Stephen Bush Biography
Stephen Bush is a British journalist and political editor. He edits for the New Statesman. Additionally, he co-hosts the New Statesman podcast and writes for both the print magazine and NS website. He also writes for a number of other publications. Among them; The Guardian, the Financial Times and the i.
Bush attended Morpeth School, a state comprehensive school in Globe Town. The school is near Bethnal Green in East London. Later on, he joined Balliol College at the University of Oxford. At the college, he studied history and was a member of the Oxford University Labour Club.
In 2008, Bush was matriculated and eventually graduated in 2011. Soon after his graduation, Bush worked for the magazine Progress before writing for The Daily Telegraph. He also worked on the Morning Briefing email. In February, 2015, Bush joined the New Statesman from the Telegraph.
Later that year, Stephen Bush became the first political commentator to predict Jeremy Corbyn’s election as Labour leader in September 2015. He has also appeared on the BBC’s current affairs programme Newsnight. In the programme he commented on UK politics. He was even tipped as an outsider to succeed Nick Robinson as the BBC’s political editor in 2015.
Stephen Bush Photo
The position however, eventually went to Laura Kuenssberg. In 2015 Bush received a commendation. He was runner-up in the Young Journalist of the Year awards category in the Press Awards. Since 2016 he has contributed a weekly column to The Guardian’s Lifestyle pages on cooking, called “The Delia Project”.
In the column, Stephen Bush recounts his efforts to relearn cookery skills using only Delia Smith’s Delia’s Complete How to Cook. Bush was awarded the Political Studies Association’s Journalist of the Year award in 2017. The following year in December, he was appointed political editor of the New Statesman.
Stephen Bush Age
Stephen Bush was born in East London in the United Kingdom. He attended Morpeth School. Later on, he joined Balliol College at the University of Oxford. In 2008, Bush was matriculated and eventually graduated in 2011. His actual date of birth is not actually known. He is probably in the late 20s. We will update you on more details about his age.
Stephen Bush Height | How Tall Is Stephen Bush
Stephen Bush is a very tall man. As ridiculous as it may sound, the political comentator stands a number of inches tall. Writing as somebody who very nearly hit six foot three and then stopped half an inch short. It’s always a bit of a surprise when you find that the voice you’ve been listening to every Thursday for the last year or so is speaking down to you.
Details about Stephen Bush actual height have not been known yet. But just incase you are thinking of meeting him in person, prepare to look him up. We will however update the details about his actual height.
Stephen Bush Family | Stephen Bush Father | Stephen Bush Mother
Stephen Bush is from a single-parent family. His father left his mother before he was born. He wrote “In my case, well-meaning people ask what my father does, which leaves me with the unlovely choice between honesty, which makes the questioner feel awkward, and lying, which is hard to keep up for long.”
“Before the era of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, I might have wanted to meet him – to find out what he looked like, if nothing else. But thanks to Google Chrome’s “Incognito” mode, I have been able to ascertain the most important detail, which is that both sides of my family boast full heads of hair well into their fifties but that, sadly, what we retain in volume we do not match in colour.” Stephen Bush added
Stephen Bush Guardian | Stephen Bush Morning Call
Stephen Bush is a writer for the guardian. Soon after his graduation, he also worked for the Morning call before leaving for the New Statesman.
Stephen Bush Interview
Q: A more boring interview would probably start with the Zhou Enlai quote about it being “too soon to tell” what the impact of social media is. So I’ll kind of flip it around: to what extent do you think we actually can tell at this point the influence social media has on British politics and candidates?
Stephen Bush: One of my pet peeves is when people say, “oh, history will judge me”. If you read any serious historiography, historical verdicts are always provisional.
Stephen Bush: So obviously, we can have an intensely provisional verdict about the impact of social media! We know that it’s asinine to say that it has had none. I find it astonishing the number of people who believe that they have some kind of sophisticated Marxist diagnosis – “oh, it’s actually not about Facebook, it’s about a long period of wage stagnation…” – I mean, we know the printing press changed politics. We of course know that social media is a hugely consequential historical invention.
Q: Silver surfers with iPads and not much else to do.
Stephen Bush: So we know that those trends are interlinked. We know that we’ll never ever write in a thousand years – assuming all of those records survive, which given what I remember about studying things a thousand years ago, is a big if – we will never be able to say, “social media changed things by ‘X’ amount”. But we can say, “well, social media had this effect”.
Stephen Bush: But you then end up in a weird debate. To take a case in point, the anti-Corbyn video at the last election about the IRA obviously did very well in terms of eyeballs on Facebook. You can ask – in an era of five television channels, would that have just been a PPB which was discussed for a couple of weeks? How different would that be? We don’t know. But we do know one way or the other that it was different. So I think we can semi-know the impact social media has had.
Q: I suppose the big question is: what we’ve seen is social media’s influence has effectively got a party leader elected. It’s probably changed a general election result. Is that really the maximum level of influence it could have, or do we think anything much more profound is out there?
Stephen Bush: So right, there’s already been a pretty consequential impact in terms of Facebook, and how it’s changed politics, not just in this country but around the world. Although actually, I feel very certain that Facebook had a consequential impact on the 2017 election results. I’m less convinced it had a consequential impact on the outcome of the 2015 Labour leadership election.
Q: Okay. Not even in an organisational sense?
Stephen Bush: No. I think the core of it was Carmel Nolan’s joke about Corbyn’s first leadership campaign being ‘a coalition of the willing and the available.’ Those weren’t people who had met each other via Facebook or social media.
Q: They were people who’d been hanging out through Stop the War…
Stephen Bush: They were effectively people who McDonnell and Simon Fletcher were able to go “look, do me a solid, I trust you”. They really cobbled together from nothing a campaign which was able to a) convince people to lend their nomination and b) once it was on the ballot paper, sustain the wave that it found itself on. I’m less convinced that if you took away social media, that campaign wouldn’t have succeeded.
Q: In the nominations, or in winning the whole thing?
Stephen Bush: In winning the whole thing. The moment when party members fell in love with Jeremy was not on Facebook or on Twitter, or on Labour List, or on the New Statesman website, or on the Guardian. It was on the Newsnight hustings, you know, the seven o’clock one…
Q: Nuneaton?
Stephen Bush: Nuneaton. The crowd loved him, the audience loved him.
Q: “The one thing nobody’s talking about is the Iraq war.”
Stephen Bush: So despite everything I just said about how important social media is, which I completely don’t resile from: it’s really easy to forget that the most important broadcaster in the 2015 Labour leadership election, the 2016 Labour leadership election and the 2017 general election was the BBC. It was that BBC hustings, which is the moment when Corbyn introduced himself to party members, and they went “she’s a robot, he seems like he’s doing an impersonation of a left-winger, she seems really right-wing – oh, he seems different.”
Q: Even the Welfare Bill?
Stephen Bush: The Welfare Bill has become a significant event, I think, because it is a way for various failed leadership candidates to blame Harriet Harman for their own failings. But if you look at the claim “oh, it was the welfare bill”, I had already written that first story about polling showing him ahead, and I think at that point we already had a public poll validating that story. Corbyn was already ahead in the CLP nominations. Crucially, the thing that the welfare bill changed was that it meant we moved from a situation where he was winning in the second round to one when he was winning in the first: because it detonated Andy Burnham.
Q: So in terms of the organisational effect of social media, in terms of networks built up – Red Labour, the People’s Assembly events, all those, which many would argue had been accentuated by Facebook and social media. Do you think they were just something that swelled Corbyn’s victory from a second round win anyway to something that was a complete crushing victory, rather than anything that actually really made a difference?
Stephen Bush: Yeah. I would say that very confidently as far as 2015 goes. I think the interesting counterfactual is, given that we all know that there was a majority on the NEC to hold him off the ballot paper – would those people in an era before social media, without the eyes of the world on those 33 people, would they have gone “actually, yeah, let’s kill it in darkness”?
Q: In terms of what can be learned, it sounds like your diagnosis is that we actually still live in a fairly conventional environment? Social media has accentuated things, made things a bit more shouty, but underlying it all the same opinions would broadly be there.
Stephen Bush: I think where it becomes significant is when you move from party electorates, which are just weird for a number of reasons, to general electorates. Corbyn is in many ways the perfect mirror image of it. What was his strongest area in the general election? London. What was his weakest area in the membership (though very strong anyway)? London. What was his weakest area in the membership in terms of age? It was ironically people we think of as first time voters. But of course that was his strongest age group in the general election.
Stephen Bush: It’s just so different that the comparison is completely useless, and actually obscures more than it informs. But when you get to the wider electorate, that information can be disseminated much more quickly and there aren’t barriers to entry meant in the 2017 election the Right’s historical advantage of a dominant right-wing press amplified by the BBC was disrupted. You had a situation where you have social media and a right-wing press, both amplified by the BBC.
Q: Stuff like fox hunting was more important than it would have been otherwise.
Stephen Bush: Exactly. I think the open question, and one of the things that is particularly difficult for us politicos to absorb, is that people have this idea of us in the UK as a hugely consequential nation. From Facebook’s perspective all of the choices they make about politics are about a different regulatory arrangement, and how they affect the UK.
Q: “Oh, you’re still following GDPR on the side?”
Stephen Bush: Yeah. “Has England left Europe yet?” I mean, it’s that kind of level of engagement. But it was obviously consequential in the 2017 election, and was consequential in terms of organising.
Stephen Bush: The information Facebook releases to us is a bit incomplete and perhaps not as accurate as we would like. But incomplete and inaccurate information is better than speculation. And all of the evidence shows that actually, it was in the general election that Momentum’s brilliant videos, the Evolve Politics fox hunting stuff started to become significant. There is no real evidence that those things were significant in the leadership election. Other than, of course, the really important thing – by the time of the general election, the Labour leadership and its support network had fought and won two elections.
Q: They had had a test run. It’s interesting that you bring up that mirror image point of the party electorate not being very representative of the general electorate, but actually those two leadership elections turned out to be quite good test runs.
Stephen Bush: I think in many ways it’s a bit like what Euro elections used to provide the national parties. Obviously the people who turn out at European elections are…
Q: Weird.
Stephen Bush: Are weird, yeah. They are odd events. In terms of their outcomes, they can tell us quite little, other than where a party is particularly strong.
Q: But they’re good for test driving.
Stephen Bush: They’re good for test driving – “oh, we’ve got to fight a genuinely national election.” So if you think about Ed in 2014, the thing it exposed was that his team were not able to adequately brief and prepare him to go “This morning you’re in Swindon talking about cuts”.
Q: “Here’s who the local council leader is.”
Stephen Bush: It provided a stress test for that level of breadth. And in the same way, the party membership leadership election does at least give you a test of, for example, how quickly can you get sign off on content from the leader through to it appearing on social media. You know, can you move your candidate around eight different venues and still feed them?
Q: Yeah, it’s like a process. Practice in terms of…actually making sure that you’re not getting to the end of the day and calling someone a bigot.
Stephen Bush: Yeah, exactly.
SOURCE: www.thesocialreview.co.uk