Breakfast With Bristol24/7: Kerry-Anne Mendoza

Not many people have had the opportunity to tell Nigel Farage what they think of him straight to his face live on national television. For Hambrook resident Kerry-Ann Mendoza, it was all part of a journey that has taken her from a high-flying career as a management consultant to one of the most well-known but also one of the most vilified journalists in the UK.

Mendoza is the founder and editor-in-chief of The Canary. For her detractors, she is a cheerleader for the looney left, an unashamed Jeremy Corbyn fangirl who will print anything in a publication that Private Eye magazine calls a “pisspoor Corbynist clickbait website” and the Guido Fawkes political blog calls an “infamous fake news site” – to raise his profile.

For her supporters, however, she is a standard bearer. A proudly working class woman who has helped create a powerful voice from the left, one that is holding both politicians and the media to account like never before.
On the day that we meet in Hart’s Bakery, some choice headlines in The Canary include: “Independent media is under attack and we should all be very worried”, “A ludicrous right-wing report reveals how wildly out of touch Tories are with young voters” and “A top professor has just pulled apart the BBC’s ‘shameful’ pro-Brexit bias”.

Under all of these headlines are the words, ‘Please share this article’. And they are shared enough among readers to ensure that Mendoza and her wife Nancy, director of communications and membership at The Canary, can afford to eat out at Michelin-starred Casamia four times a year as the Redcliffe restaurant changes their menu with each new season.

At Hart’s on a day off, Mendoza does most of the talking as we both order flat whites, hers untouched for long stretches of our conversation as she speaks passionately about a range of different subjects from Bristol’s food scene to her appearances on Newsnight and Question Time, clickbait to Corbyn.

It’s a noisy working bakery but Mendoza’s laugh still fills the room. The only pause is when a bottle of orange juice explodes on a neighbouring table having sat at the bottom of its owners’ bag for too long. “You’ll never guess what happened in Hart’s Bakery,” to repurpose the event as a Canary clickbait headline.

“Headlines are more important than ever before in a socially driven news landscape which is what we’re all in operating now,” says Mendoza, leaning back in her chair as she warms to her latest theme. “I find it strange there’s sort of a false distinction created sometimes between new media and old media. There’s a few media that only exist on the internet. We’re just using it for free, everyone else is paying millions of pounds to get into people’s timeline so for us it’s a very, ‘okay so how does your story stand out?’ Also, every story (in The Canary) is a front page…

“People have got all of this stuff going on the social media landscape and we’re trying to say to them, ‘read this’. So for us it’s actually not about being sensational, it’s about thinking how do most people read and how can anyone whose timeline the story happens to pop up in know that it’s about them?”

Mendoza says that it’s no coincidence that The Canary has its headquarters in Bristol, which saw a big surge to Labour at the General Election in June, including in Bristol West the largest swing to Labour in any constituency in the UK, and in Bristol North West sitting Tory MP Charlotte Leslie toppled by Labour’s Darren Jones.

It’s “phenomenal”, says Mendoza, taking a sip of her flat white, that this surge has taken place. “And I think a major part of that actually has been the work we’ve done, the work our peers have done, the work of people behind Momentum. You know, we fundamentally understand how people speak and are willing to speak that way.”

Speaking her mind to Farage was just one example of this: “To be able to tell Nigel Farage to his face what I thought of him on Newsnight was probably one of the best nights of my life. My grandad came to this country in the 50s (from Dominica via Barbados). My nan was white and they married in Bristol.”

Mendoza says that from the age of nine she used to shout at Question Time, and it’s “an absolute dream come true” to now be invited to appear on the panel. “I’ve always wanted to be a part of making the world a better place,” she says.

“To me, whilst you’re here, you’re a custodian of the earth. Each generation gets the opportunity to be a custodian of the earth. I want to know when I go, that I could look back and if they wrote the history of this earth and period of time, I would’ve been one of the people on the right side of the page. I’ve always been interested in politics because that’s what politics should be about. It’s about how we can make things best for the most.”

Hart’s Bakery
Flat white x 2 £5
Cinnamon bun £2.10
Total £7.10

Illustration by Anna Higgie: www.annahiggie.co.uk