Ash Sarkar is the face of woke. Up against the Goliaths of the right wing, the 32-year-old journalist from north London counts tech billionaires like Elon Musk and US president Donald Trump among her adversaries – of which she has many.
Another to cross her path was Piers Morgan before his unceremonious exit from Good Morning Britain in 2021, when during a heated TV debate about Trump and Obama, she quipped: “I’m literally a communist, you idiot.” A video of the moment has since clocked up nearly eight million views on YouTube. In 2023, Sarkar was ranked No 45 on the New Statesman’s Left Power List, and through appearances on shows like Question Time and in her role as senior editor of Novara Media, she has become one of the left’s most ubiquitous commentators.
Thus it will come as a surprise to many that Sarkar is now sounding the death knell for the culture wars on which she made her name, declaring: “Woke is dead.”
By that, she means all this uproar about unisex bathrooms and the debate over whether there should be a Black James Bond or a gay James Bond is simply not the priority. Such a statement might seem counterintuitive to everything Sarkar stands for, but “diversity, equity, and inclusion”, she says, is a distraction from the real issues. And so goes Sarkar’s argument in her debut book Minority Rule: Adventures in the Culture War.
“Identity has become the dominant preoccupation for both the left and the right,” she tells me in The Independent offices. “I no longer care about microaggressions – pronounce my name however the f*** you want.”
Sarkar knows that this view is controversial, and as ever, she’s prepared for the backlash. “People are gonna be like, she’s moved to the right,” she jokes, drily. She’s correct. A quick scan of recent comments on Novara Media, the platform she helped get off the ground over the last decade, reveals a rift in the left-wing ranks over her apparent conversion.
“Pathetic,” writes one person. “A fundamentalist identity politician slating an ideology she built an entire career around as the Western public massively rejected it.” One headline in The Daily Telegraph reads: “The Queen of Woke just exposed the hypocrisy of the virtue-signalling Left.” Still, online jibes are nothing compared to the death threats she’s received in the past. “I’m not worried about anyone from the left killing me,” she laughs. “They’ve all got iron deficiencies anyway.”
Sarkar is self-assured when it comes to politics, offering analysis with the certainty of scientific fact. And for someone who is about as famous as a journalist can get, she doesn’t find talking about herself all that interesting. Unlike other media personas who make a meal of just about any X post – ahem, Piers Morgan – she shrugs off any insults, attacks, and controversies, often with a smirk or a funny remark. Sometimes a literal shrug.
She has not once thought about quitting her job (“I made my bed”) and tells me she doesn’t feel any sense of pressure despite her still-rising profile. Sarkar doesn’t get upset or angry about the vitriol she faces and credits a lack of media training for her ability to speak with wit and candour compared to the fusty politicians she often shares mics with. A testament to that candour, she calls such MPs “degraded, atrophied figures”. Sarkar attributes her penchant for insults to her time at an all-girls school. “It was an Olympic sport,” she says of the name-calling. “And everyone else was much better [at it than me].”
Perhaps most surprising of all, Sarkar doesn’t enjoy fighting. “I hate conflict in my personal life,” she says. “I’m a scared little dog. If my husband is like, ‘Look, let’s have this difficult conversation, tell me what you really think.’ I cannot do it. Whereas, if you put me in a news studio and say, ‘Talk to this pro-privatisation lobbyist, they’re going to take your head off and you’ve got to stop him from doing that,’ I’m like, ‘Great. Fine, light work.’”
She’s since come to the realisation that compartmentalising like this isn’t exactly healthy. The death of her stepfather last year heralded the end of what Sarkar calls her “avoidance and ‘inshallah’ strategy”. At the age of 31, she entered therapy for the first time where she learnt that being unmoved and removed is a survival technique. “But you can’t just freeze things out,” she says. “Being frozen is not the same thing as being resilient.”
Sarkar has been trying to tap more into her emotions. “You have to accept that your brain is the dumbest part of you,” she says. “You have to drop down into this intuition and work out what it is that it’s telling you.” So far, it’s a technique that has served her well, guiding her through some of the biggest decisions in her life, like getting married in 2023. For Vogue, she wrote a piece on how marriage and Marxism can, in fact, co-exist.
Outside of TV and radio, you can find Sarkar hungover on the sofa with her husband (also an activist) and their cat Mousa Dembélé (named after the PSG footballer) watching Sharpe, the Nineties series about the Napoleonic Wars, starring Sean Bean. She falls asleep to woodworking videos. Her social media algorithm is wholesome, made up of “cats, comedy, and recipes”. She’s also an Aries. All this to say, she does, in fact, lead a very normal life.
I remember what it was like when my mum was worried about money
As Sarkar gets up to help me fix the faulty light in our meeting room for a third time, she reminds me of so many other Muslim women I know – charming, politically engaged, hospitable, and more cutting than Regina George when it comes to terrible politicians.
In many ways, her entry into politics was inevitable. Her great-great-aunt Pritilata Waddedar was a fighter in the armed struggles against the British Empire in the 1930s; her mother, a single parent, was an anti-racist activist, trade unionist and child protection social worker, who helped mobilise marches following the racially motivated murder of Altab Ali in east London. Sarkar was 12 when she first read The Communist Manifesto.
There is no doubt that her financial background also had an impact. “I remember what it was like when my mum was worried about money,” she says. “I remember how arbitrary and unfair it seemed that someone who worked really hard and had two kids was still stressing about having a place to live sometimes.”
Her stepdad entered the scene when she was 11, meaning the family could afford to relocate to the more upmarket neighbourhood of Palmers Green. “It was like the Jeffersons moving on up to the east side. I was like, ‘These kids go skiing, what the f**k?’” she recalls. “It was a different planet, where there was all this ease everywhere. People were worried about different things. I thought, ‘Oh, so this is money. This is what money does.’” All her new friends lived in “houses full of books” and would participate in extracurriculars like singing, theatre, and sports. “Were they any more deserving than the kids I grew up around?” she says now, her accent a mix of posh clipped and more colloquial.
Class is the predominant issue for Sarkar, above and beyond the overblown spats of identity politics. “Everyone could use the right language when they talk to me and it still wouldn’t change the fact that you have racialised wealth gaps, discrimination in the employment market, racialised incarceration rates and sentencing,” she says.
The problem is the left is weaker than the right, so it’s currently getting its head kicked in with the very same tactics that it itself developed
What Sarkar is pushing for is a more complex perspective on politics, beyond the soundbites that made her famous. “It’s about looking at things through a materialist lens,” she says. It’s about what things cost, who owns what, and where the real power resides – as opposed to feelings.
Her formidable online presence (Sarkar boasts over half a million followers across her social media) has no doubt been built on feelings – often the prickly ones that arise as a result of the irreverent boxing-style punditry that’s now a mainstay of contemporary media. A punchy jab here, a viral refrain there, Sarkar has it down to an art. So withering are her put-downs that she once put them on T-shirts to raise funds for Novara.
If Sarkar is a heavyweight in verbal sparring, then Piers Morgan is the world champion – for better or worse. Speaking to Sarkar for her book, the Talk TV star confessed that his show has a “confected” nature. Of course, Sarkar says, Morgan couldn’t fess up to the whole shtick being fake. “He was as honest as he could be, because he’s got an interest in people consuming this kind of media. So, if he was to say ‘This is all bulls***, everything I do is designed to generate outrage’, he would be taking food out of his own mouth,” she says. “But the fact that he was able to accept that there was some ‘confected’ outrage, that was an important admission for me.”
It’s part of the reason why she’s learning to be more selective when it comes to media appearances. “The left had to take every single opportunity that came its way, and I was scared of being perceived as difficult or unavailable,” she says. “But I want this project of contesting media terrain for the left to exist even if me and Owen Jones [perhaps the only left-wing commentator more recognisable than Sarkar] die in the same tragic bus crash.”
As we speak, it becomes clear that something else has shifted within her since she was a spunky twentysomething doing vox pops on the streets of London. “In hindsight, I was self-deluding and hubristic,” she writes in her book, discussing the personal toll that Jeremy Corbyn’s defeat in the 2019 election took on her. “I got swept up in the fantasy of what a socialist government could be like. There were far more people in the country who weren’t like me than those who were.”
Her U-turn on identity politics comes from this meteoric, unforeseen rise of the right. “They’re actually organising,” she says with a sense of urgency. “The problem is the left is weaker than the right, so it’s currently getting its head kicked in with the very same tactics that it itself developed.” While the left has “absorbed” liberal priorities such as workplace cultures and tokenist representation, in effect tearing identity politics from its Marxist roots, “the right has taken the position of challenger to the status quo. That is the biggest immediate political threat to the left”.
Sarkar refuses to give any answers or solutions in her book or anywhere else for that matter, inspired by the ambiguity of Amia Srinivasan’s 2021 collection of essays The Right to Sex: “She opens up a contradiction, and then she opens up another one and another one, and people ask, ‘When are you gonna give me the answer?’ And she’s like, ‘I’m not, life is complicated.’”
“I never feel like an authority on anything,” Sarkar says. “I think doubt is so powerful, doubting your own assumptions, putting them under pressure, putting them under scrutiny.”
Her goal is radical: to get people across the political divide to unite against a common adversary – minorities, yes, but not the ones splashed across red-top front pages. The minorities Sarkar is talking about are the minorities who own everything and control it all. “Why are we actively seeking out reasons to throw each other away?” she asks in her book. For someone portrayed as divisive, it’s a remarkably earnest call for changing the world.
‘Minority Rule: Adventures in the Culture War’ is published by Bloomsbury
