Kate Chisholm

Tables turned | 27 June 2019

Plus: Derek Jarman’s writing comes alive in Book of the Week

It can’t be easy to find yourself on the other end of the microphone when you’re a journalist of the calibre of Emily Maitlis. You know all the pitfalls, how easy it is to be teased out of your bunker, to say more than you ever intended under the scrutiny of an ambitious, driven interviewer with a keen nose for a story. In One to One on Radio 4, though, it was surprising to hear the ultra-cool Newsnight presenter almost in tears as she recalled covering the Manchester Arena bomb and the Grenfell fire. We could hear her voice catching, the tears welling up, her words stuttering as she tried to get her breath back.

She was being interviewed by Emma Freud, who coaxed Maitlis into giving more of herself away than we might have expected, not least by confessing at the outset that she herself had always wanted to be a news journalist but she knew she didn’t have the intellect or the self-belief to make it in that highly charged, competitive world.

As if to compensate, Maitlis began by telling us that at first she was ‘a terrible reporter’ (which seems unlikely given her unflustered poise now), leaving the mike on a bus in China and always letting the tape run out at crucial moments. How has she managed to overcome this early incompetence, bred from lack of confidence? ‘Age helps,’ she said, which sounded a bit absurd coming from someone who still looks as if she’s in her thirties (she’s actually 48).

But then the interview took another turn as Freud began to probe further by asking Maitlis what drives her, what is her mission. ‘I have a real horror of platitudes,’ she said. ‘I just want to unearth what people actually mean.’

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