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Having a nice stay

03.07.08 Tom Tivnan

The BBC’s main man in America is confessing that high-minded journalism was not necessarily the reason for bringing his family to Washington, DC five years ago.

“To be honest,” Justin Webb says, looking almost conspiratorially around the Covent Garden Hotel’s brasserie, “we went for the craic, we went for the sunshine. I didn’t know all that much about American ­politics. I didn’t go with a desire to expose America. I just thought it would be sunny and a nice place to live.”

Indeed, Webb has found that he loves living in the US, and that is the starting point for his forthcoming book Have a Nice Day . . . Behind the Clichés: Giving America Another Chance (Short Books, September), which takes a look at America’s ­politics, religion and culture. It is intended as an “anecdotal counter-blast” to what he believes is a knee-jerk anti-Americanism that is pervasive throughout Europe.

Webb, who became the BBC’s North American editor in December 2007, believes the timing for the book is apt, with British interest piqued by the gripping Barack Obama v Hillary Clinton primary battle, and the presidential elections set for 4th November.

“A year ago British people would have said: ‘Oh yeah, a book sympathetic to America. Thanks, but no thanks.’ But we’re entering this post-Bush world and I think now there is a desire to engage again with America.”

The presidential campaign is at the centre of the book, and used to help explain the essence of American politics. He argues that US politics is vigorous, with a seriousness of purpose that European democracies fail to match: “It’s not just about money and balloons.”

Yet it is also touched by a “homespun folksy barminess”. He points to a flashpoint last year when Clinton failed to tip a waitress in a Des Moines coffee shop. The waitress complained to the press, and Hillary was roasted in the media for it.

It may seem strange that the race for the leader of the free world can turn on things so trivial, but Webb says connecting with people is at the heart of national US politics. “You have to be able to talk to the ­single mother who is waiting tables at a restaurant, and do it in a way that is not condescending. If you can’t, it all goes haywire.”

Though an unapologetic lover of America, Webb still says he has to present the country “warts and all”. He adds: “I’m very conscious that just being relentlessly positive about the place would be counterproductive and unprofessional. Yet I’m also conscious that in many areas of the world the BBC makes a real effort to get under the skin of local people, which we may not always have done with Americans. We shouldn’t start by making the assumption that they are fat, gun-slinging idiots.”

Though largely positive, Webb still writes of the controversial issues in the US, from racism to its troubles with illegal immigration and right-wing evangelical fundamentalism (which he argues is on the wane).

He gets animated when refuting the contention that Americans are myopic and do not care about the rest of the world. Europeans, he says, always bring up the low number of Americans with passports, but he points out that Americans are on “this huge land mass” and until very recently didn’t need a passport to travel to Canada, the Caribbean and Mexico. He adds: “How many Brits use their passports only to go to France or Spain and eat chips in the Costa del Sol? If you look at it per capita in terms of adventurous travel, it is probably the same as us. It is just a false picture.”

Webb grew up in Bath and says his early life “was not easy”. His stepfather suffered from schizophrenia and he was brought up mainly by his “devoted and selfless” mother. After studying at the London School of Economics and working briefly for a political lobbying firm, he joined the BBC in 1985 and has been there ever since. He briefly thought about joining CNN several years ago, but was turned off by a trip to the imposing CNN Centre in Atlanta. “It seemed like a swivel-eyed cult and was not for me.”

He has held a number of roles at the BBC, including a reporter for the “Today” programme and a rather unhappy stint as a presenter for the “Breakfast News”. “I got recruited against my better judgement and perhaps against their better judgement. It wasn’t the perfect fit and I eventually escaped. That is the thing with the BBC; you can reinvent yourself.” He got back into political reporting covering the EU in Brussels before moving to the US.

He chose Short Books because he wanted Have a Nice Day to be brief, punchy and non-academic. He admits to being surprised by publishing’s very singular schedules. “Being a first-time author, this is all very mysterious­—the long time between your final change and when the book comes out.”

Covering the John McCain/Barack Obama face-off this autumn for the BBC will mean his promotion of the book will be limited, with just a stint on Radio 4’s “Start the Week” in September and a one-off event at Topping & Company in his hometown of Bath.

He is not making predictions on the race’s outcome (the BBC forbids him to), but Webb interestingly says Obama’s Achilles heel may be his callowness, not race. He says: “Strangely,­ a lot of Americans say to me: ‘I won’t vote for Obama, look at what happened with Bush—it’s the same thing, a guy with no experience.'"

Whatever the outcome, Webb hopes his book challenges people about America: “To dismiss the country as just a great monolith full of fat people, religious nutters and guns is to be staggeringly ignorant about the modern world. If you don’t know what makes America tick, you are dismissing in the widest cultural terms the driving force of most of the last century, and I think this one.”

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