It was such a bad breakdown, I had no choice but to reboot myself
The News At Ten anchor and thriller writer on emerging stronger from mental collapse, the Partygate scoop that cost his ex-colleague her job… and why he won’t be talking about the young royals
IT’S HARD to know which straw broke the camel’s back when it comes to what News At Ten anchor Tom Bradby bravely describes as the breakdown which culminated in his need for a “reboot” – but there are plenty of potential culprits. The then ITN political editor lost his mother to cancer, his seriously ill father would later suffer a fatal heart attack, and a ridiculously busy career as a broadcast journalist, author and screenwriter left him in a state of constant anxiety.
During a last-minute holiday to Greece with his jewellery designer wife Claudia in 2015, Bradby had watched horror-struck as a car plunged off the quayside in front of him. Diving into the sea, he saw an elderly man sitting behind the wheel and battled in vain to rescue him before being forced to swim ashore as the vehicle sank.
In retrospect, the trauma should have set alarm bells ringing.
But a year later, his own father died and by 2018 Bradby, now anchoring one of the country’s most prestigious news bulletins and busier than ever, found himself gripped by mental anguish and appalling insomnia, unable to sleep for nights on end.
Happily, a total three-month break from work and treatment with one of the country’s leading psychiatrists set him back on track. Today it’s hard to equate the confident, sunny 55-year-old with the angry, unhappy and dangerously stressed-out man he talks about.
But having recently described himself as a “poster boy for having a breakdown”, I wonder whether the boyish-looking Bradby regrets being quite so frank.
Not a bit of it, he smiles.
“You can’t disappear from News At
Ten for three months and not have people notice. I had a breakdown, I was fortunate to see one of Britain’s best psychiatrists, I was very expensively rebooted and I came out pretty much a totally different person psychologically.
“I wouldn’t say I’m entirely serene but I don’t worry about 98 per cent of the things I used to worry about. I like to think I’m reasonably well educated, but I couldn’t believe just how ignorant I was about all these psychological matters.”
AS FOR the tragedy he witnessed, some unsettling parallels emerged. “My mother had died of cancer, my father was 83 and very ill. We’d finally got him out of hospital and gone on holiday. It turns out this poor guy was 82 and had recently lost his own wife to cancer.”
Today Bradby, who has three grown-up children with Claudia, believes his breakdown was, if not pleasant, then generally positive: “In one way, I had the benefit of having such a bad breakdown I had no choice but to reboot myself,” he says, having subsequently become a public face of mental health.
“Almost as soon as I got better, people came up to me socially, at work, on the train, to tell me they were suffering, their partner was suffering, their son or daughter was suffering. If every time I talk, I can help ten people, even one person…”
Despite the many warning signs, Bradby’s breakdown was an unforeseen – albeit terrifying – blip on an otherwise effortless career trajectory. The son of a naval officer, having studied history at Edinburgh University, he joined ITN as a trainee journalist in 1990 and, 32 years later, remains a pillar of the operation. But at the same time as reporting, he’s enjoyed an increasingly successful parallel career as a bestselling author.
Working in stolen moments, and influenced by ITN legend Gerald Seymour who wrote Harry’s Game about Northern Ireland, Bradby published his own first, Troubles-set novel, Shadow Dancer, in 1998, later adapting it into the acclaimed Clive Owen and Andrea Riseborough film.
“I have always had two different sides to my brain,” he admits. “One part always wants to be there at the frontline; and one part wants to be sitting alone inside my head. One part is sociable, the other insular and I need both.
“I’ll have an idea and it grows slowly in fits and starts. I’ll have a creative spurt and a whole lot will come clear and then I’ll stall for a bit. Then, suddenly, it comes and I’ll have another novel or film in my head. I have to write it otherwise it sends me crazy.”
We’re talking today about his tenth novel, Yesterday’s Spy, a page-turning Cold War thriller set against the backdrop of the CIA-backed Iranian coup of 1953.
In it, Bradby conjures a sinister and occasionally bleak, if ultimately redemptive, tale of Harry Tower, a world-weary British spy desperately searching for his missing journalist son Sean as Tehran descends into chaos.
It’s a deliberate period piece in contrast to his recent Secret Service trilogy, featuring thoroughly modern MI6 agent Kate Henderson, which he is currently adapting for TV. Historically overshadowed by the 1979 Islamic Revolution that set Iran on the path to hardline extremism, he believes the toppling of an elected leader had far-reaching, and fascinating, consequences for the Middle East and wider world.
For the West it was also, Bradby says, a painful example of the laws of unintended consequences. Essentially a row over oil revenues – British firm Anglo-Iranian had won the rights to exploit Iran’s oil for a pittance – it became a debate over sovereignty, escalating into the expulsion of British diplomats and a naval blockade of the country.The US, fearing of Soviet encroachment in the Middle East, used British contacts to ferment a coup against elected prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh and install the Shah in power.
“This CIA guy, Kermit Roosevelt, literally turned up with suitcases of cash and bribed everyone. He was very pleased with himself and wrote a book about it,” says Bradby.
“It gave the Shah absolute power and he abused it and you had the subsequent Iranian Revolution with the consequences we see today. Iranians are still incredibly suspicious of everything British because of what happened in 1953. Equally impactful was that the CIA considered this a massive success and went on to meddle in lots of other countries.
‘Almost as soon as I got better, people came up to me socially, at work, to tell me they were suffering too’
‘On Twitter, some people are so aggressive, you think, did I murder your mum, did I kill your dog?’
My character Harry is at a point where he’s devoted his life to this political ideology and he’s beginning to feel a degree of profound regret because he’s worried it prevented him exercising his humanity in some key ways.
“Is it bleak? Well I hope there is redemption at the end of it. But it’s a novel I was more likely to write at 55 than 25.”
In many ways Yesterday’s Spy – shining as it does a light on a relatively little-known episode – is typical of Bradby, a dyed in the wool reporter who champions News At Ten for opening a “window on the world” and never underestimating its viewers.
While viewing figures have remained healthy since he took over as anchor in 2015, I wonder if the arrival of GB News and the return of Piers Morgan on Talk TV in April have shaken things up?
“We grew up with big media organisations, very stable, very powerful, with big circulations and huge audiences. Now you look at where we are; massive competition and new competition all the time. We’re in a fluid situation but we’re fighting our corner.”
Would he ever go down the Piers Morgan route and swap his reputation for painstaking impartiality and research to become someone with slightly shouty opinions?
“I think I can reasonably say I’ll never do that,” he smiles. “Lots of people have really decided opinions. I’ve no coherent set of political views. I am just not a tribal person at all. This sounds pious but for me journalism is about analysing everything.”
That’s not to say there haven’t been tough moments on the newsbeat. Having become friendly with the young royals, Bradby was sucked into the fallout from Harry and Meghan’s unhappy departure from the UK. During a 2019 ITV documentary on the couple, he asked the Duchess of Sussex how she was.
More than 20 million people have now watched the clip of her answering: “Thank you for asking, because not many people have asked if I am OK.”
Unsurprisingly he declines to discuss it today – “I’ve taken a personal view. I’m not going to talk about it in public or private” – for which he can hardly be blamed.
But more recent News At Ten revelations that government spokeswoman Allegra Stratton, a former colleague of Bradby’s, had seemingly joked on video about Number 10 staff breaking strict lockdown regulations also proved uncomfortable.
It was one of the major scoops of the Partygate scandal, and Stratton was forced to resign amid a wave of public anger and criticism of the Government. The pair haven’t spoken since, but Bradby insists: “She’s an honourable woman and she did an honourable thing. The irony of it, as far as I could tell, was that whatever was going on, she doesn’t seem to have been part of it.
“The difficulty was, it’s not just that they broke rules, it looked like they were laughing about it. She’s smart, I think she knew she would have to resign. We felt sad because she was a really valued colleague, but it was a big story.”
As for Bradby, interviewers frequently give him flak for his “plummy accent, posh background and rugger-pitch bluffness” – all of which seems rather unfair. In our ohso-woke times, are white, middle-aged blokes the last group it’s okay to mock?
“I’ve had a lot of privilege in my life. If you can’t take people occasionally poking fun that would be tragic. There are so many people who’ve had tough experiences and realistically speaking I’m not one of them,” he says disarmingly.
“It’s a bit like if you go on Twitter, some people are so aggressive. You think, ‘I’m sorry, did I murder your mum, did I kill your dog?’ Then you think, ‘This is really about you.’ I mean. I’ve got my faults but you’re not really talking about them, you’re just venting because you’re not feeling very nice about your life. There’s no point taking that personally so I try not to.”
Does so-called white male privilege make him fair game then?
“I just think it’s an inevitability that if you’re someone who’s had a great deal of privilege for a long time, there’s going to be a period of adjustment. It’s a good time for people to be a bit quiet and do a bit of listening.”
BRADBY believes journalism is more important than ever, citing the last US election as proof of the widening gap between mainstream media and the public. “A very large number of Republican voters in America believe, really believe, the last election was stolen,” he says.
“I spent hours and hours going through some of the 51 court cases to be sure I wasn’t jumping to a conclusion based on a preconception.
“They were all thrown out – quite a lot by Republican judges – so how can it be that so many Americans believe this? It’s not new but in terms of the democratic world it’s an increasing, not a declining, problem.
“We’re moving from the model that was imperfect but relatively stable – legacy media holding people in power to account – into a town hall square thing where everyone’s shouting to be heard.”
Bradby, by contrast, is now able to distance himself from all this noisy daily hubbub, deliberately making time to sit quietly and think in his Hampshire garden.
Before he leaves, off to his next appointment, he recommends fellow newscaster George Alagiah’s bowel cancer podcast for putting life in perspective.
“This is a guy with terminal cancer, who knows he is going to die, and he’s just so joyful and fatalistic and accepting about his death in an utterly inspiring way.
“You do what you can to control your destiny but one of the things I learnt getting over my breakdown was that there are so many things you can’t control and you’re wasting your life stressing about them.”
● Yesterday’s Spy by Tom Bradby (Transworld, £16.99) is published on Thursday. To order for a discounted £15.29 with free UK P&P, visit expressbookshop.com or call 020 3176 3832