Is Jermain Jackman the first winner of a TV talent contest more interested in politics than pop? The 19-year-old from Hackney gripped 6.6m viewers on Saturday, when he won the third series of The Voice.
“Someone said: ‘Jermain, you’re too nice to be a politician, you need to have something radical to say that shakes everything up, you’re too general.’ I said: ‘Sometimes that’s good!’. You have to side with the public, you have to seem normal.” In fact, his greatest desire, as he repeats often, is “to inspire others”.
Jackman still lives on the council estate where he grew up, in a fairly deprived part of east London. Gentrification and the Olympics have ploughed money into his area – but not for everyone. Cuts have affected his neighbourhood greatly, but crucially for the middle-of-the-road politicos courting him, Jackman can do bland rhetoric well.
Jackman was raised in a very close Christian family, his mum a dental nurse, his dad a bus driver, and their granny on hand to tell tales of how hard it was growing up on the family farm in Guyana where there is still no phone. The children were all raised with scrupulous manners.
“When my mum comes home we always say: ‘Good evening’ and ask how her day has been. I was never allowed a sleepover, ever. Richard Branson’s son Sam has asked me to do an amazing project with him but it’s overseas and my mum worries I’m going to get hurt. I know she’s going to have to let go soon and I have had girlfriends, but to this day I have never stayed the night at anyone’s house apart from my own family.”
Jackman worked with MPs in 2012 on a project to dissuade young people from getting involved in gang culture. I ask what his tactic was. “Opportunity. Giving something that appeals to them. People who may get into gun and knife crime are on the street, not seeing that they have any worth. I guarantee, if they saw what they were good at, they would be pursuing that and making jobs out of that. But they don’t know what they’re good at.”
At school, he says, he was the guy who got along with everyone else and the one who teachers would ask to talk to difficult kids. “If there was an incident, I would approach the student and say: ‘You need to let go of that knife, you need to throw it away.’ There’s an [amnesty] knife bin down the road from my school and they would throw them in there.”
No doubt his brief spell in community politics has rubbed off – Jackman is a smooth operator. “When I met David Cameron, he was talking so eloquently about how to inspire young people that I was inspired. I said: ‘This is a great guy. I don’t like his policies, but I like his personality.’ I know how to separate policies from personality. I don’t agree with Boris’s policies, but he is a funny guy. If it’s for young people in music, I will support it.”
Jackman is so encouraging about Johnson and Cameron, his own plans to open a free school and his conviction that you make your own opportunities in life that I find myself asking if he’s sure he’s not, you know, a secret Tory. “Nooo! I’m a leftie – leftie for life!” he laughs, humming the Beyonce lyric “to the left, to the left”.
But is he not in thrall, somewhat, to their charm? “What I noticed about Boris is that he purposely combs his hair like that – to look ‘normal’ – you can see the comblines in his hair. I don’t know what he’s trying to say about normal people because we do groom ourselves. I was like: ‘Boris, what are you trying to say? Nobody looks like that.’ [And] David Cameron’s trying to cover up his bald patch by doing a combover and it isn’t working. Prime Minister, just embrace your age. Hopefully I can go into politics and bring some youthful energy to the commons.”
For now, though, Jackman’s priority is on recording his album. But as the show is glorified karaoke, one wonders what is his own musical style going to be? He can’t entirely answer. He wants the record to be called Genesis. I point out he wants to make sure people don’t think it’s by Phil Collins. He looks blank. “I only know Phil Collins from the Disney Channel movies.” It’s a sentiment his fans will echo – tweenage girls who voted him the first black male winner of a UK TV talent show and Cheryl Cole, who tweeted Jemain asking him to call her. So, will he? “Why does everyone ask me that question?! She wasn’t talking to me in that tweet, she was talking to Will.i.am! How can I call her when I don’t have her number?” He thinks about this. “Cheryl needs to call me.”