Sarah Smith
On opening up about her late father – and embracing 50
Few television presenters are spared online abuse, and Sarah Smith is no exception. Like most of her female colleagues, the BBC’S Scotland editor is accustomed to hearing from Twitter trolls in all their bitter guises. For her, however, there is a particularly hurtful twist of the knife.
Time and again, the same few words appear on her screen. “Your father would be turning in his grave.” Almost 25 years have passed since John Smith, seen as a certainty to become the first Labour prime minister for 18 years, collapsed and died of a heart attack. He was 55.
Though his oldest daughter learnt long ago to shrug off the insults from the Right and Left, they puzzle her. “Why be so personal and nasty? And why would anyone know what his response would be to something I’ve said? These people claim to have quite astonishing insights.”
In the hallway of Smith’s tenement flat in Glasgow hangs a portrait of the father to whom she never said goodbye. She was in California when the news of his death, relayed via an American friend, came through. In the intervening quarter of a century, she has said little about him publicly. “And then I suddenly thought that I could start to talk about him and not be accused of bias. That I’ve done enough broadcasting to stand on my own two feet, and not be worried about what people think.”
As Channel 4’s Washington correspondent, she covered the 2008 financial crash. After switching to the BBC, she rose to her current post, plus a temporary job of hosting Sunday Politics in place of Andrew Neil. Although her stay was brief, the news that she was being paid “in line” with Neil was taken as a sign that the BBC was serious about achieving wage parity by 2020. “As I was doing two jobs at once, I appeared that year on the list of people paid more than £150,000.”
Smith, who signed a letter demanding fair pay to the BBC directorgeneral Tony Hall, joined a Whatsapp group of female colleagues lobbying for equality. “I feel very strongly about women being underpaid, but I never felt like one of them. I felt I was being paid absolutely fairly as Scotland editor, even though the salary [to which she reverted when the Sunday Politics role went] was below £150,000.”
Although once described as “pushy” by Jeremy Paxman, she is as modest as her father once was. Like him, she also has a steely core. Smith admits that she applied for the political editor’s role now filled by Laura Kuenssberg. “But I never really expected to get it. Laura thoroughly deserved it, and she is doing an amazing job.” Are they friends? “I know her professionally, and I like her very much.”
For now, Smith is happy in her own domain. Her life is woven into Scotland’s affairs like stripes through tartan. “In Washington, you are an outsider. Here, politicians will phone you back and tell you something of what they are thinking.”
She has the strict impartiality her job demands, volunteering nothing of what her father might have thought about Jeremy Corbyn. She does, however, admit that his friends told her “he wouldn’t have wanted to get into the Iraq war,” and she hints that he would also have opposed Brexit. “His instincts were much more European than Atlanticist.
“I’m often asked what my father would think of events such as the anti-semitism row within Labour or the Tiggers [the new breakaway Independent Group of MPS]. The simple truth is I don’t really know. But proud as I am of him, I am deeply uncomfortable talking about him publicly. I’ve always worried people will think I got my job through nepotism and would not be where I am were it not for my dad.
“I squirm when I am asked about him in interviews, and I’m starting to realise that is a real shame. I must learn to feel more comfortable celebrating his values without worrying that doing so undermines my professionalism. This is my first attempt at being a little honest about how I feel about being his daughter.”
As for her own political views, she is wary. “I spend so long reporting [Scottish] independence and Brexit that I don’t spend much time asking: what do I think? Maybe it’s not healthy to be that detached.” Does she believe that Nicola Sturgeon, whom she respects, will succeed? “In 2014 people realised an independent Scotland was a possibility. But whether they will choose to have one in my lifetime… I really don’t know.”
Smith celebrated her 50th birthday recently. “I’ve decided to embrace 50. I’m a bit fitter, a bit thinner and a bit better than I was at 49. There are a few women around my age [in the BBC] – Sophie Raworth, Mishal Husain, Fiona Bruce.” Bruce is doing “astonishingly well” on Question Time, she says. Women of their generation have, she believes, a long career ahead. I ask idly if she would ever contemplate a facelift: “I wouldn’t rule it out. I’m as vain as the next person on television. When I look in the mirror, I think: ‘Am I looking crumpled and untidy?’ I feel I have never quite lived the life I should have.
“If you don’t get it sorted by 50, then when the hell is it going to happen? So I’ve been putting a bit of effort into being who I want to be. As Nora Ephron said: ‘Always use the good bath oil’.”
Smith’s father died when he was only five years older than she is. “Yes, and he had his first heart attack at the age I am now – 50 doesn’t seem as old now as it did then. But I need to clean up my act a bit, so I do yoga to balance out the sausage rolls.
“Did you ever meet him?” she asks, and I tell her how, after his initial heart attack, John Smith marched me up Blackford Hill, near the family home in Edinburgh, to prove his fitness. Not long afterwards, he told a fundraising dinner in London: “All we ask is the opportunity to serve.” He collapsed at his flat early next morning and died shortly afterwards.
“I probably should have expected it,” Sarah says. “But he was making a bit of an effort. Andrew Marr wrote in his obituary that he had given up drinking, but he was the only man he knew who sincerely believed that white wine was not an alcoholic drink.”
John Smith was buried on the Scottish island of Iona, with the eyes of the world on his widow Elizabeth, now Lady Smith, and the Smith sisters – dubbed the Three Graces by the media. Jane, the middle daughter, is a personal trainer with two small boys, and Catherine, the youngest, is a lawyer. Ella, Catherine’s four-year-old daughter, was born at 28 weeks, weighing 1lb 10oz, and survived thanks to research done at a centre set up by Gordon Brown and his wife Sarah after their baby daughter, Jennifer, died in 2002.
A photo of Ella sits on the hall table next to one of Tostig, Sarah’s dog, who is travelling with her husband, Simon Conway. She met Simon, an ex-army officer who writes spy novels and works for landmine clearance charity the Halo Trust, at a book launch. They married six months later on Iona. When I ask if she chose not to have children, she replies guardedly: “I was nearly 40 by the time Simon and I got married. That may tell its own story.”
Despite her contentment, Smith has the restlessness of someone with much left to prove. She is open about her ambition to return to Washington some day or to become a permanent host of Radio 4’s Today programme.
Will John Humphrys’s departure give Smith her chance? “My reading is that there will be no full-time replacement, but if it means the opportunity to set my alarm for 2am more often to present the programme, I’d be delighted,” she says.
Life has taught Sarah Smith that time is short, and that she must seize all her chances, just as her father did.
‘He had his first heart attack at the age I am now – 50 doesn’t seem as old now as it did then’