If Britain was auditioning for the role of a national writer, James Graham would be one of the stand-out candidates. In an era in which the literary novel has become increasingly irrelevant, Graham is a writer who has demonstrated a continuous imaginative engagement with the people and events creating the history of modern Britain. He works in popular forms and reaches a mass audience. His signature style as a playwright is to blend factual reporting with fictional narrative techniques as he recasts or reimagines real historical characters and actual events. He writes about big, defining political moments, such as the fall of a prime minister or the end of a government, but in microcosm.

Consider the subjects he has dramatized: the miners’ strike of 1984-85 and how its legacy affects a community in the former Nottinghamshire coalfields (the BBC’s Sherwood); the Brexit referendum (Brexit: The Uncivil War); old Fleet Street and the transformation of the Sun newspaper (Ink); the gruelling final days of the minority Callaghan government but told from inside the parliamentary whips’ office (This House); the rise and fall of New Labour but told from inside a Nottinghamshire constituency office (Labour of Love); How to be a Millionaire’s coughing major scandal (Quiz); Gareth Southgate’s rejuvenation of the England football team (Dear England); the beginning of the end of Margaret Thatcher’s premiership (Brian and Maggie), and most recently the 2008 financial crisis and the collapse of the Royal Bank of Scotland (Make it Happen, in which Brian Cox plays the ghost of Adam Smith).

I’ve long been fascinated by his work and met Graham one morning in late July at his terraced townhouse in south-east London. On the kitchen table, alongside a short history of Edinburgh, were print-outs of two completed scripts: Make it Happen and the four-part BBC adaptation of Dear England, which is currently being filmed.

Dear England, which this month began a nationwide tour, is ostensibly a play about football but it is also about the condition of England. Through the character of Southgate, an introspective, reticent man but of iron will, he wittily and provocatively explores the defining themes of our fractious, divided politics: belonging, identity, diversity, patriotism, national purpose and its absence, and the burden of history.

What Graham admires most about Southgate, he told me as we had coffee in his small, immaculate garden, is that he had a story to tell not only about the England football team but the country. He had an analysis of what was wrong, a long-term strategic plan and the courage to implement it. “When you consider our politicians, our spiritual leaders, our celebrities, our academics, whoever constitutes our public life, in no other area of our life – and challenge me on this - is there another equivalent to Gareth Southgate, who delivered incremental improvement year by year, where something that wasn’t going well is now going well. When I think of our politics, we’ve just accepted that we are now in an age of managed decline. But Gareth took a failing project and decided to do a radical reset.”

What advice does Gralam have for Keir Starmer? What for instance could he learn from Southgate or more precisely Graham’s Southgate (as originally played by Joseph Fiennes), who is part football manager, part self-help guru, part secular preacher?

For a start, Starmer’s government also needs “a radical reset”, he said, because a “return to a sort of technocratic managerial calm” is not enough. “We’re just not very well [as a country], are we? We don’t feel very well. We are really unmoored as a society and we’re feeling angry and alone. … There’s an appetite in the country for radical change when it feels like almost nothing is working anymore. It requires change on the scale of Attlee in 1945 and Thatcher in 1979. What has to happen first, though, is recognition of the scale of the challenges and the scale of the ideas that it requires to get the country working again. And that’s not just individual policies. It requires a framing narrative or a story, an arc, a mission, a project and words that you can communicate and quantify for us all to get behind.”

As well as a story Starmer needs a coherent political strategy. And he needs to embrace a more populist style. “The one thing I agree with Dominic Cummings about is the lack of a national plan and a long-term vision. Incremental change is happening under Labour, and they probably do feel aggrieved that they are not going to be getting the credit for slowly beginning to turn the tanker of state around. I understand their frustration, but in the age of populism, you are going to have to unfortunately play the game on their battlefield and sell something harder and in a more populist way.”

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When we met, Graham had just moved back into the house – unemptied boxes were piled up in one corner – having spent three months in New York preparing for the opening on Broadway of Punch, which originally premiered at the Nottingham Playhouse for a limited run in May 2024 and is based on Jacob Dunne’s memoir Right from Wrong. Dunne, a former drug-dealer, killed a man with a single punch after an altercation in Nottingham in 2011, and the play is a story about randomness (the punch), tragedy (the death) and redemption (Dunne’s rehabilitation in prison and ultimate recovery of self).

Since his breakthrough play This House premiered at the National in 2012, Graham has had sustained success. This month, as well as the Dear England tour, Punch is opening on Broadway and in the West End - but last year, also in New York, he had what he calls a significant “failure”: Tammy Faye, the musical he co-wrote with Elton John (music) and Jack Shears of the Scissor Sisters (lyrics), closed less than a month after it had opened following poor reviews and ticket sales. Tammy Faye Messner was a singing televangelist who came from the ultra-conservative Christian right but reached across the aisle to the gay community. “I thought her story was tailor made for a musical with great banging tunes from Elton John.” The critics disagreed.

Perhaps he should avoid three-way collaborations: The Way, a BBC series created by Graham, Michael Sheen and Adam Curtis, and set in a dystopian Wales shattered by civil unrest, received decidedly mixed reviews last year. Notably it was a work of pure fiction rather than a reimagination of what has already happened.

“In New York’s it’s actually very specific when the critics don’t endorse you,” Graham said, reflecting on the failure of Tammy Faye. “That doesn’t happen so much here, you can have a hit, like famously Les Mis [Les Miserables] was fucking slammed, but people just loved it. There’s a mistrust of critical opinion here. Broadway’s so expensive, you’re spending like $300 on a ticket. If the New York Times says, don’t go, you don’t go. And it happens quickly. I knew, we all knew, as a creative team, just before midnight, the night of the opening of Tammy Faye, we were just stood at a party with a glass of champagne and I’d flown my Mum over, and I knew we were going to get some really difficult reviews in the next 48 hours. You open your phone and Google your show and you see it and go: ‘Okay, that’s three months wasted.’ You immediately feel sorry for the cast, and the people who have moved to New York hoping to be in a two, three year running show.”

He didn’t lose money because he had been paid for his script.

“But what you lose is future royalties. And you just think it would have been really nice to have a long-running show on Broadway. That’s okay. I’ll crack it one day! It slightly helped, and I say this with love to my colleagues, you’re spreading the responsibility a bit when you do a musical. It’s not like a James Graham play failed.”

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Graham, who is 43, lives alone, and works obsessively. He has been diagnosed with and treated for “workaholicism”. He grew up in the old mining community of Kirby-in-Ashfield in north Nottinghamshire; Reform’s Lee Anderson, a former miner and Labour councillor, is now the local MP. Of the popularity of Reform locally, he says, “Anderson is an ex-miner, once tied to the Labour Party. And it’s a majority quite socially conservative town. There’s no judgement there from me on that but it’s about family, traditional values, community. Once your connection to the labour movement collapses because of work and deindustrialisation, culturally and socially there was a gap for Reform.”

Later, he is more scathing about Nigel Farage and his anti-system party. “We are completely entitled to be dissatisfied in the country. It’s been such an unsatisfying lost decade of paralysis and stagnation.… But the idea that Farage and Richard Tice are not the metropolitan elite is fucking absurd. I mean, they have a whole media arm to their political party. Farage, Aaron Banks, Zia Yusuf – these people are so removed from the experiences of the people in my community in the Red Wall, and yet they have the brass neck and confidence to walk in and try to relate and try to communicate their experiences back to them. And I sort of admire them for doing it. It seems to me these people are welcomed and trusted and given the benefit of the doubt, because again, they’ve sold that narrative very successfully that something about the metropolitan left is elitist and distant from people’s experiences. Whereas the actual millionaire and billionaire classes from the City, which is where Farage and those people come from, aren’t. I find the success of that narrative both impressive and really frustrating.”

Graham wrote about his hometown in Sherwood, meticulously recreating the atmosphere of the surrounding “borderland villages which feel culturally northern but are geographically Midlands”. He believes people like him who come from but leave behind the “red wall” are in “constant dialogue with their origins, how it’s impacted upon them, how it limits them, how it empowers them”.

What matters to him is the “specificity of place”. “I don’t like these places being ignored, and stories not coming from them.”

His mother had various jobs, often at the same time - as a school secretary, in pubs, a warehouse and a shop – and his father worked for the local council. Graham has a twin sister and elder brother and remains close to his parents, although they divorced when he was a young child. “They had a good divorce, but I remember there was a strange period when my father lived in a caravan on the front lawn. I mean, it’s just weird. I didn’t know it was weird at the time, but I guess the thing I am aware of, is there’s no blame or judgement. But I never experienced from a young age, like a model of a loving relationship. There was no point I ever remembered my parents being affectionate or loving to one another. I remember slamming of doors and screaming and shouting… I can’t remember the first time I ever really believed that people loved each other in the way they do in films or in songs. I’d never seen that.”

He attended Ashfield Comprehensive School, which had its own theatre. “I was a bit of a sissy when I was younger. Quiet, a bit feminine, a bit camp. I used to get upset. I used to struggle with things. So I got a bit bullied. I was easy to pick on because I was small, shy, skinny.” The theatre and the drama department offered him a place to go at lunchtime, somewhere to belong and dream.

The school is being knocked down and rebuilt but without a theatre, and Graham is outraged. “Eton has three theatres so why shouldn’t my old school have one? It was amazing to have a state school in a working-class community, a socially deprived area, that had a theatre. What it said culturally and philosophically is that drama is important, that creativity and imagination is important. It told parents it was important. Without it I wouldn’t have been a playwright.”

Would he lead a fundraising campaign for a new theatre at the rebuilt school? “If I have to, but I don’t really want to say that because I shouldn’t have to. The state should pay for it.”

He also told me that he and the producers of the West End production of Punch will take no profit or royalties from the play and instead direct some of what they would have earned to subsidise cheaper ticket prices. “The actors will be paid for their work. The play is based on a real-life tragedy from our community. It just doesn’t feel right to be earning a profit.”

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When Graham first came to London, after studying drama at Hull University, often sleeping on friends’ floors, he felt like an “imposter” as he tried to make his way as a playwright. “I used to be really uncomfortable in my own skin, impossibly shy.” He was supported early on by the 50-seat Finborough Theatre, a small, independent venue in west London where he became writer-in-residence, and collaborated with the director Kate Wasserberg, who says he has “the soul of a playwright and the brain of a historian”.

He describes his sexuality as fluid and has had relationships with men and women, but back then, in his twenties, he “closed himself off” from the possibility of love. At school, “I looked at girls and fancied girls which made it a bit easier, as well as probably looking at boys and fancying boys. I just assumed that everybody fancied everybody, and apparently that wasn’t the case… And I generally thought love was a made-up thing for poetry and songs and that people didn’t really believe it. I had no example of that as a young person.”

If he did not believe in love he believed in work, the redemptive capacity of work, and was extraordinarily driven. As a young playwright, he wanted to go entirely his own way. He did not care what was fashionable or modish or want to write about sex and relationships. What interested him was history and politics but revealed through intimate character studies, process and systems; one of his early plays at the Finborough (Eden’s Empire) was about the 1956 Suez crisis.

By the 2010s, even though This House had enjoyed two sell-out runs at the National, he knew that “something was unhealthy, or I was unhappy in my life”. Being a successful playwright did not feel as he once imagined it would back when he worked on the door at Nottingham Playhouse and received £10 tips from stars like Danni La Rue.

After a failed relationship, a former lover who had suffered with addiction urged Graham to seek professional help. “I didn’t believe there’s such a problem as being addicted to work,” he told me when we spoke a second time a few weeks later. “You think, ‘Well, just work less you stupid idiot, go on holiday, have a day off.’ But it just becomes completely destructive. Physically, I was changing. I was losing weight. I wasn’t eating or sleeping, and I completely disconnected myself from the people in my life, from my family, my friends, even to an extent the people I was working with.”

He was lying about small things – about the time he got up in the morning or had gone to bed, about having a day off when he had been working. He felt ashamed about these lies and his self-neglect. “If you’re addicted to drink or drugs, then you cannot sustain that in your work or daily life. People will start to see it. You can maintain your addiction to working for such a long time because, on the surface, it looks like you’re doing extraordinarily well. You’re extremely efficient. You’re producing this incredible output.”

He was reluctant to seek help because he thought “therapy was posh and middle class and something Londoners did”. Then one day, he found himself “sat in a circle of people and they all started talking, describing similar behaviours and patterns that were destroying them and that I recognised as my own”.

He sometimes feels as if he is relapsing, as if he is succumbing again to the fever of work addiction. The paradox for Graham, however, is that what makes him happiest (his all-consuming commitment to work) can also destroy him. He talks about the joy of completion, of the times when he is on set of a TV drama he has written or sharing one of his plays at the Edinburgh Festival. “How you resist the thing that makes you happiest in the world – I guess I’m at peace with never quite discovering how you balance that.”

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Graham likes to meet the people he writes about and immerse himself in their stories. He takes notes but never records conversations. “I met Dominic Cummings a couple of times. One evening the Vote Leave team came together around pizza for a night, and I just sat there and listened to them, which was thrilling. I saw the energy, the vibes, the dynamic, but also quite how much they revered and respected him. Often I don’t know why I am there, but I just feel I need energy characteristics, a sense of it.”

Energy characteristics: that is what he is looking for in a story.

Cummings’ public persona is aggressively assertive and confrontational, but in person Graham was surprised by him. “Given how combative he is in his writing, he was infinitely more thoughtful, quiet and introverted. Dare I say it – it could have been for my benefit – there was a sort of humility about him. I don’t know how performative his aggression is.”

In Graham’s drama Cummings is portrayed by Benedict Cumberbatch - “Who wouldn’t want to be played by a Marvel superhero!” Cumberbatch captures the intensity of Cummings but does not fully master his clipped-with-just-a-hint-of-Geordie middle class Durham, by way of Oxford, accent. From time to time, Cumberbatch-as-Cummings places his ear to the ground as if he can hear something, a distant hum, the very movement of the Earth.

What is it, I asked Graham, that Cummings can hear? What does he understand about the mood in the country that others don’t? “Britain actually does make a noise. There’s something called The Hum, which is louder around Bristol or something, and I have this pretentious playwrighty idea: Cummings can hear that and thinks he can hear something mythic and profound. I loved the metaphor, and to Cummings’ credit he suggests if you don’t even listen to it, you’ll never hear it.” Nigel Farage claims something similar: that he has sensed a feeling or mood in the country, a hum of mass disaffection perhaps. “Something is happening out there,” he has often said to me.

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Graham believes that what defines his work is imaginative empathy; he wants even the anti-heroes like Fred Goodwin, the former reviled chief executive of the Royal Bank of Scotland who was stripped of his knighthood, to be heard on stage and understood. But he also says he does not want to upset the people he portrays in his plays, whether it is the coughing major who was accused of cheating his way to the jackpot on How to be a Millionaire or Harry Kane, the England football captain. I told him I thought the portrayal of Kane, one of the most accomplished Englishmen alive, was cruel in the version of Dear England I saw shortly after it opened at the National. Graham seemed genuinely disturbed: it was never his intention to ridicule Kane or encourage the audience to laugh at him.

“One of my defences of that is that we had fun with everybody. We had fun with Greg Dyke and Sarina Wiegman and Theresa May because it’s a comedy and a slightly vaudevillian comedy. There’s something in it, which is quite Elizabethan, because all of England is there and we’re celebrating them, but also laughing at our foibles and our idiosyncrasies. Something happened when that play landed in front of a thousand people. People just adored Will Close, the actor who played Harry Kane, because he just nailed his voice and his mannerisms…. [But] I think a bit incorrectly, it felt like we were laughing at him. I have to take responsibility for that, and I’m trying to correct on our representation of him in the TV drama.”

All writers, Graham Greene said, must have a splinter of ice in the heart. Does James Graham have that splinter of ice embedded in the heart - or is he too eager to be liked, too unwilling to offend and show his hand politically, in the style of a more strident and polemical playwright like David Hare?

“You could argue there’s an icy coldness to putting Fred Goodwin [in Make it Happen] on stage and giving him a hearing rather than just lynching him. But I suspect not. I suspect what I feel - and it’s sentimental and possibly why I don’t have the cut-throat bloodthirstiness the true political playwright needs - is for me the beauty and the power of theatre is it’s a space of consensus and empathy.”

He paused and looked directly at me. “There’s an obsession in politics with party, like with which scarf you are wearing, which colour stripes. What is more interesting and more important is values. I believe I have strong values and principles. I’m a working-class kid from a northern mining town and my first job was a window cleaner. I worked in factories and warehouses. I have those traditions in me. I also went to university and lived in young urban centres. Now I live in London, surrounded by arty people. You get the privilege and the benefit and the joy of seeing all these different points of view. All these things infuse into you and your work.”

And there is a lot of work. Perhaps Labour should add to his burden. After all Graham is a storyteller, Starmer is a prime minister desperately in search of a story to define the purpose of his floundering government and for someone to craft it. A task for a national writer if ever there was one.