awful. I was reassured.”
“I’m not coping” – the health struggles
One painful throughline of John’s adult life and career has been mental health troubles. Troubles that were exacerbated by, but have subsequently outlived the drug problems.
“After I gave up the drugs, I realised that I did have severe mental health issues anyway. I’ve twice been hospitalised in recovery in the last 37 years with mental health issues, particularly anxiety and depression. My thing is, just be honest about it, talk about it – don’t try and cover it up because it’s not going to help. That’s not to say you have to become a walking symptom, but in terms of editors – there have been times when I’ve just told them – I’m not coping.”
“Just be honest about it, talk about it – don’t try and cover it up because it’s not going to help.”
To anyone reading this who is struggling themselves, John advises, “Get help – I’ve got a shrink, I’ve got a therapist – take advantage of what is out there. And also, try and differentiate between what are day to day issues and what are serious mental health problems because I think that sometimes the lines between them get blurred…you will know about it if you’ve got a mental health crisis.”
In recent months though, it has been John’s physical rather than his mental health that came closest to disaster. Back in March, during a Friday night session at the gym, John suffered a heart attack. His powerful column outlining this experience can be read here.
“The world turned surreal. It was an almost out of body experience, thinking, fuck, I’m having a heart attack. It wasn’t one of those where I keeled over and people did CPR on me or anything like that – I just sort of sat there after it thinking Christ, what’s going on. After about five minutes I thought, maybe I’ll drive home – all the things you shouldn’t really be doing. But I got lucky – my symptoms were relatively mild and they turned out to be quite treatable…the NHS was superb.”
“The world turned surreal. It was an almost out of body experience, thinking, fuck, I’m having a heart attack.”
Thankfully, John appears to now be fully recovered.
Wrapping up
John was very generous with his time, and gave considered, detailed answers to all of my questions. All but one. My final query was met with an answer that came as quickly as it did emphatically. And it needed no elaboration.
Are his beloved Spurs making top four this season?
“No.”
John’s latest book, The Adventures of Herbert Hound, releases on October 10th, and can be pre ordered here.
If you have been affected by any of the issues discussed, you can contact wellbeing services at wellbeing@exeter.ac.uk or call the Samaritans at 116123.
Callum, Online Editor in Chief for 2024/25, has written a varied selection of articles for Exepose, from coverage of student Palestine protests to high profile interviews with figures such as Suella Braverman, John Crace and Josh Widdicombe.
Guardian columnist John Crace on life, career and politics
Warning – article contains discussion of drug abuse and mental health issues.
John Crace is something of a one-off. As the Guardian’s parliamentary sketch writer, he is one of Britain’s foremost political commentators, and his columns, of which he pens 4 or 5 per week, can attract up to 250,000 readers. His level of acclaim (Press Gazette have him sandwiched between Andrew Marr and Owen Jones in their top 10 most famous UK journalists list) is not just the result of his erudite columns. He is also the author of several bestselling books on politics, literature and Tottenham Hotspur Football Club.
Yet his path to success has been far from conventional. John has battled a heroin addiction, multiple mental health crises, and, most recently, a heart attack. He also, as it happens, is an Exeter Alumni. I went to John’s home in London, to talk about his time at university, his career, politics and everything in between.
“I was a bit of a slacker really” – the early days
John’s interest in politics began young, and he came of age against a backdrop of political turmoil that almost makes the post-Brexit years look sane. Three day weeks, a double election year, oil crises, emergency loans from the IMF – it really was a shitshow. It was in this milieu that John began reading politics at Exeter University in 1976, at a time when the institution catered for only a few thousand students, and student fees were nothing but a twinkle in the eye of a young Tony Blair.
Unfortunately, we can’t claim John as an Exepose prodigy. Even if we had existed in the 70s, during his time as a student John steered well clear of extracurriculars – “I was a bit of a slacker really…I was just there to work and have a good time.” Yet Exepose isn’t the only Exeter institution that John pre dated. Tragically for him, he also graduated a few months before the founding of Wetherspoons. In the B.W. era, a night out for John typically meant a trip to the student bar – “The Ram was always the one…but there were also two discos in town named Tiffany’s and Bosun’s.” Today, these venues have become the Samuel Jones gastro pub and the Coombe Street Academy of Music and Sound. It’s the gentrification of Devon.
Some of John’s best nights as a student were when bands would come to campus, his favourites being the visits of The Clash (London Calling, Rock the Casbah, Should I Stay or Should I Go), and Bob Marley and the Wailers. Yes, you read that right. The King of Reggae really did play the Great Hall. If you’re interested, you can watch that very performance here.
After three years in the city, John would graduate Exeter in 1979 with a 2:1, before completing a postgrad in political sociology at the LSE. On the surface, it may seem as if he had it all figured out. But appearances can be deceiving.
“I thought I would probably wind up dead” – the heroin years
“When I was at Exeter, everyone smoked dope. But I kind of never stopped. I kept on experimenting. I finished my degree and my postgrad, but then I got a heroin habit and that was a kind of hell really. You’re spending your whole life trying to stop, trying to manage it, trying to fund it, and you feel you’ve got no self worth. There’s just this perennial sort of shame around you.”
“I literally had no idea of how to go about getting a job or anything. I sold ice cream, I worked in a bookshop for a bit. I ended up getting fired from everywhere. It was an intensely unhappy period – I thought that I would probably wind up dead – that’s where I was heading. I hit my rock bottom when I hit 30 – I looked back at my life and thought , Christ, I’ve wasted my entire 20s…I literally had nothing to show for it. After that, I started overdosing regularly.”
Thankfully, in March 1987, John was confronted by a friend who encouraged him into rehab. At a treatment centre, he came off the heroin and was put in touch with Narcotics Anonymous.
“It was an eye opener. I’d never heard of anybody recovering from drug addiction – people either died or just carried on going. Here was a whole world of people who did have drug problems, who were like me, who were now living their lives without taking drugs, without drinking, and I thought, yeah, I want a piece of that.”
“I just made an effort to get stuck in” – becoming a writer
Through Narcotics Anonymous, John met a reformed addict of three and a half years who offered him a room to rent, at a time when he was effectively homeless. Yet after so many failed starts, John still needed to find a new career – one in which he didn’t need to explain a ten year black hole in his CV. Inspired by his new flatmate, he decided to give writing a go. He sent a piece off to the Independent on Sunday, and, possibly because they confused him with the novelist Jim Crace, it was accepted. And so it was that John found himself as a freelance journalist, not the result of a burning ambition and careful planning, but because he had nowhere else to turn.
After freelancing for a few years, John acquired a permanent position at The Guardian in the early 90s. He told me, “I just made an effort to get stuck in. I was quite commercial about it. Every writer wanted to do a cover story in the Guardian – your big high profile piece. But the chances of doing that often are relatively small. I would target where the bar was a lot lower.” And it paid off. In 2000, he took over Digested Read; in 2010, Westminster Digested – satirical columns on literature and politics respectively. But the role for which John is best known is that of the paper’s parliamentary sketch writer – what John calls the “dream job for a satirist.” In this post, John has written hundreds of erudite, witty and biting columns on the daily cut and thrust of British politics.
The timing of John’s promotion was such that ever since, he has barely been able to catch a breath. Acquiring the job in early 2014, within months John had to wrangle with the Scottish referendum, and soon after, the breakdown of the coalition, and then Brexit, May’s disastrous 2017 campaign, two years of parliamentary paralysis over Article 50, Boris, Covid, Cummings, Partygate, Truss, the mini budget, the chaos of Sunak, and on and on and on. Over this period, all sense of normality was comprehensively abandoned, the barrel was scraped on a near hourly basis, and for a satirist, every day was Christmas. As John succintly puts it, “it’s been absolutely mental.”
But this veritable goldmine of content seems to be in danger of drying up. Keir Starmer’s accession has marked a clear turning point, the apparent return of serious, businesslike government – with ‘boring’ being, in light of recent years, a character trait to be embraced rather than avoided. I asked John if he was worried that he won’t have much to write about.
“Not really, because things happen. I thought Theresa May would be unsketchable when she took over, but I christened her the Maybot. I will hold the Labour government to the same standards that I’ve held previous Tory governments – the same level of scrutiny, and the same level of mockery as well. If they do things well you give them credit for it – it’s not just a knocking exercise – but it’s about holding power to account – that’s what decent satire should do.”
“Find your champions” – words of advice
John entered the newspaper industry when it was a growing business, but recent years have taken their toll. Print circulation has collapsed, ad revenues have fallen, outlets have shuttered and staff have been laid off – just last month the Evening Standard axed 150 jobs as they took their publishing schedule from daily to weekly. This down turn has primarily been due to the advent of the internet, but other factors, such as a decline in trust spearheaded by Donald Trump and his accusations of “fake news”, have certainly played their part.
Reading the runes can certainly give one a sinking feeling – but John feels that “second-guessing the future is hopeless.” It’s all about adapting to the times. If he were starting out now, John says he would be uploading to a blog – “It gets you into the habit of writing and you’ve then also got something editors can refer to. I don’t know how you go about getting paid these days – I’m sure there are any number of blogs now that will take what you’ve got to write for nothing – occasionally you want to do that for a sort of shop window, but you don’t want to be abused.”
He also emphasises the importance of finding your advocates. John got the Digested Read gig because an editor took an interest in him, and he says, “that’s one of the secrets – find people who champion you, who like your writing.”
For now at least, John isn’t too worried about AI taking all our jobs – “A friend asked ChatGPT – write me a political sketch in the style of John Crace. It was awful. I was reassured.”
“I’m not coping” – the health struggles
One painful throughline of John’s adult life and career has been mental health troubles. Troubles that were exacerbated by, but have subsequently outlived the drug problems.
“After I gave up the drugs, I realised that I did have severe mental health issues anyway. I’ve twice been hospitalised in recovery in the last 37 years with mental health issues, particularly anxiety and depression. My thing is, just be honest about it, talk about it – don’t try and cover it up because it’s not going to help. That’s not to say you have to become a walking symptom, but in terms of editors – there have been times when I’ve just told them – I’m not coping.”
To anyone reading this who is struggling themselves, John advises, “Get help – I’ve got a shrink, I’ve got a therapist – take advantage of what is out there. And also, try and differentiate between what are day to day issues and what are serious mental health problems because I think that sometimes the lines between them get blurred…you will know about it if you’ve got a mental health crisis.”
In recent months though, it has been John’s physical rather than his mental health that came closest to disaster. Back in March, during a Friday night session at the gym, John suffered a heart attack. His powerful column outlining this experience can be read here.
“The world turned surreal. It was an almost out of body experience, thinking, fuck, I’m having a heart attack. It wasn’t one of those where I keeled over and people did CPR on me or anything like that – I just sort of sat there after it thinking Christ, what’s going on. After about five minutes I thought, maybe I’ll drive home – all the things you shouldn’t really be doing. But I got lucky – my symptoms were relatively mild and they turned out to be quite treatable…the NHS was superb.”
Thankfully, John appears to now be fully recovered.
Wrapping up
John was very generous with his time, and gave considered, detailed answers to all of my questions. All but one. My final query was met with an answer that came as quickly as it did emphatically. And it needed no elaboration.
Are his beloved Spurs making top four this season?
“No.”
John’s latest book, The Adventures of Herbert Hound, releases on October 10th, and can be pre ordered here.
If you have been affected by any of the issues discussed, you can contact wellbeing services at wellbeing@exeter.ac.uk or call the Samaritans at 116123.
Callum Martin
Callum, Online Editor in Chief for 2024/25, has written a varied selection of articles for Exepose, from coverage of student Palestine protests to high profile interviews with figures such as Suella Braverman, John Crace and Josh Widdicombe.
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