I no longer care about microaggressions: Ash Sarkar

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 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.