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Confessions: Life Re-examined
By Edward Stourton
Doubleday £20
Three subjects once forbidden in dinner-party conversation dominate Edward Stourton’s memoir: sex, religion and politics.
A fourth – class, the snob factor – has been used against him in his career as an international correspondent and anchor of the Today programme.
As John Prescott, lapsing into lucidity, put it live on Today, ‘He’s descended from 19 barons,’ which is almost true. Certainly Stourton is aware of the mixture of ‘faith and snobbery’ that moulded him at the Benedictine public school of Ampleforth.
In this connection, a rare misapprehension escapes him: that Dom, the style by which Benedictine monks are addressed, is an acronym standing for Domine Optime Maxime. Someone might have been pulling his leg, for it is no such thing, but a shortening of the Latin dominus.
Recently an element of ‘awokening’ has stirred Stourton’s life. He first noticed it perhaps as the compassion taught by reporting on events. It is certainly no unreflective tribal pursuit.
Now 65, he has been living with prostate cancer for seven years. He expects to make it into his seventies but not his eighties. This lends seriousness to his self-examination, though its telling is through mostly ridiculous incidents.
Rich absurdity struck on Today when he was interviewing the French author Michel Houellebecq, who did not speak English ‘in the normal sense of the phrase’, giving monosyllabic answers to ever more prolix questions. Then his ready and unelaborated agreement that his latest book was ‘pornographic sometimes, yes’ left no way out but an early transfer to the sports news.
Early in his book, Stourton condemns St Augustine’s Confessions as a monument to ‘spiritual pride’, which makes his own title Confessions a bit of a hostage to fortune. But if he finds Augustine ‘very difficult to like’, Stourton, as millions of Today listeners know, is a sympathetic chap.
Part of his character that he re-examines is implicit conservatism. ‘What marked my childhood was not being posh or cosmopolitan,’ he writes. ‘It was the belief that the past had, on the whole, been better than the future was likely to be, and that its values should be honoured.’
But when Theresa May declared, ‘If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere,’ he found his experience had been ‘precisely the reverse’.
Born in Lagos, he was once helped in later life getting a visa to cover the Nigerian elections by an official at the consulate in London putting down his race as ‘Black African’.
Glittering prizes had come to him at Cambridge (President of the Union, member of the Pitt Club). His broadcasting career throve early – and saw some early falls. By an irony, ‘being fired from Today gave me a higher profile than any other event of my career’.
A straw in the wind was catching sight of a document not addressed to him, about the Today rota: ‘If you need to fill a gap, try Stourton or Montague – they are cheaper than Humphrys or Naughtie.’
In 2018, Stourton was made to look again at memories of happy school years by an official report about sexual abuse at Ampleforth decades earlier. He recalls no open sexual misbehaviour as asserted in the report, but the landscape of schooldays, already stripped of silly Brideshead snobbery, was now covered by bitter ashes.
Stourton does not discuss the BBC’S own history of abuse, scandalously exemplified by Jimmy Savile’s career. That, to be fair, was not part of Stourton’s life story.
His own place in the Catholic Church was modified by his being divorced and remarried, and thus unable to receive Holy Communion. By another irony, success in presenting the Sunday
programme meant that he lost the habit of going to Mass on Sunday mornings.
The TV programme Who Do You Think You Are? made a discovery the producer hoped would provoke an emotional response. A Lord Stourton in Elizabeth’s reign had put his name to the condemnation of Mary, Queen of Scots, to death – a betrayal of Catholic loyalties. Here was the very document.
‘Could I squeeze out a tear or two, or even a gasp of shock? I could not.’ It was centuries ago and the peer had confessed, with his own tears, as death approached, to plenty of other acts of betrayal.
The election of Pope Francis in 2013 has for Stourton meant ‘the return of cheerful Catholicism’. He and his wife have filled with books a house in France where he sits, happily writing.