Why I’ll be waking up with waffly Jim one last time

Tomorrow morning James Naughtie will say goodbye to Radio 4’s Today programme – and hello to staying in bed after 3am. That is the hour, more or less, when Today presenters have to rise from the arms of Morpheus and head off to Broadcasting House, where they will fight among each other for that day’s big interview.

He isn’t leaving the radio altogether. His monthly

Book Club will continues on Radio 4; he’ll do more in– depth series – such as this year’s corker on Britain’s oil industry – and he’ll specialise in reports from Scotland on many subjects.

The Naughtie family took the decision several years ago that they would split their time and residence between London and Edinburgh. The arrangement worked well – escaping to his homeland was a source of great pleasure. But I hear from an impeccable source that the decision to quit Today has transformed Jim, made him even happier.

I hope it will also make him less touchy. He once pounced on me outside a book shop and, in an aggrieved voice, asked: “What do you mean by saying I have hand-knitted questions?” I didn’t have the heart to mention all those listening millions who fret when a 90-second question from Jim, full of all the context and background he so often finds it only fair to include (and, in which, there will be as many vocal commas as there are, as you may have noticed, in this parodic sentence) elicits a mere three-second answer.

We also had a bit of a clash when he was interviewing me on Today, and he tweaked some waffly reply of mine and threw it back at me. Whereupon, very touchily, I roared at him “How dare you…?” Alas, I’ve forgotten what we were talking about but I remember hoping my irate response would throw him.

It didn’t. I was the one left quivering, just as Neil Kinnock was when, during Jim’s years on The World At

One, Kinnock memorably roared, obviously rattled, “I’m not going to be bloody kebabbed by you, Jim.”

Roger Mosey, now Master of Selwyn College, Cambridge, then Today’s editor, was the talent spotter who prised Jim away from

The World At One in 1994. It was a canny move by Mosey: Jim’s tendency to ask overly bulging questions is outweighed by his talent for getting newsworthy answers – and we listeners tend to forget this. Back when he was on The

Guardian, in 1986, Jim joined me on the panel of Channel 4’s Face the Press. The guest was the then prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, over whom perilous storms were raging. They started rumbling with Michael Heseltine’s resignation over Westland, and broke furiously when a damaging memo about Heseltine was leaked to the press. The Department of Trade and Industry was the apparent source of the leak. Mrs Thatcher told the House she knew nothing of it. Her Secretary of State, Leon Brittan, then resigned, saying he had lost the confidence of his colleagues.

Jim’s polite persistence in asking Mrs Thatcher why she had told the House she knew nothing about the matter eventually led to her famous reply: “Truth is often stranger than fiction.” It led every news bulletin and grabbed every front page the next day, just as Jim said it would when we finished the programme. I think this incident was more of a milestone in his career than any of those subsequent spoonerisms or spontaneous eruptions.

But I’ll be waking up with him one last time tomorrow just to make sure.