The day I cut off a senior politician on live radio — because she was drunk
It’s the bombshell BBC memoir everyone’s talking about. Now, in part two of our serialisation, JOHN HUMPHRYS settles more scores with a new salvo of exocets
ON SATURDAY, broadcaster John Humphrys, the host of Radio 4’s Today programme for 32 years, lambasted the liberal bias of the BBC in the first part of his explosive memoirs. Today, continuing the exclusive Mail serialisation, he recalls more bust-ups with politicians of all colours . . .
No MATTER who’s in charge, I don’t like being defined or told what to do. I even have a thing about wearing identity tags at work.
In my early days at Today I was rushing to the studio with a few minutes to spare and a man in a peaked cap stopped me at the door. ‘You can’t go in there,’ he told me sternly. ‘Why not?’ ‘Because you’re not wearing your ID.’ ‘But you know who I am and I’m on air in two minutes.’ ‘Sorry. No ID, no admission.’ ‘oK,’ I said, ‘you do the bloody programme.’ Happily, he gave in. Yes, I know I was being petulant and he was just doing his job but I thought at the time I was striking a small blow for freedom. Today, I suspect I was just being difficult because I don’t like authority.
I instinctively rebel against rigid routines — however sensible they may be. For instance, if I had any sense, I’d start writing down the questions I’d be asking my interviewees as soon as I got into the Today office. In my dreams. Look, I KNoW it made sense to do just that. I KNoW I should have done what most of my colleagues did, which was read the briefs prepared the day before and plan the structure of the most important interviews. It makes sense.
Just in case the brain goes blank at a crucial moment, you understand. And that, I promise you, happened more often than you may think. So why didn’t I do it?
God knows. I always ended up finding a dozen things to do that seemed infinitely more important at the time but never were.
It meant that at some point, I’d realise that I hadn’t the first idea what important subject I was meant to be addressing with the rather anxious person who’d just been brought into the studio.
I tried to justify my idiotic behaviour by telling myself that we want our audience to feel they’re listening to a spontaneous conversation, rather than to some automaton reading prepared questions. But there’s a balance to be struck.
Still, at least I grew used to coping with the unexpected.
There was one torrid morning when everything that could go wrong did go wrong. At approximately 14 minutes to nine, we had no one left to interview.
And then, my producer shrieked into my headphones: ‘ We’ve got the leader of the Indian opposition on the line and . . .’
That was all he had time to say because by then my microphone was live and I was broadcasting to the nation. I hadn’t the faintest idea who the Indian opposition leader was, nor why I was interviewing him. With milliseconds to come up with something, I tried this: ‘Many thanks for joining us — it seems the government is facing a pretty serious crisis, eh?’
And then I prayed. If there was no crisis, I was toast. It was a 50-50 gamble and luck was with me. ‘Yes, indeed,’ he began. And he was away. The opposition politician who ducks the chance of taking a swipe at his government has yet to be born.
This sort of thing happens all the time on Today. Scarcely a day goes by without a presenter having to go off-piste.
Another small test came on a morning when I was scheduled to interview a senior political figure about the Iraq war. She was in our radio car, so I’d had no chance of a quick chat beforehand.
Within roughly 30 seconds of going live, I realised she was drunk. It was 7.20am. The listeners may have thought she sounded a bit slurred but would probably have assumed she’d just got out of bed or was maybe a bit hungover.
I knew her well enough, however, to realise she was capable of saying anything. So I pretended there was a problem with the radio- car connection and ended the interview very quickly. Was that the right thing to do?
As a journalist, I should probably have exposed her frailty and allowed the audience — and her political masters — to reach their own judgement. It would have almost certainly finished her career. But I liked her and respected her, both as a politician and as a human being.
The fact is, I acted on instinct, and I agonise about it still — as I do about a similar interview for slightly different reasons. This one — with a prominent Northern Ireland minister — was prerecorded one evening at a party conference in the late 1980s. The minister had also drunk too much. Far too much. What he said was pretty incendiary and would almost certainly have had a seriously damaging effect on the peace process, which was going through a tricky time.
Should we run the interview? In the end, we decided not to. Again, it wasn’t an easy call.
It might well have made headlines the next day but what’s a headline in the context of a vicious conflict that killed and injured thousands of people? SENSIBLE people take their time when they’re faced with making a decision that will change their lives. I took roughly ten seconds.
It was close to midnight in 1986, and I’d just returned home from presenting both the Nine o’Clock News on BBC1 and the late bulletin. The call was from the deputy editor
of the Today programme, who wanted to know if I’d be interested in taking over from John Timpson when he retired at the end of the year. I said yes. I asked no questions. Not how much money I’d be paid. Nor how many days a week I’d have to work. Nor even what time I’d have to pitch up. Now that really was very stupid.
I might, just possibly, have had second thoughts if I’d known that the answer would be something along these lines: ‘You arrive at 4am, when most people are either snuggling deeper into the duvet for another three or four hours’ sleep or preparing to die.’
ONmy first day as a presenter, I’d set the alarm for 3am — earlier than strictly necessary because I was scared stiff. My god, it was cold at that hour of the morning in January.
My body was pleading for a cup of tea. But I couldn’t use the kitchen because I’d rented part of the house to lodgers and didn’t want to risk waking them up.
I’d divorced a year before and our house in Henley- on-Thames had gone to my wife. It had taken us roughly an hour to agree on a divorce settlement. A neighbour, who happened to be a lawyer, did a quick draft of the agreement in our kitchen and that was that. God knows, she’d earned it over the years she’d been married to me.
So there I was — sitting on the floor of the bedroom, wrapped in an eiderdown against the bitter cold, eating cold porridge.
It would never be quite that bad again. Within weeks, I’d established a routine that meant I could be out of bed, dressed, teeth brushed and into the waiting car in ten minutes flat.
It meant showering and shaving the night before to get that precious extra ten minutes in bed, finding a supplier of blackout curtains and having three alarm clocks, always at least one of them a clockwork job in case the batteries on the others ran out.
One slightly trickier problem was that my terrace house had thin walls and my neighbour went to bed at about midnight. That wouldn’t have mattered had he stayed single — but he did not.
It was a passionate relationship and it regularly reached its climax after I’d been asleep for three hours. End of sleep. What to do?
After enduring a particularly torrid session, I ambushed my neighbour one morning. When he asked how I was, I said: ‘Feeling a bit tired, to be honest. I keep being woken by a curious wailing sound at pretty much the same time every night. God knows what it is. Maybe one of those urban foxes?’ He looked embarrassed. Not a very subtle tactic, I grant you, but it did the trick.
The subject of sleep is never far from a Today presenter’s thoughts. The great Sue MacGregor simply refused to acknowledge it was a problem and was always first to arrive, perfectly made-up, looking as though she’d just left her favourite beauty salon. I made a tentative comment about it once. She gave me one of those looks. ‘Wouldn’t dream of coming in without my face on!’ she snapped.
As for Jim Naughtie, he regarded an invitation to an evening political reception as a royal command. It meant he was always on top of the latest political gossip but sometimes needed to catch up on sleep during the weather forecast or a particularly boring interview. But Jim was a class act.
My ridiculous sleep regime affected my choice of house. At the great age of 57, I realised I’d have to move when I discovered that I was going to become a father again, and my partner ruled that a baby needed a garden.
But the baby’s father had needs, too: the main one being not to be woken up by a bawling infant.
So when we found a house that looked vaguely right, my partner would go into a bedroom and I’d go into the room that was furthest away. We’d close the doors and she’d scream. If I could hear the scream, we’d cross the house off our list and try the next one.
Lord knows what the owners and estate agents made of the screaming but eventually we found a house that met our needs. In fact, the whole bizarre exercise turned out to have been unnecessary because the baby slept 12 hours a night. Getting up so very
I'LL HAVE TO STOP YOU... AMOROUS NEIGHBOURS MADE THOSE 3AM STARTS HELL
early does take its toll — an obvious thing to say but it really struck home only recently — when I looked at Sarah Montague.
Sarah joined the programme in 2002 and we’ve been good friends ever since — though it may not have seemed that way to onlookers. She was always giving me a hard time — turning the studio heating up when I turned it down, berating me for reading the Daily Mail, calling me old-fashioned because I refused to have anything to do with social media.
But I like and admire her enormously. She wasn’t just brilliant at presenting Today, she also managed to have three daughters while holding down her job. Now that’s a real achievement.
She loved Today but she loved her children more, so she left in April 2018 to present the World at One. When I saw her a few weeks later, she’d been transformed. It was as though she’d had an injection of whatever serum is needed to knock 15 years off your biological age.
The reason was simple. She no longer had to get up in the middle of the night. THE radio newsroom is a strange sight when you arrive. It’s how the director of a Hollywood apocalypse movie might imagine the headquarters of a mighty international news operation — minutes after the warning had been given to head for the bunkers.
There are just two tiny huddles of dead-eyed people in a vast space of empty desks and blank computer screens. One is the Today team, the other the World Service people who are broadcasting to different time zones.
Did I say the Today team? I exaggerate a little. I should say the Today couple. There are only two producers, who have spent a long and lonely night worrying about how they will fill three hours of airtime. There is, more often than not, a touch of desperation about some of the offerings.
Do we really want yet another interview with that former Cabinet minister who says exactly the same thing every time, which mostly comes down to a veiled attack on the Prime Minister for being foolish enough to have sacked him all those years ago?
Do we really care about the latest survey telling us we could all live to be 100 if only we ate a diet consisting entirely of mung beans and quinoa — especially when it has been funded by a company that flogs them?
And do we really need yet another interview that might produce a little more detail about the immense complications of the Brexit process but add not a jot to anyone’s understanding of it?
Is there anything, in fact, that will be relevant to the listeners’ daily lives, rather than just reflect the obsessions of the big BBC bosses — who are far more interested in impressing their political masters? It’s a very tall order. I’d love to report that when we presenters arrive, we examine the running order, offering a word of praise here and there, always brimful with helpful suggestions.
The brutal truth is that each presenter wants to play the starring role. We each want to do the big political interview, chair the most interesting discussion and chat with the most famous, amusing guest.
So what we’re actually doing when we peruse the running order is looking for our own names to make sure we haven’t been short-changed.
What every presenter wants is the 8.10 slot. And there is only one 8.10 slot.
Perhaps all Today presenters should be forced to spend some time editing overnight. Then, perhaps — just possibly — we’d be a bit less concerned with our own self-importance. THE phone call I got at home on the evening of March 24, 1995, was about as bad as it gets.
On the line was the head of radio news programmes. He’d been given advance notice of a speech being made that evening by a Conservative Cabinet minister, Jonathan Aitken.
In Aitken’s eyes, I’d committed two great offences. The first was to chair a meeting in Westminster of teachers opposed to the Conservative Government’s pay policies.
I’d ‘embraced open partisanship’, he thundered.
It wasn’t true. I’d been assured that both sides of the argument would be represented on the platform but they weren’t: just Labour and the Liberal Democrats and no Conservatives. Although I was completely impartial in my questioning, my very presence gave Aitken the ammunition he needed.
His second charge? I was ‘poisoning the well of democratic debate’ with what he called my ‘ego-trip interviewing’. He cited an interview I’d done with Ken Clarke, accusing me of having interrupted him 32 times.
He may have been right but it rather depends on what you mean by ‘interrupt’. There’s a real difference between interrupting for the sake of it and interjecting to try to keep the interviewee to the point.
BuTAitken was doing more than attacking me for interrupting. He said: ‘ Mr Humphrys was conducting the interview not as an objective journalist seeking information but as a partisan pugilist trying to strike blows.’
Now these were potentially lethal accusations because BBC journalists are required to be impartial. Had Aitken been able to prove I was in league with the Labour party, I’d have been forced to resign.
In fact, the bar for him to clear was set even lower. All he had to do was convince his ministerial colleagues that his attack was warranted.
So the weekend of that phone call was probably the scariest of my career. I feared the worst. All it would take was a couple of respected colleagues to side with Aitken and refuse to be interviewed by me.
I spent much of that Sunday discussing with my family how our lives would change if the BBC chose to bid me farewell. My youngest child volunteered that if we found ourselves on the streets, having to beg for scraps, she’d leave school and take a job freelancing on a film set. Selfless to a fault.
Late on Sunday, the Today overnight editor had a call from Douglas Hurd. Then Foreign Secretary, he’d been booked to appear on the programme before the Aitken storm broke. He’d called, he said, to confirm that he’d indeed be turning up. Oh, and by the way, he added, ‘If Mr Humphrys is on duty, naturally I’d be happy to have him interviewing me.’
For me, the storm clouds had at least parted. Twelve hours later, they vanished.
Ken Clarke was on the World At One, doing an interview about some economic matter, when he was asked about Aitken’s comments. A lot of nonsense, he said. And that was all it took.
A few days later, Ken came in to be interviewed by me on Today. I met him in the green room beforehand and handed him a calculator.
‘ What the hell is this for?’ he asked.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘I thought it would help you keep track of the number of times I interrupt you, and if I exceed 32 you can shout “bingo!” or something.’
Ken looked at the calculator. ‘D’you know something? I’ve never really figured out how to make one of these things work!’
He was Chancellor of the Exchequer at the time. I think he was joking. As for me, I lived to fight another day.
AdApted by Corinna Honan from A day Like today by John Humphrys, to be published by HarperCollins on October 3 at £20. © John Humphrys 2019. to buy a copy for £16 (20 per cent discount), go to mailbookshop.co.uk or call 01603 648155, p&p is free. Offer valid until 04/10/2019.