Divisive Tory MP turned TV star Michael Portillo: ‘We’ll still have railways in 200 years’ time’

Michael Portillo has been making his remarkably popular Great Railway Journeys at home and abroad for 15 years. And as unlikely as his sartorial colour combinations is the route he has travelled from divisive Tory MP to international TV icon. 

In each episode of his series, he follows old guidebooks from the past to see how Britain has changed and is changing, hopping off to participate in any number of random activities.

The programme is a sleeper hit here, but a runaway success overseas. Michael Portillo is now really having his moment. To vast swathes of the world he is our primary ambassador with a level of recognition for a British TV star unrivalled since Mr Bean.

Here, he is still remembered as a symbol of political schadenfreude, his seismic unseating in 1997 (while defence secretary) signalled an emphatic changing of the guard. There’s none of that baggage for international audiences. Instead he personifies a curious kind of Brit abroad, conducting himself with a civilised air and a wardrobe that’s a technicolour fever dream.

• Rail fares go up year after year – but it doesn’t have to be this way. It’s time to fix fares for good
• Michael Sheen: ‘Going on holiday doesn’t matter to me as much as paying off 900 people’s debts’
• Comedian Babatunde Aléshé: ‘My biggest regret? Not having therapy in my 20s’

A typical set could be an avocado green blazer, blush-pink shirt and post-box red slacks punctuated by a lavender pocket square (an Australian article on the topic, yes there is that level of interest in him, describes his style as: “Muggle substitute teacher’s first day at Hogwarts”). 

Michael Portillo is still a sometime political commentator, with views we might not all agree on, but his heart is in the railways, a passion awakened on trips on the ‘Starlight Special’, the steam sleeper that took him as a child from London to his grandparents’ pad in Kirkcaldy for summer sojourns, where our journey begins…

Big Issue: Talking about your childhood, you’ve said that the train from London to Scotland took you to “another world”. I’m from Kirkcaldy so I know it’s not usually a better world.

Michael Portillo: It was because in London my family lived in a semi-detached house in the suburbs. My Scottish grandfather, John W Blyth, was quite a prosperous manufacturer of linen, although by the 1960s it was an industry in decline. Nonetheless, he had done pretty well in a town famous for linoleum.

Trains can transport you not just physically but to a completely different situation. Is that what’s behind their romance? 

That is obviously entirely true, and that’s very much what I hope my television programme helps us understand. We move to different geographies, different cultures, different histories, different preoccupations, different priorities. Of course, you can experience all of that by getting on a plane. What I think is interesting about the train is that you can appreciate that evolution as it occurs. As an example, if you take a train from Paris to Marseille you leave a city of predominantly grey skies and you arrive at the Mediterranean in bright sunshine and highly accentuated colours. You’ve felt the temperature rising, seen the sun higher in the sky as you’re sitting in your seat, observing it occurring outside the window.

In the new series of Great Continental Railway Journeys you revisit the former Yugoslavia. Does going by train make you see the same places in a different way?

Although I’ve often been to the former Yugoslavia, I have not ever taken the train in the former Yugoslavia. When I was defence secretary we went from place to place by army helicopter. We’d fly over village after village where all the roofs had been burnt off. This was ethnic cleansing. The mobs had been into the villages after people had been driven out, and they’d burnt the roofs off to make sure they couldn’t reoccupy those houses. To get back now is a very different experience. The buildings have been repaired and you get a terrific welcome. But the ethnic cleansing has not been undone. The populations live apart. In towns and cities there are still dividing lines, which is a sadness. 

It’s hard to believe that war was so recent. And there is still similar conflict in our modern world. 

It’s an experience I’ve had in various places. When the Vietnam War was under way, it was incredible to think I’d ever travel from the south to the north on a train, or that as a westerner I could get a warm reception from the people. One day we’ll go back to Ukraine and hope that we’ll have the same experience, that everything has been rebuilt. 

In the first episode you fight gladiator reenactors in Pula. They don’t look like they were holding back…

Yes, being on the receiving end I strongly had that impression. The fellow popping the helmet on my head bashed me seven times with his sword to make sure it was offering me protection. It was a fantastically hot day and I had an arthritic hip at the time, so I was hopping around in 40-something degree heat with this fellow coming at me with a trident and a net. Yeah, it was quite an experience.

When you’re making those shows, how do you adapt when trains are delayed or cancelled?

I want to pay tribute to the team. I find it so brilliant, these young people not long out of university who are brilliant researchers, brilliant assistant producers, brilliant on-location assistants, fantastic. I turn up on the day, think about what to say and say it but the planning has been done by other people. As for disruption, we do have to be very much on our toes. We always have a train to catch, we’re always absolutely up against deadlines. If we get a delay, it can plunge us, certainly, into a challenge. The worst delays we had were in India, where trains can be many hours late. Waiting for a train, we’d start observing what was going on around the station. We noticed a WH Smith’s that took us into the fact that Kipling started his career by publishing little newspapers in India that were sold to railway passengers. There was an open-air barber, just with a set of chairs out in the open shaving people. So the fact that the train was delayed made us think on our feet and I think we made some of our best television as a result.

You’ve also made a new series of Great British Railway Journeys. Does making the two close together highlight the pros and cons of our train network? 

Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina do not have the most modern trains in the world. More generally though, yes, indeed. I mean, we have much less high-speed rail than many countries, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Japan, China… to name but a few. 

Are we missing out? 

I think we are. If all those other countries have decided that’s the thing to do, it would be arrogant to assume that high-speed rail wouldn’t bring us advantages too. Another striking thing is that most of those countries managed to build their high-speed rails at a fraction of the cost per mile to what it’s costing us. 

Is there an easy explanation for that? 

Yes, the easy explanation is that we allowed every lobby group to get its way. People said, ‘Oh, we don’t want to have the railway running through our countryside, it must go in a tunnel.’ We said, ‘OK, we’ll put it in a tunnel.’ Obviously, that’s vastly more expensive. I don’t think people value railways. Very often a valley is enhanced by a beautiful railway viaduct. 

Would you get planning permission to build Glenfinnan Viaduct now?

I leave the question in the air. Imagine today if we tried closing the Glenfinnan or the Ribblehead Viaducts, there’d be an absolute uproar. In this country there are two things which are impossible to do: close a railway or open a railway. 

Do you know how many territories your shows sell to around the world?  

What I can say is, as I travel around the world I notice more and more people know the programme. One isn’t surprised by Italians or Germans or French or Spanish, but Brazilians now often come up to me. They’re very popular in Australia and New Zealand, Hong Kong. Lots of nationalities come up to me and say they know the show so apparently they’re selling pretty well.

You might be becoming the best-known British face overseas. 

I’m sure I’m not more famous than Sir Keir Starmer. Whether I get recognised or not probably depends on whether I’m wearing a bright jacket. 

Are these clothes just for TV? 

It’s seeping into my real life to tell you the truth. At this moment I’m in a peach-coloured jacket, and I’m not doing TV today. 

When you’re waiting at a station or on a train, what do people talk to you about? 

Almost anything, but they tend to be related to television rather than politics. There aren’t so many people now who associate me with politics. They might be railway memories or they might want a selfie. Lots of people do come over and chat, which is all very nice. The only thing is sometimes our filming is very urgent. I’m getting off or on a train. We only have one chance to get that shot, so we sometimes have to restrain people when we’re doing that.

Is it a positive change that people talk less about politics with you? 

I think it is because although I’m still interested in politics, I don’t have expertise any more. I spent years talking about it and that seems to be probably about enough.

Your next project will mark the 200th anniversary of the railways in the UK. What do you hope to kind of shine a light on?

We’re approaching it in two parts. In the Northeast of England, the Stockton to Darlington railway ran from 1825 so that programme will be about the invention of the steam engine and the development of the locomotive, the big figures in railway building, the impact on the industries of Britain, railway archaeology. The Liverpool to Manchester railway was the first intercity passenger railway, opened in 1830 and so the second program will be about people. The social impact of the railways is almost limitless. It changed everything about society.

Where do you think the railways will be in 200 years? 

The thing that strikes me about the railway is that it is still completely recognisable from its invention. People laid two tracks that were four-foot, eight-and-a-half inches apart. And today, around the world, people are laying tracks four-foot, eight-and-a-half inches apart. Unbelievable. Think about anything else, the telephone that I’ve got in my hand, any other piece of equipment or machinery – it doesn’t look like it did 200 years ago. Yet the railway does. I have a feeling, therefore, that we’ll still have railways in 200 years’ time. Now, by then, we may have moved away from tracks four-foot, eight-and-a-half inches apart to magnetically elevated rails or whatever. But I think we’ll still have high-speed transport at ground level, supported by some sort of guidance. 

That’s 200 years’ time. Where do you think railways in Britain will be in a couple of years with nationalisation? 

I don’t think it’ll make much difference, to tell you the truth. The railways were denationalised under the Conservatives a while ago. What was very interesting was that we went from 700 million passenger journeys a year to about 1.7 billion passenger journeys a year, just before the pandemic. More than doubling, an increase of a billion journeys a year. When I was a minister, we seriously thought the railways might simply disappear and be replaced by motorways. That’s no longer the position. The railways have been so largely determined by the public sector, even private companies receive massive subsidies from the taxpayer. A lot of public money goes into railways because they’re a massive national utility, more valuable than simply the money that you can collect.

What would that little boy travelling by train to Scotland think about your life now going around taking great railway journeys?

I’d think it’s beyond my wildest dreams.

Great Continental Railway Journeys with Michael Portillo is out now on BBC Two and BBC iPlayer, with the new series of Great British Railway Journeys following afterwards.

Do you have a story to tell or opinions to share about this? Get in touch and tell us more. Big Issue exists to give homeless and marginalised people the opportunity to earn an income. To support our work buy a copy of the magazine or get the app from the App Store or Google Play.