Edward Stourton: ‘My BBC bosses tried to take me for a complete mug’
In an exclusive extract from his book, the veteran broadcaster recalls the abrupt way he discovered his time on BBC Radio 4's Today was over
Today is a surprisingly easy programme to present competently. All the ‘programme furniture’ it has inherited may be daunting at first, but I quickly realised it provided useful props to hang on to. As long as you get your time checks right and remember when to introduce sport and Thought for the Day you can sound perfectly plausible. But it is a very difficult programme to present well: you need the confidence to take risks. And a solid relationship with your fellow presenters is key to that confidence.
John Humphrys, belying his fearsome reputation, welcomed me to the team with a piece of advice told as a joke. On a bad morning, when lines were going down and minds were constantly changing, the gallery could descend into chaos. ‘Just occasionally,’ John warned me, ‘they’ll fling you an interview at the last minute without telling you what it’s about or who you’re talking to. They’ll just shout something like “Millbank – now” at you, and all you can really say by way of introduction is “We go live to our Westminster studio.” My technique for dealing with this is to put on my gravest voice and say, “Minister, this sounds serious” – with a bit of luck he or she will tell you what the story is in the first answer.’
I became – and I hope remain – friends with all my fellow presenters, but relations between us were not made any easier by the steady stream of newspaper commentary on our relative status and performances, plus advice on which of us should be sacked and which promoted. Leafing idly through the gossip columns before going on air, one was likely to chance upon charming little nuggets like this: ‘As the published historian of Radio 4’s Today programme, its former editor Tim Luckhurst writes about its decline. He says Sarah Montague is “struggling to cope”, and regards Ed “Posh” Stourton as second banana to Humphrys, whom he sees as the only class act. “Mr Naughtie reeks of the politically correct bias that so damages the Today programme’s reputation,” he says.’
Reflect that when you read this kind of thing, a colleague who had received one of the more disobliging notices was likely to be sitting in the chair next to you. We would both pretend we had not read it, while both knowing perfectly well that we both had, and it rather took the shine off the studio atmosphere during that day’s programme.
On programmes broadcast later in the day you can wind down from [difficult days or] moments of high-wire tension over a convivial drink and laughter with the rest of the team. Not so, for obvious reasons, on Today: there was a time when the menu provided on the breakfast trolley included a bottle of Scotch, but those days are, happily, long gone.
The one event that brought [the team] together, [however], was the annual skiing trip, always organised by Jim Naughtie, who approached the task with the enthusiasm and sense of adventure that marked his journalism. It always began with a Friday flight to the chosen Alpine destination, a big and bibulous dinner that evening, followed by two days of bashing the slopes and a Monday-morning return to Blighty. That it led to several long-term relationships between team members was a mark of its success.
On one trip the male/female balance of numbers was badly awry, and I found myself allocated a room in the women’s chalet. A young broadcast assistant informed me that this was because I had been judged to be ‘non-predatory’. This was, of course, one of the kindest compliments I have ever been paid.
Presenting Today fools you into thinking you matter. You get asked to chair charities and review books, the party invites pour in and everyone wants you to speak at their annual dinners. [But] the [real] danger lies in the clubbiness that comes with membership (or at least the illusion of membership) of a magic circle at the heart of the nation’s affairs. It is, of course, flattering to be treated as a friend by senior cabinet ministers.
Today and the political world were so closely intertwined that the febrile quality of Westminster life infected the programme. I found that to keep my moral compass steady in my encounters with politicians I needed complete confidence that my own position was safe: you can risk dangerous, challenging questions to ministers only if you are secure in the support of your bosses.
Like most BBC presenters of the day I was employed as a freelance rather than a member of staff. But I had grown used to this uncertain way of life, and I thought I could rely on my antennae for office politics: they were reasonably well tuned, not least because I had been through a couple of nasty near-misses during my telly career.
By the winter of 2008, after nearly a decade on Today, my place there felt very settled, and I was completely unprepared for a call one evening requiring me to report to a senior manager the following day. I explained that I would be on a train to Harrogate, where I had agreed to give a lunchtime speech about my latest book, but the peremptory nature of the instruction rang alarm bells.
I emailed the boss in question with an apology and explanation of why I could not appear in his office. Nothing came back, and the feeling that something bad was up nagged at me. The literary lunch went well: the audience seemed to like what I had to say in It’s a PC World: What it Means To Live in a World Gone Politically Correct. But when I switched on my phone after the Q & A, I found a message from a journalist who was planning a profile piece [on me in a Sunday newspaper].
There was, he explained, a nib in the Mail suggesting that I was to be replaced on Today by Justin Webb, then the BBC’s North America editor. Was it true? he asked. A call to the programme’s editor established that it was. This was obviously quite big news for me.
The BBC’s account of how I came to hear it in this astonishingly cack-handed manner was included in a letter, which was later drafted to answer the hundreds of complaints the Corporation received: ‘We are very sorry, of course, that Ed should have heard this news in the way that he did, and we have offered him our apologies for the way the announcement was handled. We had arrangements in place to meet Ed less than 24 hours later to discuss our plans but, regrettably, someone involved in the process chose to leak the news.’
I did not see this letter at the time, and can quote it now only thanks to one of my parents’ Yorkshire neighbours, who serendipitously came across her copy among some old papers. The word ‘rubbish’ had been written in the margin, and she was right. ‘Arrangements’ were not in place in the controlled manner the smooth tone suggests. The next few days saw the BBC fire-fighting an entirely avoidable PR disaster.
The BBC was quite within its rights to dump me from the programme. You could even argue that I was not really ‘sacked’ at all, since they were simply proposing that they would not renew my annual contract. But the way I learnt about my defenestration gave me a huge tactical advantage. There is obviously a danger of losing one’s objectivity in such circumstances, but it seemed pretty clear to me that I had, by any normal professional standards, been shabbily treated.
I am not a natural rebel, but when my delayed meeting with the senior manager finally took place, it cleared up any doubts I had about raising Cain. During the discussion about the way my departure would be managed he suggested to me that it would be in my own interest to add a supportive quote to the press release announcing that I was to be replaced by Justin. ‘Your future employers,’ he explained to me (God knows who they might have been), would expect to see evidence of such loyal behaviour.
By this time I had worked for the BBC for nearly 20 years, and for the previous decade the Corporation had been paying me (quite handsomely) to spot bullshit being peddled by politicians. Why, I wondered, did my manager expect me to turn off my bullshit detectors when he was doing the peddling? It was a moment of perfect clarity, and oddly liberating. For all those years I had been inside the BBC tent, dedicated to its ethic and no doubt also absorbing the group-think that permeates any big institution. Suddenly everything flipped: I was an outsider, and I could see all too clearly where the institutional ethic stopped and the group-think began.
It was the realisation that I was being taken for a complete mug that really made me dig my heels in. My manager was startled when I refused to shake his hand. He had clearly expected me to salute smartly, say, ‘Aye, aye, sir,’ and walk the plank like a decent fellow. I think everyone was startled – I certainly was – by the way my fate became, as [one columnist put it], the kind of story that ‘brings the dogs from their kennels, the slumbering from their beds and the dead from their graves’.
The first indication that anyone minded about what had happened came in the form of a telephone call from a sympathetic producer on Today who had been watching the programme’s inbox over the weekend. The messages of support for me were pouring in, she said, and many of the emailers took a most unflattering view of the way the BBC had handled things
Next my children – Ivo, Eleanor, Tom and Rosy – very loyally started a Facebook campaign on my behalf, and it quickly attracted supporters. The Daily Telegraph piled in too, with an online petition for my reinstatement, and there were several thousand signatures within days. Most surreally, two MPs, Jeremy Hunt and Keith Vaz, put down an early-day motion in the Commons. Ninety MPs signed the motion.
Some of this was mischief-making – there are plenty of MPs and journalists for whom BBC-baiting is a more than acceptable form of blood sport. [But] the letters that piled high in my pigeonhole were personally heartening, and a reminder that friendships endure even in the febrile world of journalism.
But most of the correspondence came from people I had never met, and reading them back, I realise that they were not really about me at all. They were about a community and its values. Most members of the Radio 4 family of listeners believe the network belongs to them and not to us. Almost everyone I met over a glass of Any Questions wine was completely uninhibited with their views on programmes and individual broadcasters – and they were often very trenchant. And if they wanted to critique – or praise – one of my own performances, they picked up on what I had said on-air as if we were simply continuing a conversation.
[I could never have predicted the public outpouring that followed.] After a decade of early-morning appearances, I was part of the Radio 4 family, and there was nothing the BBC or I could do about that: the audience who had heard me for so long regarded me in that way. Beyond that, many of them also saw the manner of my defenestration as a violation of some of the values that bound the family together. I understood that they, and not the managers who gave me (or refused me) contracts, were my real bosses.
[In the end,] the BBC offered me enough future work to make it worth my while staying on. The perks that go with Today dropped away pretty quickly – the Christmas cards from ‘Gordon and Sarah’ and ‘David and Sam’ stopped pronto, as did those satisfyingly stiff invitation cards to the American ambassador’s summer party – but I am still broadcasting on Radio 4 more than a decade later.
There is a quotation attributed to St Augustine– master of the aphorism as well as a great confessor – which I commend to anyone who goes through a similar experience: ‘Feeling resentment is like drinking poison and hoping the other person will die.’ Once the future was settled, I let matters lie. Worrying over the wound would only keep it open.
Confessions: Life Re-examined by Edward Stourton is out on January 26 (Doubleday, £20); pre-order a copy at books.telegraph.co.uk
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