Mark Devenport: why I decided it was time to quit the BBC
BBC NI’S former Political Editor talks for the first time about how the fates conspired to bring about his departure after 20 years in the post
His sudden departure as BBC NI Political Editor shocked viewers, but Mark Devenport had been mulling the decision over for some time, with the long shadow cast by a harrowing family tragedy proving an influencing factor.
In 2001, when he’d taken up the coveted post, he was celebrating becoming a father for the first time yet also had to watch his beloved brother Peter die from a brain tumour. The 20year anniversary of that tumultuous year was fast approaching. Landmark birthdays for the journalist and for Northern Ireland were also visible on the horizon.
“The year 2001, for good and bad reasons, had been quite a significant year and I had it in my mind’s eye that 2021 might be another significant year for me,” says Devenport, who grew up in Oxford but considers himself an honorary Northern Irishman.
“I would have marked 20 years as political editor, I’d also have been turning 60, Northern Ireland would have its centenary and I thought that might be a good time to hang up the boots.”
Fate and circumstance, however, conspired to bring about his exit even more swiftly.
His mother’s death at the start of this year inevitably prompted some mental stock-taking, the pandemic saw him working from home and then the BBC launched a voluntary redundancy scheme.
Talking publicly for the first time about the thought processes behind stepping down, Devenport recalls the enduring impact of losing his talented musician brother, aged just 46.
It was, he says, a defining experience.
“You kind of expect people will depart in a certain order. I had already lost my father in the 1990s but nobody was expecting that to happen at that age for Peter.”
With trademark understatement, Devenport describes 2001 as “an interesting year for me” but evidently he found himself almost overwhelmed by a series of highly stressful life events.
Back in Belfast after a twoyear stint in New York as United Nations correspondent, he’d just taken up the post of political editor. His partner Patricia had given birth to their first child, Joseph, in May and then, in July, while covering the Drumcree dispute, came shattering news.
“I got a phone call to say my brother Peter had collapsed. He was diagnosed with a brain tumour and died that December so that was quite a year of turmoil and change. It was an extremely difficult time.
“You had all the highs of having just become a father for the first time... and then there was Peter’s illness. It happened out of the blue.”
Peter, a composer, had studied at the Royal College of Music and ran a music centre in south London.
“I was torn in terms of geography because obviously as a new father I wanted to be with Patricia as much as possible in Belfast and we were looking around for places to live because the place we were in was a bit too small and yet at the same time feeling I should be across in England helping the rest of the family out with Peter.”
While the death of his mum, at 92, earlier this year felt in the natural order of things, inevitably it was another considerable blow.
“In 2020, in all sorts of ways, things moved more quickly than any of us could have imagined,” explains Devenport. “In all this, paralleling with my brother in 2001, 2020 started with me losing mum. She was 92 so it’s not surprising at that stage but it was still something to go through… I missed the New Decade, New Approach deal because I was in Oxford caring for my mum. I wanted to take some time to relieve my sister, Maria, who was the main carer.
“Shortly after that came the pandemic and we’d to switch to this strange new way of working from home. That was fascinating and I adapted to it pretty well. And then around that time the BBC launched a voluntary redundancy trawl.”
Last year’s Brexit machinations saw Devenport regularly commuting to London and, though he doesn’t say it specifically, there’s a sense the break from that gruelling schedule delivered something of an epiphany.
“It’s possible if I hadn’t had that period of working from home and been in the usual way of going along I might not have thought about going for the redundancy because it would have been a shock to the system to go immediately from going off to Westminster all the time, which was what my life was last year, and then suddenly thinking about being at home most of the time.
“But working at home during the first lockdown made me think this might be more feasible than I thought previously. Cutting a long story short... the pandemic made me think this might be the time to go for this but I had to make my mind up quite quickly. There was a period of time when I needed to tell the BBC yes or no and so I went for it.”
The last few sentences are classic Devenport, the consummate broadcaster, editing and analysing his own story on the spot. He’s clearly relishing the novelty of having time to chat at leisure on a weekday at his rural
Co Down home, which he shares with Patricia, a social worker who specialises in the field of domestic violence. Son Joseph (19) is studying maths and economics at the University of Glasgow while daughter Caitlin (17) is doing AS levels. Such were the demands of his job that later, when I ask about downtime, he struggles to come up with much beyond driving his son to cricket and football and his daughter to Cinemagic events.
Devenport is an entertaining raconteur fond of delivering anecdotes with self-deprecating punchlines. His exit from the job prompted an outpouring of praise and affection from politicians and public alike on social media. Colleagues, too, haven’t a bad word to say about him, on or off the record. Nor is any question off-bounds.
Senior BBC NI journalists Mervyn Jess, Kevin Magee and Maggie Taggart took voluntary redundancy along with Devenport and a recent Daily Mail article claimed the male trio may have fallen victim to a cull of “older white men”.
Headlined the ‘The Blokes are Banned Corporation’, the report suggested the Beeb was prioritising “impossibly good-looking” presenters and that “invaluable insight, knowledge and news instinct... counted for nothing compared to white teeth and taut skin”.
Devenport was unaware of the report but chuckles when I mention it. “That’s very funny, I’m going to have to have a look at that...” He continues: “I know the BBC launched a VR trawl and nobody told me I had to go in for it. No one said that they were looking for any particular kind of employee. The fact is most VR trawls in any organisation are likely to (attract) people who have quite a few years’ service, be they male or female.
It’s a matter of public record that the BBC wants its staff to be as representative as possible of the community, of different ages and so on. I don’t feel like anybody has pressured me or forced me to go, I have made my decisions entirely of my own volition.”
Perhaps it’s a disposition finely honed during decades of close interaction with NI’S politicians, but the urbane Devenport is determinedly diplomatic when asked if he’s good friends with any of the, er, colourful personalities he’s encountered?
“I like to try and keep most of the politicians on a cordial basis so I’m friendly with a large number of them but am
I a particular friend of any one of them? I kind of avoid that. I don’t want to mix it to the extent that I feel ‘oh I owe somebody so much that I can’t report about this’.
“Sometimes it can get hot and heavy, with individual politicians who don’t like what you’re reporting but by and large I’ve a pretty good relationship with them and they mostly will pick up the phone and chat.
“The ultimate journalist’s answer to the question about favourite politicians is it’s the one who tells you something that you didn’t know already.”
Could he reply on some more than others? “Oh yes, I don’t want to name names even now but there are some to whom you could say ‘I know you’re not going to tell me anything but if I was to go on the airwaves and say this would I end up with my trousers down around my ankles?’ and they’d say ‘yeah, you would be all right there’ and keep you right.”
So, no bust-ups? “Um, a number of NI politicians are pretty well-known for being incendiary at times and most have been incendiary with me. I remember a bit of bust-up with one politician... shortly afterwards a Stormont security guard said to me ‘I don’t know what you said to him but you should have heard what he was saying about you!’”
Devenport’s well-modulated tones have been a fixture on NI’S airwaves since the mid-eighties, but his was not a privileged background. His paternal grandfather worked in the coal-mines and maternal grandparents were millworkers. His own family was “lower middle class”. His father “was a junior manager in the motor industry” and his mother gave up a nursing career to raise Mark and his three siblings. As well as the late Peter and his sister Maria, who studied music at Oxford University, became a teacher and now works in a care home, he has an older brother Tim, who specialises in science publishing.
Devenport’s parents fired his interest in current affairs. “We were quite a news-obsessed family. My dad — this was in the days of no rolling news — would come to the bottom of stairs and shout ‘News’ because the news was coming on and we’d pile down to watch it. I remember trying to work out what (legendary former BBC NI political correspondent) WD Flackes was saying about NI because we were finding it quite hard to follow his accent.”
Raised a Catholic, he knew some Irish people through his local parish. He discovered the Devenport name is Irish — “we came over a few generations back” — but lost his faith as a teenager. “I’m agnostic bordering on atheistic now.”
After reading history at Cambridge, he was knocked back by several large newspaper groups before joining the BBC. He arrived in Northern Ireland “almost by accident” when the trainee scheduled to come here dropped out.
Prior to his arrival he’d visited a BBC region in southern England where, he laughs, “they rehearsed their entire local news in the afternoon as basically not a lot of immediate things happened”, but Northern Ireland during the Troubles was “all hands to the pump. A junior journalist like me was never going to be sent out to cover the terrible things happening, but the knock-on effect was they still needed a feature for the back end of the programme so I was immediately thrown onto the screen.
“On my first day duty editor Graham Mckenzie said ‘you must be Devenport, have you made any TV before?’ I said ‘well no, not actually but I’ve been on a training programme... ’ He said ‘see that door, the camera crews are out that way, the Ulster Motor Show is launching today... ’
Later, he worked on Spotlight and as Ireland correspondent before that two-year stint in the US. He feels privileged to have been an eyewitness to history, such as the IRA ceasefire (“I’m the breathless voice on Radio 5, critics thought it was because I was so excited but in fact where Brian Rowan was ringing the news in to was 100 yards from the studio”) and the Good Friday Agreement.
Other highlights include interviewing former US President Bill Clinton and “door-stepping Nelson Mandela in South Africa, who turned up to open the hotel we were staying in”.
Now it’s a period of readjustment, but he’s keeping busy as a freelance journalist and recently contributed to this newspaper. Being recognised while out shopping is unlikely to stop, though happily most people are friendly. He hopes that’s because he “was as straight as possible in reporting and called things in a fair and balanced way”.
Devenport adds: “I do feel like an honorary Northern Irish person. I’ve spent more of my life here than in England so I hope that people accept me. I suppose I’ll always been a blowin but I haven’t blown away very fast.”
‘I do feel like I’m an honorary Northern Irish person, I’ve spent more of my life here than in England’