Interviewed for the inaugural Fleet Street Quarter’s Festival of Words, the mild-mannered writer spoke engagingly of why he was drawn to write about such drivers of populism as media mogul Rupert Murdoch and Boris Johnson’s enigmatic advisor Dominic Cummings.

Graham’s 2017 stage play Ink presented a broadly sympathetic portrait of Murdoch, far from the gutter press Dirty Digger Private Eye satirical characterisation. In 1969, when Ink is set, Murdoch was unknown to most of Britain. His success at turning The Sun, a staid broadsheet when he bought it, into Britain’s bestselling tabloid would change that. Ink recounts how Murdoch hired ex-Mirror sub-editor Larry Lamb, who revamped the paper with a diet of sex, sport and celebrity.

At the time, Murdoch was not a confident figure, according to Graham. He was patronised by the British establishment but his instinct for journalism as popular entertainment was unmatched. 

What attracted Graham to this story, asked the evening’s host, Helen Lewis.

“Murdoch unapologetically gave people what they wanted. Remarkably, over one year, The Sun started outselling all the other papers. Larry Lamb came up with the idea of Page 3 girls. Everyone was against it. Murdoch was furious,” he recalled. “He thought it was so distasteful. It was secret – they didn’t tell the unions because they knew they would reject it. The Archbishop of Canterbury exploded, there was a debate in the Commons, but they beat The Mirror.

“The Sun became the biggest selling English-language paper in the world. That is such a delicious proposition if you want to talk about what are the values and morals of the news. As a playwright, you can attach all your anxieties and pretensions about populism and democracy, but you can’t do that unless you have a story that has an incredible engine – protagonists, antagonists.

Murdoch saw Ink twice, on the first occasion mistaking the writer for a barman at the theatre and attempting to order a G&T. What was he like, asked Lewis. “It was a studied case of giving absolutely nothing away. For all of our Succession associations… I do think he has a deep-seated value for traditional news, even though, ironically, that is the first thing he destroyed.”

The Sun’s view of a British working class obsessed by sex, celebrity and sport was at odds with Graham’s own working-class heritage in his native Nottinghamshire. He told the audience that his grandfather loved classical music. “The great joy and privilege of being a playwright is you get to play devil’s advocate with your own prejudices. I have prejudices against populist news and The Sun, but it was a great mischievous joy to ask why it was the most widely read paper on Earth. Some of it is so funny. They are great at making jokes. I wanted to understand the paper’s skill at doing that.”

He added: “When it comes to art and culture, in the community I come from, the public realm has been annihilated. There is no public space any more, including working men’s clubs and social clubs. They used to be the heart of the community. It was common for working-class people to have art and literature in their life, which influenced the rhythm of their day…

“My granddad could play an instrument and could talk about classical music. There were adult learning classes where you could learn about poetry and painting. That was normal. But the narrative that has taken root is that this kind of stuff is metropolitan. I find that infuriating because that is not my experience. We even own the narrative ourselves in those communities. Ashfield [where Graham was brought up] has the first ever Reform MP, Lee Anderson.”

Cummings, who helped sell Brexit to a credulous nation, was the subject of Graham’s Brexit: The Uncivil War, commissioned by Channel 4 and starring Benedict Cumberbatch as the Brexit mastermind responsible for coining the phrase “take back control” .

Cummings’s enemies, of whom there was no shortage, saw him as little short of a monster subverting democracy. Graham, who voted Remain, offered a more balanced view as audiences were taken inside the Brexit campaign from Cummings’s perspective.

“I was surprised that people on the progressive left saw casting Benedict Cumberbatch as Dominic Cummings as irresponsible,” Graham said. “The joy of drama is that you have all these characters saying different things. In Brexit: The Uncivil War, some people said Cummings was a genius, others said he was a charlatan who was poisoning the democratic discourse.”

Like Murdoch, Cummings’s impact on British politics has been considerable. Graham reminded the audience that when he wrote Brexit: The Uncivil War, he had no idea that Cummings, who dressed more like Mark Zuckerberg than a Westminster insider, would subsequently become a key advisor in Johnson’s doomed government.

“When I pitched a Channel 4 drama about the referendum, everyone assumed it was going to be about David Cameron, George Osborne and Theresa May. People who make the decisions in referendum campaigns are not politicians but unelected and completely unaccountable. Having a Channel 4 drama dragging Cummings into the light felt like a responsible thing to do.”

“Some people said Cummings was a genius, others said he was a charlatan” 

He went on: “I like writing dramas that ask questions, and maybe questions about our system of government and power. I definitely don’t want to answer them.”  

Turning to Sherwood, Graham’s BBC One series set in a divided north Nottinghamshire former mining community, Graham revealed that he was inspired by his own experience of seeing how deep the divide is. “Even today in my village, people cross the street to avoid someone who made a different choice to them in the miners’ strike of 1984. It feels like we’re trapped in a perpetual cycle of not being able to move on from that trauma.”

He had been thinking about what became Sherwood for about 10 years  “I didn’t know if I was good enough to do it” – and was encouraged by local people to finally tell the stories via fictionalised versions of horrific real events.

Dear England, Graham’s stage play about the highs and lows of the England football teams, is being adapted for a BBC TV series. The lead character is Gareth Southgate. Did Graham see a tragic flaw in the erstwhile England manager?

“Gareth took over about two weeks after the Brexit referendum and went all the way through to the end of Conservative rule. He outlasted five prime ministers and countless culture secretaries. He stayed and exhibited the opposite of almost everyone else in our public life in terms of saying there’s a value to kindness, quietness, decency and compassion. That was not the national story, so I loved the fact that he survived.”

In view of his fascination with populism, would he consider writing about Donald Trump? Graham’s reply was unequivocal: “There’s no part of me that wants to spend any time putting Trump in my head or on stage.”