‘You have to be rigorous. I hate coy and coquettish’
Kirsty Wark had her son induced to front the 1992 election. Her work ethic is all part of her charm, says Camilla Tominey
It was the interview that, for many, signalled the decline of Margaret Thatcher’s premiership. But for Kirsty Wark, the infamous “We in Scotland” demolition – when the then prime minister sought to align herself with the Scots, only to further alienate herself from them – cemented her BBC career as a fierce political interrogator.
That said, her mother was “absolutely horrified” with the way the then 35-year-old broadcaster took Mrs Thatcher to task in 1990, seven months before her resignation.
“I think my mum was a Tory,” Wark reveals, in what some might say is a surprising confession from a journalist who has been accused in the past of Left-wing bias. “She didn’t know what I was. But I knew what she was. In our family, we never talked about how we voted.”
As she prepares for the publication of her second novel, The House by the Loch, later this month, family matters are on the mind of the 64-year-old mother of two as we speak at her flat, close to New Broadcasting House, which boasts panoramic views of London’s West End.
The book, which follows her bestselling debut, The Legacy of Elizabeth Pringle, is partly inspired by Wark’s childhood memories of growing up in Dumfries, exploring the bonds between generations and the “devastating consequences of family secrets”.
Wark describes the death of her solicitor father, Jimmy, in 1994, as the family “trauma” that inspired the novel. “Every family has some kind of trauma. He was only 70 and still working. He had stopped smoking but it was too late,” she says.
“He had cancer but then he had a massive heart attack, which was the best thing because he was such an active person, I think the worst thing
would have been if he’d had a slow decline.” Her mother lived for another 15 years but similarly died “too soon”.
The novel also explores the complex relationship between grandparents and their grandchildren, which Wark admits is “often much easier” than that of parent and child. “Not that mine was particularly difficult but it wasn’t necessarily as emotionally close.”
Despite being a “very good lawyer”, Wark’s father discouraged her from following him into the profession.
As a bookworm who made great use of the local library in Kilmarnock (“although I wasn’t a geek,” she insists), she decided to be a journalist at the age of eight, in 1963, when John F Kennedy was assassinated.
She prepared meticulously for the Thatcher interview, but found herself confronted by a PM who clearly hadn’t grasped the brief. “We were both in the make-up room, we said very little. I don’t think she quite understood what feminism was, but she sort of tried to say something about women. And I knew she was going to try to
‘I think my mum was a Tory. In our family, we never talked about how we voted’
steer me on to that territory. But I only had half an hour, so I couldn’t let her.
“When we came off air she just literally went for me. ‘You interrupted me! It was a disgrace!’, all this kind of stuff. I had Malcolm Rifkind [the then Scotland secretary] at one side and Michael Forsyth [Scottish Conservative chairman] at the other. She didn’t get what they were asking her to do, which was to be more empathetic. Instead she just kept saying, ‘We in Scotland believe’.”
Neither was Wark’s mother, Roberta, a schoolteacher, thrilled. “I think she found it really difficult that I was with the prime minister and being quite forensic,” she says. “I think it is about the idea you shouldn’t draw attention to yourself.”
Wark spent the Nineties juggling her career with having two children with her production boss husband, Alan Clements. Caitlin, now 28, and James, 27, were born 16 months apart.
“You always feel a little bit of guilt,” she says. “Mum was kind of, ‘You’re not going to London again, are you?’ when the kids were little, yet she wanted me to be successful. It was only after she died I found under her bed an old leather suitcase of cuttings.”
Wark covered the 1992 general election when James was just three weeks old. “He was 10 days late and Alan was going to film in Kazakhstan, so I had to be induced. It was just horrendous,” she recalls. “Caitlin, her labour had been like 22 hours and I ended up on diamorphine. But this was sudden. It had to happen because I was fronting the election.”
She had worries on screen, too: “I had to be bound… for leakage because I was breast-feeding. I won’t say who it is, but a colleague of mine once, a long time ago, had a wee accident.”
Did her mother frown on her decision to carry on working?
“She was like, ‘Are you sure?’ And I was like, ‘Absolutely’. But the upside of this huge privilege was that I was doing Newsnight a couple of nights a week, I was home for two or three days. I was doing One Foot in the Past and other programmes. And that was the wonder of the sleeper [train].”
The most time Wark has ever had off work was to recover from a hysterectomy, aged 47. She points out the irony of women being hit by the menopause when they are often “at the height of their powers”.
“That’s just what happens,” she says. “We’re going to work for longer, we have our kids later, our parents live longer. So the menopause is not to be seen as a sign of weakness, or something to be shunned. We just have to embrace it, help each other, do the best we can.”
Admitting to being “disappointed” to have missed out on hosting Question Time, she insists she is “very happy” presenting Newsnight on Fridays along with a host of other television roles, including a cameo in Doctor Who and an appearance in the final of Celebrity MasterChef.
Such versatility is perhaps down to her famous no-nonsense presenting style. Wark insists women should not feel the need to be “gushy” on screen. “A journalist’s job is to report the story and use as few adjectives as possible… You have to be rigorous. I hate coy and coquettish.”
Nowhere was that tested more than in her reporting from the Lockerbie bombing in 1988. “Journalists were not allowed on the hill where the fuselage and everything was. There were police officers… Army. PTSD wasn’t really thought about then, but these people all needed real help. What they did was extraordinary,” she says. “You want to get the story… but you don’t want to exploit. How people respond to tragedy is very important, but also, what makes them heal.”