Edinburgh Fringe 2026
Steve Richards Presents Rock and Roll Politics
Steve Richards
Genre: Political, Spoken Word
Venue: theSpace@Symposium Hall
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
Spend an hour with the doyen of UK political correspondents, Steve Richards, as he explores a different key issue affecting politics in the UK each day. With a bit of help from his audience.
Review
Comfortable seats in a cosy venue with political discourse on the menu sounds like the recipe for a Sunday 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 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 threatened to 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 facing the key operators in UK politics.
Steve Richards Presents Rock and Roll Politics takes a deep dive into a different political issue every day. This was day eight and a quick show of hands from the audience revealed that quite a few were on their second or even third visit. Each day Richards starts by asking a question which he takes great care to set into detailed context. He then polls the audience for their binary response.
Today’s was whether Andy Burnham would take the plunge and seek a fresh mandate through a General Election. After all, he’s promised to deliver a Labour manifesto committed to arguably the biggest change in forty years, something he’s inherited from three people who no longer have any skin in the game, namely Starmer, Reeves and McSweeney. Our Edinburgh audience gave that idea a firm thumbs down, causing the few of us who stuck our mitts in the air and urged Burnham to hit the hustings to wonder whether, with the right fractured like a broken record, he was unable to see the horse with the proverbial gift between its choppers.
But this was merely a sidebar into the main topic on today’s agenda, another audience vote on a list of those who are not in the political spotlight on a regular basis but who can wield a surprising amount of power and influence from the hinterlands in which they operate. Richards offered five for us to vote on, with the lead two being the subject of his discourse for the day.
Step forward Robert Jenrick (Reform UK – well, this week at any rate), Morgan McSweeney (Master of the Dark Arts party), Anas Sarwar (booted out as leader of the Labour party in Scotland and rescued from political oblivion by Andy Burnham), Ed Milliband (possibly the most radical energy minister in Europe) and Shabana Mahmood (Home Secretary and former Starmer loyalist – well, until the wheels started coming off his bus, whereupon she pushed him under it).
And, in one of the most predictable landslides ever recorded in an audience poll, the first three on the list above received about the same number of votes as a UK entry to the Eurovision Song Contest, leaving Richards to give a pair of very crisp, incisive pen portraits of just why Mahmood and Milliband are where they are right now, why one of them might already be positioning themselves for a tilt at the tiller and why the other would possibly be a challenger for the Liz Truss award for Prime Ministerial brevity.
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; the installation of a revolving door at No. 10; the rise and fall (?) of the right; the growing political fatigue; and 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 here to the bitter end and I, for one, will be juggling my reviewing schedule in an attempt to get back for more.
