Caroline Wyatt gets candid about life with MS - and why she thinks the BBC will endure

She’s sunny and speaks with no hint of self-pity, even though she acknowledges, with almost a newsreader’s detachment, that her condition is deteriorating. “I am slowly getting worse and I have got to the stage where I’ve had all the drugs I’m eligible for with the NHS. The thing that I really notice now is the way my brain is changing. I can’t focus and concentrate as much… it’s like accelerated ageing.”

She also has to contend with crushing fatigue. “You wake up in the morning feeling as if you haven’t been to bed. And the older I get [she’s 58], the worse it gets.”

We last met 10 years ago in her central London flat, where she spoke for the first time about the hospital results confirming she had MS. Today, as that diagnostic anniversary approaches, we’re at the BBC’s HQ, from where she broadcasts a 30-minute version of Radio 4’s PM programme every Saturday. She laughs – as she does frequently – about the support she needs from colleagues in getting the programme on air.

“My eyesight is really quite unreliable now, so if I’m nervous or have a lot of adrenaline in my system I find it really hard to read words on a screen. I ask the team to print out a script in big letters, which these days is the equivalent of saying I’m a dinosaur, but it just makes it a lot easier.”

Today is also the day that Donald Trump is in town and the world’s broadcast media are in tow. Considering she was the BBC’s woman in Berlin not long after the reunification of East and West Germany, was Moscow correspondent at the time of Putin’s rise to power and the corporation’s first female defence correspondent covering wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, does she miss the cut and thrust of it all?

“A bit,” comes the reply, quickly followed by a story – despite self-proclaimed memory failings she’s a wonderfully detailed storyteller – of why she took her leave of the front line. It was 2014, and in northern Iraq Isis was committing a genocide of the Yazidi people. Wyatt was there as religion correspondent and reporting, as she describes it, “appalling stories of rape, murder and retribution”.

“I came home after that and decided I really can’t do that again. I think everyone has a limit and I had reached my limit of witnessing other people’s suffering. I just thought I am really pleased that I have these amazing colleagues who are going to carry on reporting wars and extreme situations, but I can’t do it any more.”

Part of it, she acknowledges, was also physical. The as-yet undiagnosed MS was taking its toll. “In those situations you need to be fit enough to get out quite quickly. But I thought if they [Isis] did come to kidnap us, or worse, I couldn’t run.”

These days she uses a walking stick to get about and admits to episodes of tripping over “because my foot doesn’t lift in the right way”. Her MS is now classified as “secondary, progressive”, so how does she manage the symptoms? “I try not to fight it and just acknowledge that I need a lot more rest and sleep. If I work on a Saturday, I try not to arrange too much on Sunday and Monday and hope that by Tuesday I can go and see friends. Pacing myself has been a massive lesson that I haven’t quite cracked yet. I still try to do too much and then I crash.”

Does she ever despair? “Yeah, of course I get down and depressed and despondent.”

What lifts her spirits? “I think friends and family… all the normal things. Being able to talk to other people who understand.” Cue more throaty laughter. “There are four of us women near where I live, all with MS. The hospital we go to got us together and we’re supposed to meet once a month, but because we’ve all got MS we cry off at least every other month!”

Her Saturday stint on PM is, she agrees, a lifeline. For all its debilitating aftermath, she still enjoys the challenge of live broadcasting, though admits she had to step back from the hour-long show on Fridays because of exhaustion. “By the end of the programme I was gripping the desk to keep focused. I feel so lucky to still be there and still working. But I don’t know how long it’s going to last, because I don’t know what’s going to happen in health terms or in BBC terms.”

Her own future health may be as uncertain as the BBC’s, but she has faith in both. “There are lots of people at my stage of the disease where the thing you need most is hope – that something’s going to come along that will halt or slow down the progression. There’s lots of research going on. I just want them to hurry up.”

And what of the BBC? Is it robust enough to withstand the body blows it’s receiving from all sides? “I think it is. I hope it is. I can see that the BBC is in the crosshairs a lot of the time – certainly on social media – but we do live in an age of partisan debate, and having something that’s available to everyone in a society that is increasingly atomised is really important.”

What’s important to Wyatt is maintaining a sense of perspective and appreciating there’s much in life still to be enjoyed. Though she rarely travels abroad now, she’s enjoying discovering unfamiliar parts of the UK.

A study of her social media feed on X reveals daily repostings of beautiful paintings. She explains: “Algorithmically, I was getting war, killing, death, doom and destruction, so to influence the algorithm I went to other stuff, and that way it feeds me beautiful pictures every morning. Going to art galleries is one of the things I’ve started doing a lot more – sitting, looking and contemplating. It’s been a revelation. Although it’s quite knackering, they’ve got really good cafés – so tea and cake at the end!” More laughter.

Her motto is simple: “Be glad, be grateful. One of the things the job taught me was how incredibly lucky we are.” There it is again, that word luck.

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