Alastair Stewart
‘I can’t do anything about my age - but I still have something to offer’
When Alastair Stewart stepped down as ITV’s longest-serving newsreader in January, fellow broadcasters lined up to defend him in the face of accusations of racism. The TV veteran admitted to “errors of judgment” in the wake of a Twitter exchange with a black man in which he quoted a Shakespeare passage including the phrase “angry ape”.
But the reaction of colleagues across the industry spoke volumes about how they felt one of its most respected figures had been treated.
“I would never use the word ‘racist’ and his name in the same sentence,” said Ranvir Singh, political editor of ITV’s Good Morning Britain.
ITV news anchor Julie Etchingham added: “Al is a trusted friend and guide to many of us.” Sky News’s Adam Boulton described him as “a great TV journalist, professional model and friend”.
Yet despite Martin Shapland, the Twitter user involved in the spat, insisting that “an apology would have sufficed”, ITN cut ties with Stewart, 68, claiming he had breached editorial guidelines by quoting the line from Measure to Measure.
So perhaps it is hardly surprising that the former News At Ten presenter has no desire to return to the network he served loyally for 40 years.
Speaking for the first time since his departure eight months ago, and in the week that saw the BBC at the centre of a race row with the
Rule, Britannia Proms debacle, I find the married father of four in a buoyant mood.
“I don’t wish to go back into ITV News,” he declares. “I have no desire to go down that road.” Not even if they begged? “They won’t, it’s fine, I’ve moved on,” he insists.
Stewart is too long in the tooth to fall for any Paxman-like attempts to extract further details of what happened with his former employers.
“The decision that I took very clearly back in January, was to draw a line and not sit in my lovely farmhouse in Hampshire and weep and do the sums of my pension.
“I said: ‘OK, fine, what else can I do?’ I’ve got the experience that I’ve got. Nobody can take that from me. I’m the age that I am, I can’t do anything about that. But there might be something to offer.”
As he merrily chats away at The Ivy Club in Covent Garden after a quick cigarette break (“It takes me exactly three minutes to smoke one Marlboro Gold”), the Rolling Stones fan certainly appears to be at peace.
Having secured a series of presenting stints over the summer for Talk Radio (“I’m happy being a super sub”) and having been invited to write for The Spectator half a dozen times already, it does genuinely seem as if he’s moved on.
“All I would say is the experience has informed how I feel about the issue and gives me some focus in thinking about it. But the specific departure from ITV, ITN, call it what you will – to me, it’s a closed book.
“I’m absolutely thrilled to bits with what I’m doing now. If it was going to be a great big punch-up, it would have been. But it wasn’t.”
As one of Britain’s most experienced broadcasters, Stewart appears much more exercised about impartiality than anything else – not least in light of the BBC Proms row, which he describes as “another example of the BBC having drifted away from what its core audience really wants”.
Having got into journalism by accident in
1976 when he turned up at Southern Television to give an interview in his capacity as deputy president of the National Union of Students, the RAF squadron commander’s son soon learnt the importance of keeping his opinions to himself.
“Frank Copplestone was the managing director and he said: ‘So you’re broad Left?’ And I said, ‘Yes.’ And he said: ‘Right, if we give you a job, all of that stays at the door. You come in here and you leave all of it behind you.’
“It was almost a throwaway line and was the most profound and influential observation in my entire professional life.
“I’ve clung to it, not only because it’s right but it helps.”
Following Emily Maitlis’s reprimand for her Dominic Cummings diatribe on BBC2’s
Newsnight programme in May, Stewart warned about the “Foxification” of Britain’s broadcast media. He believes social media is partly to blame for what he describes as a belief “that you can say what you want online” – an ironic comment, perhaps, in light of his own circumstances. “Broadcasters think they can be someone else online, that they can be chameleon-like, but they can’t.” He agrees narcissism can also play a part – although is careful not to cite any specific examples.
“There are still some who perhaps like the idea of appearing on the other end of the cathode ray tube or the flat screen in somebody’s sitting room, in its own right. I just think that’s complete and utter selfindulgent tosh.”
He also “hates with a passion” Gotcha-style “fishing expeditions”. “It’s for the public to listen to what a politician or an opinion former or whoever says, and then decide whether it’s absolute crap or profound insight.
“To approach an interview with the attitude of: ‘Why is this lying b-----lying to me?’ Or to treat the relationship between a journalist and a politician as that of a dog and a lamppost? It’s not even impressive light entertainment.” Why should Downing Street put ministers up for interview “if they are just going to be abused for 10 minutes?” he asks.
The journalists Stewart truly admires are the ones who have “worked their wotsits off as reporters”.
“I covered Grenfell Tower with Sophie Raworth,” he recalls.
“This utter superstar of news reading was able to pick up a clipboard, talk to people, get the quotes, check the facts, probe the local council, probe the claims of the pressure groups.
“Standout journalism and then 24 hours later, looking like a dream reading the news. Julie (Etchingham) is the same.” Remembering the late, great ITV
News at Ten host Alastair Burnet, he adds: “He always used to say: ‘Never ever forget, it’s the news that’s the star. It’s not you – you’re just lucky enough to impart it’.”
Burnet had another mantra: Do the homework. “He’d say – don’t go in there with notes, learn it.”
As a cub reporter straight out of Bristol University, Stewart would constantly be tested by the man Sir Robin Day once described as “the booster rocket that put ITN into orbit”.
“He’d be walking through the newsroom and suddenly ask me: ‘Who is the MP for Aylesford?’”
Which is why he worries not only about partiality creeping into TV news – but inaccuracy.
“When I started there were three channels on the TV. Now it’s 400. And an awful lot of them are news channels. Nothing goes on the lunchtime news, six or 10 that hasn’t been checked, double checked and corroborated.
“They’ve got to be absolutely watertight, hermetically sealed, balanced and impartial. With rolling news it’s trickier.”
Last week, BBC’s head of news Fran Unsworth told The Daily Telegraph that the number of bulletins may be cut over the next decade as more people watch news online.
Stewart disagrees and still thinks there is “an appetite” for “appointment to view” bulletins. “The numbers are still good. Even in the advent of multichannel TV there’s about 12 to 15 million people every day in the United Kingdom who watch one of the bulletins.”
As with the Proms, he points to the danger of “an air of we know best. It’s arrogant.” Next month, Tim Davie succeeds Tony Hall as the BBC’s director-general – a moment which, along with the appointment of a new BBC chairman and head of the regulator Ofcom, Stewart views as a “tipping point”.
“The acid test for Tim Davie is the degree to which he thinks the Proms,
Rule, Britannia and Land of Hope and Glory is a silly flash in the pan or whether he understands that in the public’s mind, it is yet another example of the BBC having drifted away from what it’s core audience wants.
“Many people who do not have axes to grind are scratching their heads, trying to figure out why it is that across the spectrum of leadership at the BBC, the natural reaction seems to suggest there is a kind of wokery about it.”
‘Never ever forget, it’s the news that’s the star – you’re just lucky enough to impart it’