Edinburgh Fringe 2025

Steve Richards Presents Rock and Roll Politics

Steve Richards

Genre: Political, Spoken Word

Venue: theSpace @ Symposium

Festival: Edinburgh Fringe

Low Down

Review

Comfortable seats in a cosy venue with political discourse on the menu sounds like the recipe for a Saturday morning snooze rather than a bit of rock and roll.  But no-one was in any danger of suffering from drooping eyelids in what was an excellent hour of political discourse featuring that doyen of UK political correspondents, Steve Richards.

Part exploration of a political topic with which the audience could easily identify and part Q&A session exploring what the audience had on its collective and individual mind, this was a show that could have run long over its scheduled hour.

With a bare stage and no props it was just Richards.  Oh, and his words, which he deployed with consummate skill, wasting none as he captured the key issues behind today’s topic, the decline (and fall?) of the Conservative Party.

Steve Richards Presents Rock and Roll Politics takes a deep dive into a different political issue every day.  This was day seven and a quick show of hands from the audience revealed that quite a few were on the second or third visit.  Each day Richards presents a question which he takes great care to set into detailed context.  He then polls the audience for their binary response.  Today’s big question was whether Kemi Badenoch would lead the Tories into the next election.

Now, it would be good to report that the audience gave this careful consideration and that they were almost equally split.  But they weren’t.  By a long way.  A long, long way.  Seems like the Tory party is heading for yet another round of regicide, at least that’s the view of this cohort.

This neatly cued up Richard’s fascinating discourse on how (and why) the party that once won elections in its sleep comes to find itself running a distant third in the polls to a party with a leader who has a disarming habit of losing interest and moving on to form another body politic.

Richard’s is an accomplished raconteur, with a nice line in acerbic asides, a great sense of comic timing as well as being a dab hand at impersonating notable political figures.  His arguments are structured, impeccably articulated and conversational, steering well clear of the cliches and sound bites so beloved of those on whom he is paid to comment.

He raised some serious issues too; the continual media obsession with leadership and leadership change across the whole UK political spectrum; the increasingly fleeting nature of leadership in our politics; the wave of political indifference; the related disillusionment across almost the entire voter spectrum, manifesting itself through a declining proportion exercising their rights at the ballot box.

This sparked some very constructive and thought-provoking audience interaction, which Richards handled with aplomb and a gentle, diplomatic touch.  OK, this sort of spoken word discourse is only going to appeal to a certain cohort but if you’re looking for something that is going to inform and entertain in equal measure, then I recommend you make a beeline for theSpace UK’s Symposium venue.  Richards is there to the bitter end and I, for one, will be juggling my reviewing schedule in an attempt to get back for more.

Published August 16, 2025 by Tim Wilcock