‘I’m not campaigning for any particular point of view’: Sam Freedman on government, the Conservatives, and writing with his father

Sam Freedman is one of Britain’s foremost political analysts. I spoke with him after his appearance on a panel at St Antony’s College, Oxford, where he discussed the flaws of contemporary British politics. As co-author of Britain’s most popular political Substack ‘Comment is Freed’, Senior Fellow at the Institute for Government, and a contributor to a number of respected British publications, Freedman has the opinions of a journalist and the knowledge of a policy maker. 

In our discussion, Freedman’s answers are measured and carry a certain nuance, a habit from a life “half in that world” of Westminster and Whitehall, but stabilised by one foot firmly planted in academia and research.

His passion for politics was clear even from childhood. Freedman was twelve at the time of Norman Lamont’s resignation as Chancellor in 1993: “I remember running through my school trying to tell everyone in excitement, and everyone was like ‘what the hell are you doing’”. He laughs fondly at his childhood enthusiasm, reflecting: “I was an unusual child, always very obsessed with politics.”

Freedman is an Oxford alumnus, having completed an undergraduate degree and a subsequent MPhil in History at Magdalen College. He looks back at his time in Oxford with great fondness: “Probably like quite a few students, I look back and think: why did I wake up at one o’clock in the afternoon every day, and not take the opportunity to have the time to think and read in the way you never get when you’re actually working.” For Freedman, university was packed with amateur dramatics – directing and producing – as well as meeting his wife. 

His transition from academia to employment was driven by a desire for change. After a stint at the Independent Schools Council, he continued to focus on education and moved to a research role at Policy Exchange in 2007. He describes it as “luck” that this coincided with Michael Gove, one of the think tank’s founding chairmen, being promoted to Shadow Secretary of State for Education. “I was in a very odd position, being a policy person in a political world”, Freedman says. “Gove knew that, and hired me anyway.” 

Though much of his time was spent developing ideas that would find themselves in the Conservative Party’s 2010 manifesto, he takes care to distance himself from a particular affiliation. “I was never actually a Conservative, and I was never a member of the Conservative Party”, Freedman explains. “I had been a member of the Labour Party, and I liked what New Labour had done on education policy.” For Freedman, his work with the Conservative Party was an attempt to “create some continuity between what I thought New Labour would have wanted to continue doing on education policy, and what a new government would do”. 

I try to pin him down somewhere on the political spectrum, but he seems disillusioned with the very act of political categorisation. “Lots of people would describe me as a centrist dad”, he says, but this label doesn’t sit right: “It doesn’t mean anything.” Socially, Freedman describes himself as “very liberal…more liberal than the average person in the country by quite a distance on subjects like immigration”. In terms of economics? “I’m never quite sure what I think”, he says. “Sometimes I feel very left-wing, and sometimes I feel quite liberal.” 

Upon the Conservative victory in 2010, Freedman became a policy advisor, spending three years working on the new Conservative Government’s policy agenda. His colleagues from this time have become well-known, and highly controversial characters in British politics, but Freedman’s insight cuts through their facades. “Some people present in public exactly as they are in person”, he notes. Here he points to former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who in Freedman’s eyes is “performing constantly, even in private”. 

He sees more nuance in the character of those like Dominic Cummings, former chief adviser to Johnson, whose “cunning genius” facade falls in private. Often getting into fights with people online, Cummings would “have these manic episodes, where he would…get very hysterical”. 

Freedman’s time in Westminster taught him that politics is less about the individuals and more about the institutions. “A lot of them were designed in the 19^th century for a completely different kind of politics.” Freedman jokingly adds that wanting to be a politician in this system makes one “slightly crazy…a sociopath”. From what he’s seen, the job is exceedingly tough: it is not particularly well paid in comparison to other jobs based in London, one must endure an “astonishing” level of abuse, and the entry-level position as a backbencher is “pretty thankless”. “Either you have to be obsessed with attention and status…or you have to really, really care about changing the world in a positive way.” 

I ask him how the deep-seated public hatred of Keir Starmer sits with him in this context. “I don’t quite know where it comes from… but I don’t think he’s been a particularly effective prime minister.” He attributes part of the uproar to a hostile media set-up. The “clickbait” culture has drawn on our more pessimistic instincts. “It’s shifted everything towards a much more aggressive and negative posture, which then makes politicians more defensive”. Ultimately, it’s a vicious cycle, and one he tries to avoid with his Substack. “I just try to be accurate…I’m not campaigning for any particular point of view.”

In terms of his go-tos for news consumption, he lists The Economist, the Financial Times, Bloomberg, and the New York Times. If you’re looking for a trustworthy news source, Freedman recommends “ones that are read by people in finance, because they want accurate information…money doesn’t lie to money”. Reading news sources from both ends of the spectrum seems to be a key way for Freedman to get a feel of the political climate: “I have subscriptions to basically everything”. 

His own role in the UK media ecosystem is shared with his father, co-writer at ‘Comment is Freed’. So how does that dynamic work? “We read each other’s pieces, but we cover quite different areas, and we have quite different styles.” Any reader of ‘Comment is Freed’ will know that Sam Freedman focuses on domestic politics, whereas his father takes an international focus. “Dad is a military historian…and he has a proper historian’s way of writing about these conflicts…whereas I’m more of a kind of journalist, so I tend to be more opinionated in my pieces.” 

I ask him what Substack offers in journalism in comparison to the average newspaper column. Not only is there more freedom when choosing what to write about, but Freedman finds he can write “at a length that no newspaper would ever allow”, with most of his pieces averaging around 3,000 words. “I prefer the freedom and the space to go into depth.” 

In the world of 24/7 media, public memory is much weaker than it once was, and scandals quickly recede from memory. For Freedman, a key example of this is the 2008 Financial Crash. “We have this way of talking about economic policy, as if Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves should just be fixing the economy, without ever really talking about the underlying structural problems…that the financial crisis threw up. Since it happened, we have just gone back to a fairly similar financial system to what we had before, which feels very vulnerable…We had the crisis, it passed, and now we are sort of pretending it didn’t happen.” This wilful ignorance, on the part of both politicians and the public, is the root of many political problems. 

I point to one of the changes often lauded as the solution to the plague of short-termism and political polarisation in Westminster: a change in the electoral system. Whilst Freedman is in favour, he argues it has been misjudged by left-wingers. “A lot of people overestimate the value of changing the electoral system in terms of how it would fit their politics.” He points to the progressive left, some of whom hold the belief that the change would see them dominate come election time. Yet, as Freedman makes clear, European countries with more proportional electoral systems still see right-wing parties flourish. For Freedman, a desire to change the electoral system should not be rooted in the perceived benefit to one’s personal political leanings, but rather “because of the underlying unfairness of the system”. 

Freedman argues that the peak of First Past the Post’s effectiveness has come and gone. With the recent insurgence of Reform and the Green Party into core Conservative and Labour Party territory, the two-party system seems increasingly obsolete. “It’s become impossible to justify, because you have five parties within 10-15 points of each other.” Freedman believes it will be a long, drawn-out and uncomfortable journey to change. “Right now, a lot of Labour MPs would acknowledge in private that the system doesn’t work, but they are not going to change it because it would hurt them. It might be that you need to have one or two elections with a very messy hung parliament before things change.” 

Whilst Freedman predicts change within his lifetime, by the end of the conversation, I’m left with the feeling that the flaws of contemporary British politics won’t be “fixed” anytime soon. Freedman, however, seems to be the kind of voice we need in the current political climate: one of nuance, pragmatism, and integrity.