The state should subsidise creatives - it works in Ireland, and kept me going in lockdown

I have a confession to make. It’s not something I’ve really written about before, not because I feel particularly bad about it, but because, in some way, it feels like I probably did something wrong. I never broke the law or anything; still, something about it has always felt off to me.

It happened during the pandemic. The country shut down in March 2020, and my career shut down with it as well. I was freelance already back then, though more of a reporter than a columnist, and I largely covered Westminster.

I wrote a few pieces on how various MPs, special advisers and staffers were dealing with the national lockdown, and the fact that they couldn’t really access Parliament. I wrote a feature on electronic voting, and what it may or may not do to the way politicians dealt with their jobs. I was basically done after that. I had nothing else to write. What exactly was I meant to do with my time – and my bank account?

Those first few weeks of lockdown shredded my nerves. I was sad about being stuck in my flat, of course, but mostly I didn’t know what I was expected to do when my work no longer existed. This is when Rishi Sunak stepped in.

Because I’d been self-employed for long enough, I was able to get some SEISS grants over 2020 and 2021, which covered 80% of my earnings. Suddenly, I was free.

Well, I was still going insane from isolation but, at least, I could think about my immediate financial future without fainting, so I set out to work. My pre-pandemic day-to-day wasn’t viable back then but, I thought, I could put that mandatory free time to good use. I’d published my first book the year before and found the process exhilarating and hilariously stressful, as there is so little money involved in it.

A book proposal is a long document that can take weeks and weeks to research and write, but which, for obvious reasons, isn’t actually paid for by anyone. If you do manage to hit the jackpot after this and get a book deal, it’s unlikely that your publisher will give you enough cash to actually write the bloody thing. Only celebrities get large advances these days, which is ironic as they’re the very people who need them least, but here we are.

Could I perhaps make the most of a bad hand and reorient my career, at least temporarily? As it turned out: yes – those two particular wrongs could make a right.

Over the course of under two years, I ended up writing two proposals, then two entire books – one on politics, and one on internet culture. In that time, I also worked on a lot of other potential projects, none of which actually ended up working in the long run, but all of which helped me become a better writer and, I think, a more well-rounded person.

By the time the world reopened, my career had been transformed. Sure, political journalism remained my bread and butter, but I also launched a website on London in 2022, and I wrote a novel in that same year, and I did some travelling, which, I believe, ultimately led to me launching the Outsiders Arts Club last year. The government spent a few thousand pounds on me and, thanks to them, I both worked for years and also gave work to others, and produced some things which were and are still being enjoyed by people across the country.