by Roger Mosey
On 7 December 1993, Brian presented what was to be his last programme. He was taken ill shortly afterwards and found to have a perforated appendix. I spoke to him by phone on the afternoon of 22 December and found him sounding surprisingly cheerful. He was amused by receiving a ‘get well’ card from Virginia Bottomley, then Health Secretary, and he told me he was itching to return to the programme. But that evening he was operated on, and in the aftermath faced ever more serious medical crises. He died in January 1994, aged sixty-four. The Archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey, wrote to me when the death was announced:
The loss of such a brilliant and warm personality must leave you all feeling bereft and very sad … The tributes flowing in for Brian should make you all feel some pride, as well as sadness, and it matters very much to me, as to millions of others, that the splendid traditions of the programme should continue to play an honoured part in our national life.
He was right about our sadness, and also correct about the death of a radio presenter having such an impact on so many. Margaret Thatcher led the on-air tributes to Brian, and his memorial service was held in St Paul’s Cathedral. As someone who had seen himself as an outsider – the non-metropolitan, former Labour man – we knew he would have absolutely loved both those things.
Jim Naughtie transferred from The World at One earlier than in the original plan, and by that stage we had also added Anna Ford to the presenter roster. There had been acres of speculative newsprint since my arrival at Today about the future presenter line-up, and a number of well-known broadcasting figures had quietly expressed an interest. We had also tried out some promising young talent, including a programme reporter in his twenties called Jeremy Vine. Anna’s name had been suggested to me by Tony Hall, and she was the only one of the famous folk who agreed to do what was effectively an on-air audition. I will always give her credit for being willing to stick her neck out. She told Paul Donovan for his book about Today: ‘What they wanted to do at the time was try out a number of people, and I know they approached some people who said, not on your nelly. And they approached other, braver, folk like me who said, yes, I’ll have a go.’
When Anna did her initial couple of mornings on Today, I liked what I heard. She had a lovely radio voice, accompanied by some of the television charisma that she had accumulated at ITN, TV-am and the BBC. It was also a counterbalance to the blokeish nature of some of the John-and-Jim political axis to have two strong women – Anna and Sue – in the team. Unfortunately, this meant there was even less room for Peter Hobday and we came to a parting of the ways.
Tony Hall put this to Paul Donovan a couple of years later more sharply than I articulated it at the time. Tony said: ‘If you asked me to rank the five of them [Ford, Hobday, Humphrys, MacGregor, Naughtie], I would put Peter at the bottom and that’s the way it is. You’re picking and choosing, trying to work out the winning team.’ It was because that is something you seek not to articulate in public that a whole set of different reasons for Peter’s departure took hold of the press, principally that he had been let go because he was too polite. This erroneous view was later summed up by John Timpson: ‘The reason he [Peter] fell out with them is because he is not part of the new aggressive knock ’em down and kick ’em brigade.’ Peter himself was quoted by Donovan as saying:
A fat middle-aged hack like me didn’t really square with the lean, mean interview machine. Nobody ever said to me, ‘You’re crap.’ But when people say my interviewing wasn’t as ‘sharp’ as it could be, perhaps what they mean is that it wasn’t invasive and I didn’t feel the need to scream and shout.
I nonetheless felt content with the screaming and shouting of John, Jim, Sue and Anna. But some of the newspaper campaigning for Hobday did create a chilly air in the office first thing in the morning. The Times ran a daily campaign: ‘Don’t sack Hobday, sack X’, with X being a presenter each day that they proposed for the chop instead. They carefully set out all the things that were terrible about the people we had kept on, which was not the best start at 4 a.m. for whoever was target of the day.
I became the firmest of friends with John, as I was with Jim, and I socialised with Anna and Sue too. Sue used to regard me more warily than the others. We had a friendly early tussle when, during a pre-recorded interview, I had followed my usual practice of suggesting a question through her headphones. She smiled through the glass, took the headphones off and put them to one side so she could no longer hear me. This is a technique a number of presenters have tried over the years, and I have never let them get away with it: editors must be able to edit, and interviews should be produced.
In her book, written after I had left Today, Sue berated me for giving her fewer of the big 8.10 a.m. political interviews than John and Jim. I am unrepentant about that. John was the consummate political interviewer of his generation, a questioner who could spot a weaselly nuanced answer at fifty paces. The man met his time as the Conservative government helpfully fell apart live on Today’s airwaves; and, without any intervention from BBC bosses or any evident sexism, the programme’s night editors would almost always choose John for the latest joust at 8.10. It did not mean any lack of respect for Sue. She did brilliant interviews with Nelson Mandela and with the Duchess of York, and was sent on assignments like the Copenhagen European summit, where she interviewed the Prime Minister. She also had guts: if you gave her a brief to battle away on a line of questioning, she was fearless in pursuing her quarry. But on breaking domestic political stories, I am not sure I can think of many occasions when I wish we had sidelined John in Sue’s favour.
I would admit that I was very hands-on during my time as editor of Today. ‘Obsessive’ or ‘a control freak’ are the other words that would have been used by my colleagues. Some of this was done by tricks of the trade. If I was up late, I would sometimes call the night team at two or three in the morning, and word got around that I was always awake at that time and monitoring the news wires. Most of the time I was sleeping soundly through the night. But I never minded if the night team called me with a problem. I perfected the art of waking immediately, sounding wide awake, making whatever sense I could and then falling asleep again.
Most programme days I would be up by 5.30 a.m. at the latest, scanning the running orders by what was then new technology – a laptop with a phone connection – installed in my house in southwest London. Night editors in the Today office would relate stories about seeing a running order mysteriously rearranging itself on their screens, as I changed it from my study. I would then drive into the office to help, as I would see it, or interfere, as they saw it, in person. Some years later, when I left television news, Anna Ford noted that she had enjoyed working with me as an editor ‘even when you used to tinker with my scripts from your home at four o’clock in the morning. Obsessive, or what?’
But, as on WATO, I had a brilliant team around me – including, once again as my deputy editor, Rod Liddle. Rod was particularly adept at changing a programme round to throw everything at a tale that took his fancy. One morning he pursued a story about a prisoner who was being let out on day release to run a marathon. Outrage poured out of the radio for the best part of two hours, before the Home Office issued a statement saying he would not be allowed out after all. Over a post-programme coffee, Rod ruefully considered the trade-off: a great edition of the programme with further evidence we could set the agenda – on the other hand, some poor bloke, near release anyway, was going to be locked back in his cell because of the controversy we had generated.
Complementary to Rod, though never one of his bosom buddies, was the formidably competitive ex-ITN journalist Chris Rybczynski. She was the exemplar of the night editor who would relentlessly pursue stories and cajole interviewees onto the air with a mixture of charm and bludgeoning. Beating BBC Television and 5 Live on a breaking news story was a badge of honour for her. She is another colleague who has become an enduring friend.
As on WATO, I would defend Today against any charge of intentional polit
ical bias. Two output editors, Rod Liddle and Tim Luckhurst, had previously worked for the Labour Party but were scrupulously fair in their judgements. My other deputy editor, Francis Halewood, ended up helping to run the Conservatives’ 1997 election campaign, and senior producer David Vigar went to work for the Liberal Democrats. It is true that we had almost no voices on air calling for Britain’s withdrawal from Europe, but this was a time when UKIP came eighth in the 1994 European elections with only 150,000 votes. It was also not for want of trying. During the WATO and Today years it was my hobby to attempt to get Tory Eurosceptics to admit that the logic of their position was to get out of Europe, and they would never say so. But our airwaves were awash with them criticising the European project and John Major’s handling of it: Bill Cash and Iain Duncan Smith and all the rebels against the Maastricht Treaty would pop up to goad the government, and No. 10, duly goaded, would provide a minister to reply to them and create a few more headlines. This was a sharp contrast with the New Labour opposition, who were conspicuously more united around policy than the Conservatives, and also ran a much more robust media operation. They clamped down on dissent within their ranks on the rare occasions it flared up, making it harder for a negative story to run for long. But this reflected a greater truth: they were the best-organised opposition in modern political history, campaigning against a government that suspected it had lost the next election from Black Wednesday onwards.
It is, of course, the responsibility of programmes to try to set the agenda, rather than the job of politicians. This line of argument always used to irritate Michael Howard in particular, who seemed to believe – in both government and opposition – that there was a duty for broadcasters to allow politicians airtime even if it was principally for an attack on their opponents. We attempted to set the higher threshold of ‘Is what they are saying interesting?’ We liked to take a contrary approach to conventional wisdom, too. One morning, Howard was scheduled to appear as Home Secretary with a string of tough measures including longer prison sentences, and he probably expected the standard interviewer’s challenge from the left: was this not too draconian, and what about civil liberties? Instead, we briefed Humphrys to come at him from the right. If he wanted to be tough, and do what the public wanted, why would he not bring back capital punishment? He had, after all, voted for it in the past. This was a much more discomfiting line of questioning. Similarly, we challenged New Labour’s agenda by a series of reports on what we termed ‘fecklessness’: people who, no matter what help they had from the state, would not conform to the values of the rest of society, and frittered away whatever resources they were given. We fostered independent thinking, and Rod Liddle remembers one morning meeting when a producer said disparagingly, ‘The Eurosceptics believe Germany is going to dominate Europe!’ This generated laughter from bien-pensant colleagues about the ridiculousness of that idea. ‘But what if that is true?’ was the response from the editor, and he set the team thinking about items that would examine whether Euroscepticism had some well-founded beliefs.
One reporter in particular might be cited as a defence against the BBC being relentlessly left-wing. We hired a bright young chap from the television current affairs programme On the Record to bolster our coverage of politics. He was a Scot, interested particularly in the Conservative Party, and he was preparing a biography of Michael Portillo. His name was Michael Gove. Gove was actually the second future Cabinet minister that I recruited to network radio, with the first being Ben Bradshaw – later a Labour Culture Secretary – on The World at One. I would not have guessed that Gove would become as eminent a politician as he became. He was effortlessly charming and polite, which made it a surprise when he showed his steeliness as Education Secretary. But he was a fine reporter. His best moment came when the Tory leadership contest was underway in 1995, triggered by John Major’s resignation of his party role while staying on as Prime Minister. Breakfast television and most of the papers were predicting that Major would run with little or no opposition, but Gove’s sources told him that John Redwood, a serving Cabinet minister, would declare himself as a challenger. This was another call where you either back your reporter or not, and we trusted Gove. We went on air saying that Redwood would challenge Major, with confirmation gratefully received later in the day that the story was true.
This balance within our team and in our journalism did not stop storms emerging in all parts of the political sphere. One of the more destabilising came from Jonathan Aitken, then a Tory Cabinet minister and later an inmate of Her Majesty. He accused Humphrys of ‘poisoning the well of democratic debate’ in his conduct of the Today programme, with the example cited of his interrupting Kenneth Clarke thirty-two times in one broadcast – and, allegedly, showing partisanship in chairing a meeting of government opponents. John told Desert Island Discs in 2008 about the moment I called him to tell him about Aitken’s attack and the proliferation of headlines it generated:
I was terrified at the time. I was phoned at home. I can remember it ever so clearly, as you can with important moments in your life. My then boss phoned and said, ‘Look, he’s made this speech and we think this is potentially rather serious’, and of course he was right. I actually thought my career, such as it was, had come to an end at the Today programme. Because if others in the Cabinet had taken the same view, and did not want to be interviewed by me – and that was the implied threat, a stated threat in the Aitken speech – I couldn’t continue to present the Today programme. That would be the end of it.
I would not say I was terrified, and I have never really known John be terrified. But it was certainly a deeply uncomfortable few days. Other Cabinet ministers joined in the criticism: Home Secretary Michael Howard, Welsh Secretary John Redwood and Conservative chairman Jeremy Hanley. And it was not clear to us that we had the support of the BBC. There had been persistent murmuring from along the executive corridor about the alleged aggression of Humphrys on Today and Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight, and in the immediate aftermath of the Aitken attack I received only the support of my immediate boss, the excellent Steve Mitchell. No word was heard from on high.
Deciding that if we did not defend ourselves, nobody would, I used an awards ceremony lunch to fight back. I told reporters that a number of other Cabinet members had told us they supported Today’s journalism. Of these, the main one – predictably, though I didn’t name him – was Kenneth Clarke. He had arrived for an interview and been greeted by Humphrys bearing a pocket calculator and inviting him to count the number of interruptions as he went along. The Chancellor had laughed uproariously. As I collected our award, I slipped in a joke. I thanked Aitken for ‘helping to publicise the programme. Other people have Saatchi & Saatchi, we have Aitken & Aitken.’ It was a couple of days before we found out we had no need to worry about our internal position. Humphrys bumped into the director-general, John Birt, in the toilets at an external event. Birt breezily told John that he and the programme had the support of the executive – and of the governors, who had discussed the affair at a meeting. It might have been less of a strain if we had known this more immediately and more formally than via a chance conversation in the lavatories.
But this reflects one of the curiosities of being editor of Today. On the one hand, it was to many people, including most opinion formers, the BBC’s most important programme. On the other hand, we were left to run it largely as we saw fit, with almost no top-level intervention. I would have lunch with newspaper editors who, used to their meddling proprietors, assumed that John Birt exercised at least some influence over the 8.10 interviews or the major themes we chose to cover. Absolutely not: he never interfered. The only threat to our distinctive voice was a structural one that came from within the news division. There was an attempt to split Today managerially from the rest of the Radio 4 sequence programmes and to put us into a group with breakfast television and the TV One O’Clock News. It was floated to me that I might become executive editor of both television and radio breakfast output in a fashio
nable commitment to bi-media working, but I rejected the idea immediately. It was bizarre to imagine that you could edit Today and a television programme at the same time, and it was loopy to try to cut off Today from the spine of daily radio current affairs.
There was just one time that I can recall a significant executive-level presence during a programme. It was when the Tory MP Stephen Milligan died – being found naked, an inquest heard later, apart from stockings, with a plastic bag over his head and a cord around his neck. A piece of satsuma was found in his mouth. Some details appeared in the papers the morning after the news broke, but we were not able to report them on air because – under Birtian rules – we could not ourselves substantiate the story. The authorities had leaked to the tabloids but not to us. That morning, as a sign of the seriousness with which the rules were being taken, the director of news, Tony Hall, stood with me in the Today studio as we put out a programme in which something significant appeared to have happened in connection with the death of an MP, but we were unable to tell the audience what it was. At ten past eight we did a solemn interview with a leading Conservative about there being an apparently significant factor in Mr Milligan’s demise, again with not a flicker of what might have been out of the ordinary. We could not even do our usual ruse of revealing what the papers were saying as a way of getting an unsourced story on the air, because it was deemed the risk was too high that we would introduce the satsuma via this unauthorised route. It was without doubt the most incomprehensible programme for which I was ever responsible.