In his memoir Returning to Reims, the author Didier Eribon recalls his father’s revulsion towards French politicians and the journalists in whose presence they were far too comfortable. Watching TV after a day’s work in a factory, the negativity he felt over their chummy familiarities was matched only by his satisfaction when a trade unionist ‘with a worker’s accent’ arrived on the panel to undermine the cosiness, to ‘break the rules’.

To Eribon, breaking the rules meant speaking ‘about the real problems affecting workers instead of responding to the typically political questions to which the discussion was supposed to be limited’, to aggravate the system for those ‘whose very existence is systematically excluded from the landscape of legitimate politics.’ To see ‘a spokesperson for his own thoughts and feelings’ reject the fundamentals of a system that forced countless millions to be mired in needless hardship offered something unfamiliar: real representation, and dignity in the national arena.

A more recent example of this phenomenon occurred across a few weeks in early summer 2022, when the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT) general secretary Mick Lynch called Tory politician Chris Philp a ‘liar’ fifteen times in one sitting, before proceeding to humiliate presenters Kay Burley (whose diatribes he condemned as ‘going off into the land of the surreal’), Richard Madeley (who talked ‘twaddle’), and Piers Morgan (who seemed to have an unhealthy obsession with Lynch’s Facebook profile picture).

Responding to the unthinking, aggressive lines of questioning the British media adopted during the Corbyn years, Lynch was happy to treat their questions with the respect they deserved.

In turn, normal people respected him for it. In one GB News interview, a Doncaster taxi driver broke ranks with the show’s southern presenter, advising that if the broadcaster wanted a clip of him denouncing striking workers, they’d be waiting forever. Mick Lynch graffiti popped up on trains, his name could be heard in pubs, his clips were played by teenagers on packed commuter trains, picket lines swelled and vaporwave t-shirts were printed.

This enthusiasm was reflected statistically. After the first wave of Lynch’s interventions, one poll saw striking workers receive a twelve-point boost in support. An Ireland Thinks poll put Lynch, a London Irishman, at ten percent should he decide to stand in the 2025 Irish presidential election.

During this period, Communication Workers Union (CWU) leader Dave Ward and myself were told in a green room by a staffer on a primetime talk show that a poll they had commissioned saw Lynch beating every politician to be Britain’s most popular political figure. Ward was asked to come up with a take on it — as presumably was his guest, a Labour shadow minister. Imagine our shock when that question wasn’t asked, the poll never seeing the light of day.

But because Lynch’s appearances so inspired socialists, they offered an implicit challenge to the received thinking of many left-wingers interested in ‘left comms’. From Ed Miliband’s Labour leadership days to Rebecca Long Bailey’s diabolically organised campaign to succeed Jeremy Corbyn, a dominant perception has gripped many left-wing television pundits and internet personalities: that getting on top of the media game is what matters most.

In media training sessions often organised by these figures and funded by unions, ‘the optics’ were always paramount, as was learning ways to manoeuvre around boorish television hosts and cultivating an ‘open’ language to capture the sympathy of an imagined liberal, post-political mass audience (a former trainee of one such group reminded me of how they were told to say that ‘people in the community’ went on strike, not ‘union members’). People who wanted to change the world were encouraged to believe that successful media interventions effectively meant being part of an already existing picture.

Thankfully, Mick Lynch did precisely the opposite. There was no jumping through hoops in a media game that will always be rigged against the worker, no self-respect was sacrificed in attempting to get the point across that workers will be disrupting normality because they deserve more. In an era of profound cynicism, where most people rightly reject everything mainstream  on offer and desire conviction in the public arena, treating the media as the farce it is and behaving disruptively set a new standard.

Following news of Lynch’s retirement, plenty of prominent online socialists touted the idea of Mick Lynch returning to lead a new political party, where presumably his media appearances could provide a political route around the dead weight of the Labour Party to become a left-wing alternative to Nigel Farage, weaning workers away from the growing hard-right threat with a call to no-nonsense, collectivist values.

This idea is obviously alluring to socialists sick of the Starmer malaise and frustrated by the resistible rise of Reform UK. But putting aside Lynch’s consistent support for Labour (and the fact that the poor sod must be knackered), such calls seem to ignore a wider point.

It is worth reflecting that not so long ago, there was a Mick Lynch in most estates and social clubs and at the local and national levels of many unions. For over a century, a democratic culture developed in many working-class parts of Britain that encouraged workers to think for themselves, consider everything from overtime rates to global politics, and promote concepts of class loyalty and social representation. Though this culture came under brutal attack under Thatcher and was subsequently hollowed out by the flash cynicism of the Blair years, it is nevertheless the culture that created the union leaders that millions still turn to for hope and leadership.

Still, it can’t be denied that many of these figures are getting on a bit, and they have few obvious successors across the labour movement. Instead of taking an electrician-turned-reluctant union leader out of retirement and into the role of what sociologist Paolo Gerbaudo calls a ‘hyperleader’, making impact through a persistent stream of social media buzz, would it not be better to finally begin to rebuild these institutions — educational, political, social, recreational — in a way that allows the development of a new confidence and dignity in working-class communities, in a way that challenges the misery and isolation feeding the far-right in these areas?

It is a difficult, dizzying task. But there have been harder ones in the past — and in the final analysis, there are no shortcuts in this struggle. What Gerbaudo referred to as ‘restoring the supply chains of leadership’ must be at least attempted if we wish to live in a country capable of halting its own decline. Or, to paraphrase what Mick Lynch once said: if you want a socialist country, you’re going to have to make socialists.