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‘I’m very driven, very competitive. Everything has to be perfect’
CATHY NEWMAN is the Channel 4 News presenter who exposed a predatory peer and accused Russia’s Foreign Minister of having ‘blood on his hands’. In this politically charged year, who will she face down next? David Aaronovitch finds out
athy Newman is late. She texted me to say she would be. I am waiting for her in Lantana, a friendly, noisy restaurant near London Bridge: the kind of place where young publicists think it might be fun to conduct an interview but a setting that old interviewers with sensitive recording devices hate. When Newman arrives she is unflustered, mildly apologetic.
‘Oh, god, I’m always late,’ she says. ‘I mean, I was late today, but not very late. I’m always ten minutes late. Always. That’s like, standard.’ Why? ‘Because
I think what you could do in that extra ten minutes. The thing is, it’s an illusion, isn’t it? Because obviously if I was on time then I’d be ten minutes earlier at the end. So it’s ridiculous.’
This is quite revealing – a life in which ten stolen minutes (let’s not go into who they are stolen from) could
Csomehow be put to great use. Because Cathy Newman – the 49-year-old Channel 4 News presenter known for her fierce questioning and for exposing difficult stories, often involving predatory men – lives a very busy life. Before she sits down, I ask her to help me describe what she’s wearing because men rarely know what women’s clothes are actually called – and some of us are not great on colours. She obliges. ‘This is a “boyfriend” coat from Paul Smith, short, bright blue – almost teal.’ Her blouse and trousers are ‘cosmic’, apparently. Her scarf, given to her by her mother, is from Peru and can be seen from space. Her boots are bright, maroonish (I warned you) and have very high heels – ‘£20 from Zara,’ she says proudly.
Why does she wear such high heels? Aren’t they uncomfortable and, well, unfeminist? Two reasons, she tells me.
‘A lot of blokes are very tall. And if you’re interviewing a tall bloke and you’re very short [she’s 5ft 4in] you’re instantly at a
disadvantage. So it’s partly professional. But also it just looks elegant.’
The ostensible reason we are meeting is she has a book out, her third, titled The Ladder: Life Lessons from Women Who Scaled the Heights & Dodged the Snakes. It’s based on conversations on Newman’s Times Radio show The Ladder, with height-scaling, snake-dodging women, including Angela Rayner, Joan Bakewell and, er, Nicola Sturgeon. Both of her previous books – Bloody Brilliant Women and It Takes Two – were well reviewed.
I first met Newman in the mid-1990s. I had just left the BBC and we were both employed by the increasingly cashstrapped Independent, in London’s Canary Wharf. She was not long graduated from Oxford – she got a first reading English – and was ultra-bright, with a kind of
‘I’M LEARNING GREEK, THAT’S WHAT I DO FOR FUN, AND I’M DREAMING OF A GLASS OF RETSINA BY THE SEA’
hyper-alert quality to her. It was not an easy time for either of us. Our immediate boss was a nightmare to work for.
Newman had the job of collating a ‘top ten of whatever’ for the news analysis page. Back then there was no Google, so, she recalls, ‘It would take all day to find, like, the top three, let alone the top ten. And then when you didn’t have it, the fury of the boss was dumped on your shoulders like a big bucket of s**t.’
She persisted. By 1999, aged 23, Newman was poached by The Financial Times where she worked as a political reporter, later becoming chief political correspondent. (In this business, every ambitious journalist wants a Westminster beat. And Newman’s career progression tells you that her seniors thought she had what it took.)
Her transition to screen was gradual – pundit spots on news analysis shows and as a stand-in presenting for Alastair Stewart’s Sunday morning
show on ITV. Stewart once took her to lunch at The Ivy and told her: ‘Remember, you are now part of a club of about 12 people – the TV presenters of Britain.’
In 2006, Newman joined Channel 4 as a political correspondent; the first onscreen newcomer to the political team for 11 years. She was constantly having a battle with ‘imposter syndrome’ – that feeling that you don’t really deserve to be where you are. It’s a feeling, she says, that women suffer from more than men. It can be debilitating ‘but also it sort of drives you on. Because you think, “Well, I’ll work twice as hard and get twice as many stories to make sure.”’
‘I’m a very driven person anyway,’ she adds. ‘But I think part of that drive is fearing that, at some point, I’ll get found out, that I’m not as good as people think I am.’
Note, however, that ‘anyway’. Has she always been driven? ‘Everything, all my life, has got to be perfect. I had to get top marks in everything. It had to be a clean sweep – all As.’
Was it her parents who made her that way? ‘No, my parents were not pushy at all. I got up at 5.30 in the morning to do all my school work so that I could then practise the violin in the evening. But that wasn’t them telling me to do it. In fact, they were begging me not to, you know. It’s just the way I popped out.’
Is she competitive? ‘I’m very competitive.’ Very competitive with other people? ‘Oh yes. When you’re a reporter you’ve got to do better than the opposition every time otherwise you’re not gonna get paid. So you look at what the opposition does. All the time.’
Competition acts as an incentive, and Channel 4 News’s competitor has long been BBC Two’s Newsnight, which is now being cut back both in terms of time and budget. Newman regrets this. She thinks publicservice broadcasting is more necessary than ever in the age of misinformation, but the money has never been tighter. Channel 4 News, she reminds me, has a contract from the channel until 2025. That’s not far away.
When I told an old friend – a veteran journalist – that I was interviewing Newman, he said how impressed he’d been by her almost pioneering work in holding the powerful to account. He mentioned her exposure, in February 2013, of allegations of sexual harassment against members of female staff by the senior Liberal Democrat peer Lord Rennard.
Her investigation, she tells me, ‘took years to actually bring to earth, because the women reporting the harassment were worried that they would never be able to work in politics again – and they were incredibly brave to say, “You know what,
I am actually going to talk about this.’’’ She becomes animated. ‘I feel proud of that work because that was before #Metoo. It was before anybody in the media was even thinking about it. And I feel that we identified a problem that then was taken up by others.’
It wasn’t just the abuse of women that Newman took on. In 2017, she also investigated allegations of physical assaults on young men and boys by John Smyth, a prominent Anglican, and associate of the Archbishop of Canterbury. The investigation took six months, and involved Newman doorstepping Smyth, who had run Christian holiday camps for students. Smyth is now dead but the church’s own inquiry into what happened has yet to be published.
‘Those men [who were abused] were still broken all these years later. I was angry, I wanted to get justice for them. And the sad thing is, Smyth died before they could get justice, which still haunts them.’
Since then, Newman has exposed allegations of sexual misconduct against Mohamed Al Fayed, the former Harrods owner, who died last year and always denied the accusations. She regularly interrogates politicians, asking Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov in 2022 if he had ‘the blood of Ukrainian children’ on his hands; he told her she was being ‘emotional’.
She has remonstrated with the likes of Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Theresa May, Rishi Sunak, Kwasi Kwarteng and Keir Starmer, and it was Newman who extracted the now notorious Partygate quote from a Tory MP about Johnson being ‘ambushed with a cake’.
She’s certainly committed, but is she ever nervous on screen? ‘If you told me tomorrow I had an interview with Vladimir Putin, that would make me nervous, because there’s a lot of work involved in doing that. Not to mention whether he’s going to slip polonium into your drink. But I prepare very hard for my interviews and the more I prepare the less nervous I get.’ And, she adds, ‘I do all my own research.’
Eventually, we address that elephant in the room. In 2018 she interviewed Jordan Peterson, the then 56-year-old Canadian academic popular with young men, who had just published his hugely successful book 12 Rules for Life. The encounter has since garnered 47 million views. At the time a Guardian journalist wrote: ‘The more Newman inaccurately paraphrased his beliefs [mostly about women and equality] and betrayed her irritation, the better Peterson came across.’
The male culture warriors were out in force and Newman, with her stellar record in exposing stories of harassment, was a glorious target. Her address was published online (a practice known as ‘doxing’), there was horrible name-calling and even death threats.
How does she feel about it six years later? ‘I don’t really mind,’ she says, ‘It’s just like another interview to me. I did three interviews that day.’ Her only worry in discussing it, she adds, is that it just gives another turn on the story, which will result in an uptick in the abuse. That rings true. But I’m not sure I believe that she doesn’t really mind.
Newman is ultra-careful about explaining more, not so much to protect herself, I feel, but to protect her programme. Peterson – who she had not heard of before – had only been booked a day earlier and she had an evening to skim-read his book. When they met, ‘not being a Lacanian psychologist’ (as Peterson is), she zeroed in on the one aspect she knew about: equal pay. So yes, it wasn’t the best interview, but you can’t win them all.
I put it to her that she should have refused the interview. ‘But I never refuse,’ she tells me. And I wonder whether a male presenter would have said the same.
The irony is that, shortly after the Peterson interview, it was revealed that ITN (which makes Channel 4 News) had an 18.2 per cent gender pay gap. Newman was quoted as saying that this demonstrated ‘just how pervasive inequality is’. Her co-presenter,
Jon Snow, subsequently took a 25 per cent pay cut in an act of solidarity.
In this year of elections, who else is on her interview list apart from Putin? ‘Donald Trump,’ she tells me, ‘and I would have loved to interview the late Queen. Literally, she would only have had to open her mouth and you’d have a story, you know?’
Newman’s husband, John, largely gave up his career in journalism to look after their two daughters, Molly and Scarlett, now aged 15 and 19. And a bloody good job she thinks he’s made of it. She never cooks, and although she did ‘the talks’ with her daughters, John bought the sanitary towels!’ And yes, of course, she missed out through working so hard, but the ‘having it all’ was always a myth.
What about fun? ‘I am learning Greek,’ she says. ‘That’s what I do for fun.’ The family goes to the Pelion peninsula on Greece’s east coast (inevitably described by travel guides as a ‘hidden gem’) three times a year. She shows me a picture of the view from a balcony over the Pagasetic Gulf, from which you can see dolphins. ‘I’m dreaming of being by the sea, eating nice fresh fish and, you know, a glass of retsina – no one likes retsina except us, and we love it.’
Actually, it’s where she’d like to live when she retires or gets the boot (‘I’m under no illusions that at some point all broadcasting careers end in failure’). She has a fantasy – although with her it’ll probably happen – of writing books in the genre of The Suspicions of Mr Whicher; history and biography told through an extraordinary story. But not any time soon. It’s a point she makes to me in the restaurant, makes again while we are walking to the tube, and for a third time in a follow-up text. ‘I’m 49 and I’m hoping I’ll still be on telly when I’m 59. Why not? Loads of the blokes are.’
She reels off some names of men who are happily ensconced in their presenting jobs after the age of 60 and of some women who were prematurely retired. She does not intend to join them – and there’s absolutely no reason why she should.
The Ladder by Cathy Newman is published by William Collins, £18.99*