I hadn’t realised how traumatised I remain by Michael Portillo. Not so much the trousers and jackets sported on his train travel, although they remain borderline criminal, but his efforts to engage with The Poor. First in 1993, when he emulated the lifestyle of a single mother on benefits (“For someone like me, who’s never had to think about these things, it’s just boring having to think all the time about how you buy the cheapest things and whether the money’s going to last”). And then again – because those poor and their boring lives are always with us, are they not? – five years ago he gave us a feature-length documentary in which he oozed around the council estates of England in Our Housing Crisis: Who’s to Blame? If memory serves, the answer somehow wasn’t Margaret Thatcher’s reign-defining sell-off of the public housing stock (we had 6.5m council homes in 1980; nearly a third of them were transferred to private hands under the Right to Buy scheme). Instead, it was apparently the failure of councils to build replacements since. Obvious, really, especially if you are a devotee of oleaginous logic delivered with a smug but straight face.
But it all comes flooding back. As do awful memories of Matthew Parris attempting to live on benefits for a week in 1983. He considered the people he met, living “meagre and threadbare” lives, were at the right level of poverty to stay motivated, and returned 20 years later to find how things had turned out. Fortunately, in 60 Days on the Estates, Ed Stafford – who spends three weeks on a London estate then three weeks on its Brummie equivalent in next week’s episode – might be another middle-aged, middle-class white man, but he is not a Tory MP. This, it turns out, makes quite the difference.
Stafford is a former army officer who has carved out a career as an explorer and survivalist. But his demeanour is gentle to the point of diffidence. There is no roaring ego, and people come to him as much as he goes to them over the 21 days he spends on the notorious Northumberland Park estate in Haringey, north London. The estate, and the borough, are riven with armed gang warfare, a third of the households qualify as “deprived”, the dozen food banks in the area are besieged and the legacy of the Tottenham riots lives on.
He meets Michelle, a mother of nine, and her friend Dionne, a single mother of three sets of twins, at Haringey Play Association. Dionne, 34, has lived in the same one-bedroom council flat since she was a university student. When Stafford visits, he brings cooked chicken with him for the family. What would Portillo or Parris have brought, I wonder? A bottle of port? She shows Stafford the sheaf of correspondence between her and the council going back years, in which she begs to be rehoused, or for them to mend the leaking pipe on the block’s roof that is causing rising damp and black mould on the walls and her children to have asthma. Nothing, according to a caption before the credits roll, has yet been done.
Phil sees Stafford sitting on a wall on the edges of the estate and invites him in for a cup of tea. Details are not given but it is clear that Phil – sweet, charming, articulate – has had a terrible childhood that made him a crack addict by the age of 17. When Stafford meets him, he hasn’t used for four days. It does not last. He used to be a gardener until five years ago, when anxiety and depression got the better of him. He wants to take up a job offer from a painter and decorator friend but is frightened. “This is the best I have been for three years,” he says. If he fails at the job, he will have proved to himself he cannot function in the real world, where he has already missed out on so much. “They say it can’t hurt to try – but it can,” he says. It’s as neat and heartbreaking a summary of so many vulnerable people’s situations as you are ever likely to hear. And Stafford sits, and he listens, and he says how sorry he is.
• 60 Days on the Estates is on Channel 4 and More4.
