Edinburgh Book Festival round-up: Ruth Jones | Amitav Ghosh | Leor Zmigrod | Gabriel Gatehouse

It’s good to have expectations challenged, so when Ruth Jones – as Welsh as the red dragon tattoo on the arm of Nessa, her character in Gavin and Stacey, read from her latest novel, By Your Side, largely set on a Scottish island, and with a Hamilton-based first person narrator, I wouldn’t have been the only one in the audience to be mildly surprised that she not only sounded like Lorraine Kelly but looked a bit like her too.

Ruth Jones | Contributed

After a bit of faff over feedback at the start, this turned out to be a very enjoyable event as she spilled some of the behind-the-scenes stories from Gavin and Stacey (there’ll be more in October the book she and James Corden have co-written), and traced her writing career from Fat Friends onwards. Most of us, though, were there for Vanessa Shanessa, and she didn’t disappoint, slipping into character at the end to tell us that she and event chair Val McDermid were collaborating on a novel, When Bryn Found The Barry Body. “I have been mentoring her,” she said, “and I’m not going to lie, it’s going to be quite dark.”

Most writers who come to this book festival tend to say nice things about the Scottish Enlightenment, so it was refreshing to hear Amitav Ghosh tear into it as the font of every bad idea around. In fairness, the Dutch East India Company also got a kicking for pioneering genocidal capitalism, but Adam Smith is clearly a Ghosh bête noir. “Free trade was the whole justification for poisoning millions of Chinese and Indians in the Opium wars of the 1830s”, he said, where the “mainly Scottish opium traders operated like a mafia”.

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His solution for the world’s present-day ills? Back to nature, support indigeneity and vitalism. Give rivers and mountains legal rights, live in greater harmony with nature (yes, fine) and if you really want to stop the illegal migration, shut down the internet. Er, not too sure about that one.

Political neuroscience is new to me, and so is psychologist Leor Zmigrod, so I’ll start with Jacob Chansley instead. If you don’t know who he is, you’ve forgotten all about the bare-chested spear-wielding QAnon shaman wearing a racoon fur hat with bison horns who stormed the US Capitol on 6 January, 2020 along with 6,000 other conspiracy theorists who refused to believe Donald Trump had lost the US election.

Zmigrod's fellow-panellist Gabriel Gatehouse, then Newsnight’s international editor, had a sinking feeling when he saw those scenes on television. He had, he realised, just missed a scoop. Back in November, he’d talked to Chansley but not filmed him. Pleasant chap, apparently, but what with believing all that stuff about the US being ruled by Satan-worshipping paedophiles, obviously crazed.

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This is where Zmigrod comes in. When we look at political extremists and conspiracy nuts, she says, we shouldn’t look at things like their age, education, class, race – or bison-horned headdresses. We should look instead at their minds. If we do that, and give them a few card-game psychological tests, it’s easy to work out who will be a dogmatic, possibly extremist thinker, and who won’t. Apparently, this works with leftists, rightists – and even dogmatic centrists.

The roots of conspiracy theories are varied and Gatehouse explored them engagingly in his two events on Tuesday. Social media spins more of us into them than newspapers ever did, and children are increasingly prey to them – though education can promote the kind of flexibility of thinking that doesn’t allow them to seed. Creativity helps too, said Zmigrod. And so, I suppose, do book festivals.

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