Hot Type: Musings from the Green Room

Heidi Siegmund Cuda offers some behind-the-scenes reflections from last weekend's Byline Festival at Keele University

Carol Vorderman, Heidi Siegmund Cuda and Carole Cadwalladr at Byline Festival, Keele University, Staffordshire, 12 July 2025. Photo: Ian Knight/Alamy

“You still didn’t answer my question,” said Peter Jukes, over dinner at the Sneyd Arms pub near Keele University in Staffordshire last Saturday night.

I had been on multiple panels at the Byline Festival with Jukes, the co-founder of Byline Times, who had drilled down on differences between Europeans and Americans, querying me based on my six months traveling through European countries.

Most smart answers pop into my head right after I’ve been on stage, but on the panels, I was focusing on all the good in people. And the love. There is so much love for Americans, still. It’s in the small conversations, people whispering in line at checkouts, “We are with you.”

At our panel on the transatlantic rift, I told the audience gathered at the Chapel on Keele’s campus that my favorite Irish restaurant and pub in Ireland is owned by a Sri Lankan, and my favorite restaurant in Paris is owned by a Vietnamese grandmother — run by three generations of her family, a little storefront that’s takeout only.

I explained that your immigrant neighbour is not the problem — that Vladimir Putin is the problem — the biggest threat to democracies everywhere. Once he’s neutralized, watch the strings go slack on his extended network of puppets.

But that wasn’t the question. The question was about differences, and over dinner with a dozen festival attendees, it occurred to me: the defining difference between Europeans and Americans is less fear.

Europeans aren’t looking over their shoulders for the active shooter. From the Seine to the Thames to the Wild Atlantic Way, they have an ease about them, moving comfortably among each other.

America has been sick for a very long time, and Trumpism is just the culmination of the malignancy. It’s a country that craves a cure, but the cures are blocked and dismantled by the party of Reagan. That party now accelerates all diseases, as it purges the country of preventative expertise.

Throughout the weekend, I tucked myself away in the Green Room at the festival to prepare for my panels, and watched the party come to me.

As a nightlife and music columnist for the Los Angeles Times in the 1990s and 2000s, so much of the fun took place behind the scenes, on tour buses, backstage, and in the post-show pubs. And the Festival’s Green Room was filled with some of the most interesting minds of our times. Authors, columnists, reporters, NGO founders, each one, another brilliant conversationalist.

I was chatting to Jukes in the Green Room after his panel with Christopher Steele and Sergei Christo on the Westminster spy ring, and Steele walked over to join the conversation.

Trump had just posted about him that day, still trying to defend his dishonour from the contents in the Steele dossier. We had a chat about the thin skins of narcissists, their deep insecurities. Steele mentioned that Napoleon, too, suffered from insecurities, and I told him how Napoleon at the end of his life said he’d been defeated by a British political cartoonist, James Gillray, who dubbed him Little Boney, making him even smaller and shorter than he was in real life.

We both knew Putin killed a puppet show when he came to power, and I thought to myself, it’s not every day you get to chat with someone in British intelligence who made history. I was still feeling gratitude for the witness he bore on his panel, when he told the packed audience about the US 2016 election:

“So the extraordinary thing in 2016, although we can’t prove it, is that it is likely that the election was swung because it was such a small number of votes - in three states in the tens of thousands - that it was actually swung by Russian interference… and the way it was swung was basically, to put it bluntly, the Russian troll farms and propaganda persuaded black voters, sadly, in the Midwestern states, to stay home and not vote for Hillary Clinton.”

Nearly a decade of my life spent investigating what happened in 2016, and Steele confirms it in a sentence.

So many incredible moments like that.

In more Green Room fun, Adrian Goldberg gave me the shirt off his back. The host of Byline Podcast launched his own record label — Jenny’s Feather Factory — named after an aunt who perished in the Holocaust — and he was sporting the shirt during interviews. I told him I regretted not buying one in Birmingham at the label’s debut party with the band, The Leaking Machine, and he offered to give me his shirt, which I gladly accepted.

And news continued to break.

Investigative reporter Carole Cadwalladr, on her panel with Byline Times editor-in-chief Hardeep Matharu, offered a quick fix to what ails our world in this moment: technological sovereignty.

The last of the remaining democracies should stop using platforms owned by the destroyers of democracy and invest in their own communications platforms, she said.

She, too, believes in the future and the goodness of people, as she told the gathered audience that 30,000 supporters stepped up to help her when she was the target of lawfare.

I had the opportunity to thank her for her brilliant work during an impromptu photo session with panelist Carol Vorderman, a media personality in the UK, who told me she reads me every week, which was a really sweet thing to say.

Over breakfast at the hotel where many of us were holed up for the weekend, I talked with Anthony Barnett, the founder of Open Democracy. He was prepping for his panel and concerned he might not be able to get all his points across, and I told him, “You know, you don’t have to answer the question, exactly. You can say, ‘yes, and…’ And then make your strongest points.”

Later, when I sat in the front row to watch his panel with Money, Lies, and God author Katherine Stewart, Barnett whipped out his ten-point list of how to save democracies, and I couldn’t take notes fast enough.

Another festival perk: I bumped into members of my Bette Dangerous Substack community, among them, a Founding Member from Holland who brought me a package of caramel Stroopwafels. I made a promise to myself to not eat more than half of them in one sitting. I also got to meet Byline Times Chief Reporter Josiah Mortimer’s sweet-faced baby in a well-timed elevator ride.

The weekend was filled with beautiful moments of solidarity, like being the last castaways on an island before the final tsunami hits, many of us still believing in people power and truth as the last line of defense.

The UK was hit with a heatwave that weekend, so the suiting wardrobe I’d brought with me stayed in the hotel room, and I ran from panel to panel in tank tops, lightweight skirts and Birkenstocks.

And I’m so glad I did. The day after the Carol and Carole discussion, I made it to the Rachael and Rachel panel in a room called the Squirrel, where an editor for Byline Supplement Rachael Kerr was interviewing Rachel Shabi, the author of Off-White: The Truth About Anti-Semitism. After the interview, we walked over to the campus post-grad pub, and I had the opportunity to tell Shabi how brave she is for tackling such difficult and important subject matter.

So. Many. Brave. Women.

Among them, Dawn Butler, a Labour Party MP for Brent East, who I joined on the ‘Women on the Frontline of Information Warfare’ panel. Wearing a gorgeous green and lime-colored dress from Ghana, she told the gathered crowd that she would consider running for Mayor of London after Peter Jukes queried her. Judging by the thunderous applause, she’s already got some wind in her sails.

The event ended with a rousing speech by the Mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, who is increasingly being talked about as a future leader of the Labour Party and PM.

Andy Burnham at the 2025 Byline Festival. Photo: ashleygrebphoto

After the festival was over, I tried to thank as many volunteers as possible. The festival only works because of the dedication of the many unpaid volunteers and the hard work of Byline’s small staff. Chief among them, the festival’s creator Stephen Colegrave, the co-founder of Byline Times, who spent the entire weekend in motion, making sure everyone was okay, going from panel to panel in a fast-moving blur. In addition, Ella Baddeley, Byline’s Head of Operations, manned the guest check-in table with her usual grace and elegance under pressure.

I spent the next morning walking around the lovely grounds of Keele University, before departing to see a friend in Bristol.

We met at a cafe called Little Victories, which was a big victory for me because they served the very rare and much coveted filtered coffee, which I crave. Europe is the land of espresso.

We went on a walking tour of Bristol, which included a Banksy of ‘The Girl with the Pierced Eardrum’ and the Brunel Clifton Suspension Bridge.

I am constantly worried about the future of citizens in the remaining democratic nations, who still seem to underestimate their proximity to their last free and fair elections. But for one long weekend, I got an invigorating reprieve from my worries, and enjoyed walking fearlessly through the streets of a continent I am falling profoundly in love with.

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Emmy award-winning investigative reporter, Heidi Siegmund Cuda is an American correspondent for Byline Times and her Hot Type column runs weekly in Byline Supplement. She is the co-host of RADICALIZED Truth Survives podcast and her Bette Dangerous Substack is read in 90 countries.