Speaking to Emily Maitlis for RT, Steve Coogan grew up with a ‘huge antipathy’ for Margaret Thatcher. But in making his new drama about her encounters with Brian Walden, he found himself empathising with her instead
Add Brian and Maggie to your watchlist On the morning Steve Coogan and I sit down, Kemi Badenoch is railing against the “bland, soggy old sandwich” and declaring a war on lunch. Nigel Farage is posting a picture of himself on X with a “Great British sandwich” and some crisps, while Keir Starmer has upped the stakes by calling it a “British institution” and hailing the lunchtime toastie. None of this is odd. Indeed, it feels entirely appropriate. Because this is now how our politicians communicate. Today, the lengthy, forensic television interview of yore is the political equivalent of dinosaur bones in the Natural History Museum. Celebrated with the quiet awe reserved for the extinct – and then turned into TV drama. The drama of the television interview became my world last year when the 2019 Newsnight interview I did with Prince Andrew was serialised in A Very Royal Scandal and became a feature-length film in Scoop. But as 2025 begins, it feels like we aren’t done with the genre. There’s an appetite to see these moments of recent history set back in context – to flesh out the characters, to better understand them once the news cycle has stopped rolling. And this is why we are meeting. Steve Coogan and Harriet Walter have re-created the 1980s interviews for London Weekend Television between Brian Walden and Margaret Thatcher in a two-part drama called Brian and Maggie. It’s based on Rob Burley’s book Why Is This Lying B*****d Lying to Me? about the potential the longform interview unlocks. It asks questions of the relationship between the protagonists. And whether in all powerful interviews there are the seeds of betrayal. Coogan plays former Labour MP Brian Walden, who becomes disillusioned with his party, or perhaps with politics, and goes over to “the other side” to become a TV interviewer. His very first encounter is with the newish leader of the opposition, one Margaret Thatcher. The drama charts the subsequent interviews between them alongside the shifts of power. “Of course I had huge antipathy towards Thatcher. I was very anti-Thatcher,” says 59-year-old Coogan – who grew up in Manchester and was ten years old when she came into power. “And the one thing that I was worried about in this drama was being too compassionate because of her legacy… and because at the end, she was definitely a victim of sexism. Whether she knew it or not. Although she probably didn’t see it like that because she didn’t want to ally herself with ideological feminism. “In fact, in the edit we cut something because I thought it was a bit too kind and we wanted to remind people that there was this damage. But her legacy is indisputable – that post-war consensus that she undid was tired and something needed to change, and she came along and made that change very clear. She had vision and zeal, but she lacked empathy. Now, she’d probably be diagnosed with some sort of disorder. “However, she was an outsider who didn’t come through in a classic way – she was lower middle class, as was Walden, so they felt like they weren’t part of the establishment – and what she did interested me over and above their politics. The fact that Brian Walden and Margaret Thatcher had this sort of shared experience is what fascinates me – and I find her more interesting because of that. I have a lot of empathy with that. It’s not often discussed. Politics are discussed, but not the idea of class and the perspective that gives you.” Coogan believes class in politics continues to be a problem. “There’s still a class issue that’s never been properly resolved. You either break out of your lower middle-class mediocrity and become like the establishment to succeed, or you languish in the margins.” Thatcher was clearly not cowed by her class – or much else. In the drama she turns to Walden full beam after their first encounter and asks, with wide-eyed innocence, “Why do people fear the media?”. She famously understood its power – and relished her attempts to tame the beast. I’m curious to know if Coogan himself – who’s been so critical of the tabloid press – puts such weight behind the media. “I’m not on social media because any point of view I have creatively, whether its political or just about people or culture, I’d rather channel into whatever I do. Because I think storytelling is a better way to put your point of view across, and you can be nuanced.” It’s only half an answer. Because here we are, after all, discussing the power of the interview to change the game. Walden forces Thatcher onto uncomfortable territory – making her explain the sudden resignation of her chancellor, Nigel Lawson. He doesn’t ask the question 14 times, but it feels as if he does. There is a temerity to his persistence. Would Coogan put himself up for a longform interview if he was facing a scandal or the threat of “cancellation”? “I don’t imagine getting cancelled because, despite my brush with the tabloids 25 years ago, I don’t go out trying to explain myself, I just put it in my work. I think sometimes people get cancelled because they are clumsy in their point of view and perhaps don’t adopt all these protocols they’re supposed to adopt. I just put it in my work.” So why can’t politicians do that? Why do we think it’s important for them to go out and do the longform interview? Couldn’t they say the same – judge me by my work, my policies? It’s different, he says, when those policies control people’s lives. “If you’re a politician it’s about your personal character. But I think good work should live by itself. Caravaggio murdered a man, but we don’t look at his work now and say, ‘I can’t look at a Caravaggio painting knowing he murdered a man 400 years ago.’ If the work is good it should stand by itself.” And does the Caravaggio rule always apply, I wonder? Does he ever stop reading or stop watching someone he thinks has crossed a line? “In certain contexts, of course, but good work is good work. Annie Hall is a brilliant film. Undoubtedly a fantastic film. It will stand the test of time. But I look at Manhattan where the girl that Woody Allen is seeing is disturbingly young and it bothers me. So, it’s a bit nuanced, yes.” Coogan and I first met in an electrifying debate in the Newsnight studio in July 2011 – the day after phone hacking revelations brought about the collapse of the News of the World. He shut down a phone hacker – who was trying to justify occasional tabloid “good works” – with the immortal burn, “Yeah, and Hitler was nice to dogs”. Twelve years on, with a change of government, but no meaningful regulation of the press, is he still as angry? “The printed press has always been owned by a handful of billionaires. There was a chorus which was so distasteful at the time – ‘This is all about freedom of speech’ – but the same people were very happy with the fact that the overarching point of view of these papers they were writing for would never be at odds with the billionaire who owned their newspaper. That to me would be free speech. But this handful of individuals that could dictate the political agenda? That didn’t seem to bother them at all.” So how does he feel about the one billionaire at the top of the tree now – with the loudest voice? How has Elon Musk changed the equation? He chuckles. “I always find it amusing that James Bond films used to have one nefarious villain. We’d say, ‘Oh that’s silly, there’s no such thing as that. It’s just a sort of enjoyable fiction.’ But that’s actually what you’re looking at – there are these individuals who are more powerful, who can actually shift the world on its axis. And right now that’s probably more trouble.” He says that, first time round, he found the Trump victory “potentially quite a good thing. It meant that a non-establishment figure could corral people to upset the establishment, even though he’s an awful person. If someone came along with the charisma Donald Trump clearly had but was a good person and wanted to empower people with social mobility then they’d have a powerful effect. But there is no one on the other side who isn’t in the pocket of big business and with vested interests”. And I’m reminded what an upside-down world this is, where Donald Trump – billionaire showbiz New York property magnate – is considered anti-establishment, while the working class bloke from Surrey who grew up with a sick mum, three siblings, four dogs and manual labourer dad, is considered part of the liberal elite. Why doesn’t Keir Rodney Starmer fit the Brian Walden/Margaret Thatcher template – he’s the most ordinary man in power? “Yeeees… But to become part of the establishment you have to adopt all the protocols and all the points of view. Take this off-the-peg box of points of view and put them all on to play the part to get into politics.” I think he’s telling me that Starmer isn’t radical enough. And my sense is confirmed when I ask him how he came across his Iron Lady, Harriet Walter – mesmerising with her uncanny Thatcher inflection and facial ticks. “I met her a couple of times actually, at Extinction Rebellion events.” And he laughs. The image settling in our heads of the Brummie interlocutor and the longest serving prime minister of the 20th century colluding on non-violent roadblock resistance. And perhaps, somewhere in the recesses of the Coogan mind, there is a quiet admiration for the hand-bagged revolutionary. Just don’t ever expect him to say it out loud.
Steve Coogan on Thatcher portrayal in new drama: 'We cut something in the edit that was too kind'
Emily Maitlis speaks to Steve Coogan about his new Channel 4 drama Brian and Maggie for the latest issue of Radio Times magazine.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. On the morning Steve Coogan and I sit down, Kemi Badenoch is railing against the “bland, soggy old sandwich” and declaring a war on lunch. Nigel Farage is posting a picture of himself on X with a “Great British sandwich” and some crisps, while Keir Starmer has upped the stakes by calling it a “British institution” and hailing the lunchtime toastie. None of this is odd. Indeed, it feels entirely appropriate. Because this is now how our politicians communicate. Today, the lengthy, forensic television interview of yore is the political equivalent of dinosaur bones in the Natural History Museum. Celebrated with the quiet awe reserved for the extinct – and then turned into TV drama. The drama of the television interview became my world last year when the 2019 Newsnight interview I did with Prince Andrew was serialised in A Very Royal Scandal and became a feature-length film in Scoop. But as 2025 begins, it feels like we aren’t done with the genre. There’s an appetite to see these moments of recent history set back in context – to flesh out the characters, to better understand them once the news cycle has stopped rolling. And this is why we are meeting. Steve Coogan and Harriet Walter have re-created the 1980s interviews for London Weekend Television between Brian Walden and Margaret Thatcher in a two-part drama called Brian and Maggie. It’s based on Rob Burley’s book Why Is This Lying B*****d Lying to Me? about the potential the longform interview unlocks. It asks questions of the relationship between the protagonists. And whether in all powerful interviews there are the seeds of betrayal. Coogan plays former Labour MP Brian Walden, who becomes disillusioned with his party, or perhaps with politics, and goes over to “the other side” to become a TV interviewer. His very first encounter is with the newish leader of the opposition, one Margaret Thatcher. The drama charts the subsequent interviews between them alongside the shifts of power. “Of course I had huge antipathy towards Thatcher. I was very anti-Thatcher,” says 59-year-old Coogan – who grew up in Manchester and was 10 years old when she came into power. “And the one thing that I was worried about in this drama was being too compassionate because of her legacy… and because at the end, she was definitely a victim of sexism. Whether she knew it or not. Although she probably didn’t see it like that because she didn’t want to ally herself with ideological feminism. “In fact, in the edit we cut something because I thought it was a bit too kind and we wanted to remind people that there was this damage. But her legacy is indisputable – that post-war consensus that she undid was tired and something needed to change, and she came along and made that change very clear. She had vision and zeal, but she lacked empathy. Now, she’d probably be diagnosed with some sort of disorder. “However, she was an outsider who didn’t come through in a classic way – she was lower middle class, as was Walden, so they felt like they weren’t part of the establishment – and what she did interested me over and above their politics. The fact that Brian Walden and Margaret Thatcher had this sort of shared experience is what fascinates me – and I find her more interesting because of that. I have a lot of empathy with that. It’s not often discussed. Politics are discussed, but not the idea of class and the perspective that gives you.” Coogan believes class in politics continues to be a problem. “There’s still a class issue that’s never been properly resolved. You either break out of your lower middle-class mediocrity and become like the establishment to succeed, or you languish in the margins.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/3/2025/01/brian-and-maggie-steve-coogan-harriet-walter-881c0aa.jpg" width="1814" height="1209" alt="Steve Coogan as Brian Walden and Harriet Walter as Margaret Thatcher in Brian and Maggie. They are standing in a bare room, with two black seats in the background and cameras on either side." title="Steve Coogan as Brian Walden and Harriet Walter as Margaret Thatcher in Brian and Maggie" /> Thatcher was clearly not cowed by her class – or much else. In the drama she turns to Walden full beam after their first encounter and asks, with wide-eyed innocence, “Why do people fear the media?”. She famously understood its power – and relished her attempts to tame the beast. I’m curious to know if Coogan himself – who’s been so critical of the tabloid press – puts such weight behind the media. “I’m not on social media because any point of view I have creatively, whether it's political or just about people or culture, I’d rather channel into whatever I do. Because I think storytelling is a better way to put your point of view across, and you can be nuanced.” It’s only half an answer. Because here we are, after all, discussing the power of the interview to change the game. Walden forces Thatcher onto uncomfortable territory – making her explain the sudden resignation of her chancellor, Nigel Lawson. He doesn’t ask the question 14 times, but it feels as if he does. There is a temerity to his persistence. Would Coogan put himself up for a longform interview if he was facing a scandal or the threat of “cancellation”? “I don’t imagine getting cancelled because, despite my brush with the tabloids 25 years ago, I don’t go out trying to explain myself, I just put it in my work. I think sometimes people get cancelled because they are clumsy in their point of view and perhaps don’t adopt all these protocols they’re supposed to adopt. I just put it in my work.” View oEmbed on the source website So why can’t politicians do that? Why do we think it’s important for them to go out and do the longform interview? Couldn’t they say the same – judge me by my work, my policies? It’s different, he says, when those policies control people’s lives. “If you’re a politician it’s about your personal character. But I think good work should live by itself. Caravaggio murdered a man, but we don’t look at his work now and say, ‘I can’t look at a Caravaggio painting knowing he murdered a man 400 years ago.’ If the work is good it should stand by itself.” And does the Caravaggio rule always apply, I wonder? Does he ever stop reading or stop watching someone he thinks has crossed a line? “In certain contexts, of course, but good work is good work. Annie Hall is a brilliant film. Undoubtedly a fantastic film. It will stand the test of time. But I look at Manhattan where the girl that Woody Allen is seeing is disturbingly young and it bothers me. So, it’s a bit nuanced, yes.” Coogan and I first met in an electrifying debate in the Newsnight studio in July 2011 – the day after phone hacking revelations brought about the collapse of the News of the World. He shut down a phone hacker – who was trying to justify occasional tabloid “good works” – with the immortal burn, “Yeah, and Hitler was nice to dogs”. Twelve years on, with a change of government, but no meaningful regulation of the press, is he still as angry? “The printed press has always been owned by a handful of billionaires. There was a chorus which was so distasteful at the time – ‘This is all about freedom of speech’ – but the same people were very happy with the fact that the overarching point of view of these papers they were writing for would never be at odds with the billionaire who owned their newspaper. That to me would be free speech. But this handful of individuals that could dictate the political agenda? That didn’t seem to bother them at all.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/3/2024/10/75394-Embargo-0001-Wednesday-2nd-October-Brian-and-Margaret-First-Look-3175cf1.jpeg" width="8184" height="5459" alt="Emma Sidi as Sue Richardson, Ross Armstrong as John Wakefield, Steve Coogan as Brian Walden and Gurjeet Singh as Vinay Ahmed in Brian and Margaret. They are sat around in a newsroom office in conversation" title="Brian and Margaret" /> So how does he feel about the one billionaire at the top of the tree now – with the loudest voice? How has Elon Musk changed the equation? He chuckles. “I always find it amusing that James Bond films used to have one nefarious villain. We’d say, ‘Oh that’s silly, there’s no such thing as that. It’s just a sort of enjoyable fiction.’ But that’s actually what you’re looking at – there are these individuals who are more powerful, who can actually shift the world on its axis. And right now that’s probably more trouble.” He says that, first time round, he found the Trump victory “potentially quite a good thing. It meant that a non-establishment figure could corral people to upset the establishment, even though he’s an awful person. If someone came along with the charisma Donald Trump clearly had but was a good person and wanted to empower people with social mobility then they’d have a powerful effect. But there is no one on the other side who isn’t in the pocket of big business and with vested interests”. And I’m reminded what an upside-down world this is, where Donald Trump – billionaire showbiz New York property magnate – is considered anti-establishment, while the working class bloke from Surrey who grew up with a sick mum, three siblings, four dogs and manual labourer dad, is considered part of the liberal elite. Why doesn’t Keir Rodney Starmer fit the Brian Walden/Margaret Thatcher template – he’s the most ordinary man in power? “Yeeees… But to become part of the establishment you have to adopt all the protocols and all the points of view. Take this off-the-peg box of points of view and put them all on to play the part to get into politics.” I think he’s telling me that Starmer isn’t radical enough. And my sense is confirmed when I ask him how he came across his Iron Lady, Harriet Walter – mesmerising with her uncanny Thatcher inflection and facial ticks. “I met her a couple of times actually, at Extinction Rebellion events.” And he laughs. The image settling in our heads of the Brummie interlocutor and the longest serving prime minister of the 20th century colluding on non-violent roadblock resistance. And perhaps, somewhere in the recesses of the Coogan mind, there is a quiet admiration for the hand-bagged revolutionary. Just don’t ever expect him to say it out loud. The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Brian and Maggie premieres on Wednesday 29th January at 9pm on Channel 4. Check out more of our Drama coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
Emily Maitlis on A Very Royal Scandal and the relationship between media and monarchy
The new Prime Video drama debuts this week.
It has been almost five years since the BBC Newsnight team — class of 2019 — sat down with the Duke of York for a television interview that would rock his world and — in different ways — rock ours, too. Now, a three-part drama on Amazon Prime will take you behind-the-scenes of what was happening inside the BBC newsroom — and bring you our understanding of some of the conversations that were going on in royal circles at that time, behind the hallowed gates of Buckingham Palace. The writing is fast paced, funny and lays bare both the high-stakes tension and the low-level chaos that went into that journalistic endeavour. Michael Sheen’s superb portrayal of the journey Andrew takes is oddly moving. From gentle buffoon to social pariah — he’s a man who nevertheless instils huge loyalty and love from the women closest to him. It explores the curious relationship between the media and the monarchy — asking who needs who more — and showing what each side has to fear from a public clash that goes wrong. But this drama quietly poses another question. In the peerless hands of director Julian Jarrold and producer Josh Hyams, it looks at the power of journalism and, frankly, at its limitations too. The ability to hold to account those at the very top of our public institutions — church, crown, state — is what makes a free press thrive and a democracy healthy. But five years on, the drama asks — what has fundamentally changed for Jeffrey Epstein’s victims or for Andrew? As Ruth Wilson [playing Maitlis] notes drily: "He’s still at Sandringham for Christmas." Prince Andrew’s life has changed, of course. Stripped of royal titles, a job, and a wider sense of any public role, you could argue that everything stopped for him after the public reaction to the Newsnight interview. The duke (or perhaps his mother, Queen Elizabeth) paid undisclosed millions of pounds to settle a civil case with Virginia Giuffre, who accused him of sexually assaulting her on three occasions — opting for a payment rather than a potentially humiliating day in court. Was this a relief to Prince Andrew? Or a victory for Virginia Giuffre? Or did neither feel, ultimately, that they got justice? The dramatised interview appears at the centre of the three episodes, but it’s in the last part that we see the full impact, the fallout. While the prince is grappling with a world that has suddenly spun out of his control — where he is being over-managed by PR teams, with ever-more frustrating results — the journalists are asking themselves if they’ve achieved anything more than a “meme moment”. There is no trial, no extradition, no apology and no closure. One month after the interview aired, I was taken aside by someone close to (then) Prince Charles and told — somewhat cryptically — that "HRH was not unhappy with the interview". The comment stunned me. In the years since, I have returned to that one line so many times in my head, trying to fathom the meaning in the message. Was I being told that the man who would ascend to the throne just three years later as our king was perhaps relieved that this exchange had taken place? That he could use the opportunity to reorder the monarchy in a way that befitted these times and the public perception of what it should be? The streamlined, slimmed-down institution as we see it today certainly supports that theory. That symbiotic relationship — between media and monarchy — has rarely been reflected back so starkly. This drama puts that tension at its core. View Affiliate Playlist on the source website A Very Royal Scandal will stream on Amazon Prime Video from 19th September 2024 – try Amazon Prime Video for free for 30 days. Plus, read our guides to the best Amazon Prime series and the best movies on Amazon Prime. Check out more of our Drama coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to see what's on tonight. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
Prince Andrew went from gentle buffoon to social pariah following her interview. But as a new drama examines the aftermath, Emily Maitlis asks: is that enough?
Add A Very Royal Scandal to your watchlist. It has been almost five years since the BBC Newsnight team — class of 2019 — sat down with the Duke of York for a television interview that would rock his world and — in different ways — rock ours, too. Now, a three-part drama on Amazon Prime will take you behind the scenes of what was happening inside the BBC newsroom — and bring you our understanding of some of the conversations that were going on in royal circles at that time, behind the hallowed gates of Buckingham Palace. The writing is fast paced, funny and lays bare both the high-stakes tension and the low-level chaos that went into that journalistic endeavour. Michael Sheen’s superb portrayal of the journey Andrew takes is oddly moving. From gentle buffoon to social pariah — he’s a man who nevertheless instils huge loyalty and love from the women closest to him. It explores the curious relationship between the media and the monarchy — asking who needs who more — and showing what each side has to fear from a public clash that goes wrong. View oEmbed on the source website But this drama quietly poses another question. In the peerless hands of director Julian Jarrold and producer Josh Hyams, it looks at the power of journalism and, frankly, at its limitations too. The ability to hold to account those at the very top of our public institutions — church, crown, state — is what makes a free press thrive and a democracy healthy. But five years on, the drama asks — what has fundamentally changed for Jeffrey Epstein’s victims or for Andrew? As Ruth Wilson [playing Maitlis] notes drily: “He’s still at Sandringham for Christmas”. Prince Andrew’s life has changed, of course. Stripped of royal titles, a job, and a wider sense of any public role, you could argue that everything stopped for him after the public reaction to the Newsnight interview. The duke (or perhaps his mother, Queen Elizabeth) paid undisclosed millions of pounds to settle a civil case with Virginia Giuffre, who accused him of sexually assaulting her on three occasions — opting for a payment rather than a potentially humiliating day in court. Was this a relief to Prince Andrew? Or a victory for Virginia Giuffre? Or did neither feel, ultimately, that they got justice? The dramatised interview appears at the centre of the three episodes, but it’s in the last part that we see the full impact, the fallout. While the prince is grappling with a world that has suddenly spun out of his control — where he is being overmanaged by PR teams, with ever-more frustrating results — the journalists are asking themselves if they’ve achieved anything more than a “meme moment”. There is no trial, no extradition, no apology and no closure. One month after the interview aired, I was taken aside by someone close to (then) Prince Charles and told — somewhat cryptically — that “HRH was not unhappy with the interview”. The comment stunned me. In the years since, I have returned to that one line so many times in my head, trying to fathom the meaning in the message. Was I being told that the man who would ascend to the throne just three years later as our king was perhaps relieved that this exchange had taken place? That he could use the opportunity to reorder the monarchy in a way that befitted these times and the public perception of what it should be? The streamlined, slimmed-down institution as we see it today certainly supports that theory. That symbiotic relationship — between media and monarchy — has rarely been reflected back so starkly. This drama puts that tension at its core.
"Grenfell was a tragedy right on my doorstep": Newsnight's Emily Maitlis recalls reporting from the scene of the fire
Newsnight reporter Emily Maitlis didn’t want to report on the Grenfell fire – she dashed to the scene to help instead
It’s extraordinary to realise we are nearly one year on from Grenfell. The number of dead has been confirmed at 72. There is a still a criminal investigation, a public inquiry, there are many people still not permanently rehoused, many more with problems sleeping from the trauma they experienced that night. But this is my attempt to make sense of it from a personal perspective. It is one of the stories that has affected me most in my lifetime as a journalist and as a citizen. I have covered many tragedies in my professional life – just in the past year the Manchester and London terror attacks, before that the terror attacks in Paris, twice. I’ve been sent to America to cover numerous and appalling shootings. All are linked by the same overwhelming sense of outrage and futility. Never before, though, have I covered something on my doorstep. This felt very different. My first inkling of something strange that Wednesday morning came at around 1am. My husband was out of bed at the sound of sirens. We live about 15 minutes away, on a main road, so we are used to sirens, but these were more persistent. “There’s been a fire,” he said. And at that point, I remember my sense of relief that it wasn’t terrorism. Fires, we know, don’t really kill people. Not in London. Not in the 21st century. Channel 4 to go inside Grenfell Tower in virtual reality documentary DIY SOS reveals new project to help Grenfell Tower community RadioTimes.com newsletter: get the latest TV and entertainment news direct to your inbox By dawn, I was up running with the dog on Primrose Hill. It was only when I reached the top that I looked back and saw the heavy grey smoke in the direction I’d just come. That was when it started to sink in. I wasn’t working that day, and I remember feeling relieved. I didn’t want to cover that fire as a journalist. I felt strongly I didn’t want to be down there with a microphone and a camera, intruding on grief and confusion when things were so raw. It’s my job, unfortunately, to do that. And often I do do it. But it’s easier when you’re a stranger – when you’re operating in French, when you’re asking American police to let you cross a line – even in Manchester I had a modicum of distance. This time, I felt no distance, just a weight in my solar plexus. I ran home, called my friend and neighbour who works at the Rugby Portobello Trust, [a west London charity that helps young people], and together we clicked into “doing mode”. We started packing bin bags full of stuff – baby clothes and shoes, games for the kids, blankets and shampoos. Anything and everything we thought would be useful. We went to St Peter’s Church, on Kensington Park Road [where a terraced house can cost upwards of £6 million], which was where many locals had turned up to make donations. We arrived, unloaded and then stayed to put things into piles. Women’s stuff in one place, kids’ clothing in another. I have never unpacked so many pairs of designer jeans, never unpacked so many British Airways business-class wash bags. I understood it for what it was – a kind of raw guilt: that the borough on that morning could be so divided between those who appeared to want for nothing, and those who had lost everything. We turned nothing down. As it turned out, the business-class wash bags were very welcome. Extra toothbrushes, socks and sleep masks were probably the most useful starting pack we could have asked for. I updated those bringing donations on Twitter and my editor at Newsnight saw my tweets and realised that I was on the scene. I explained to her that I needed to stay there, as a volunteer first, but afterwards I would happily present that night’s edition of the programme from the scene at 10.30pm. To her huge credit, she agreed, and let me be for much of the day. Rugby Portobello were looking for drivers to take residents to hotels for the night. My sister was one. I was co-ordinating pick-ups and set-downs with her and the charity. Survivors were turning up, shell-shocked and looking for someone to tell them what to do, where to go. There were very few people in authority there. That day was powered by volunteers – amazing people who got their act together when no one else seemed to have a clue what to do. Just before 10pm I went down to our live programme point. The fire was still burning on the 22nd and 23rd floors. Glancing over my shoulder at the orange glare behind me, I think that was the first moment I realised the scale – that the numbers of dead would be unimaginable. View oEmbed on the source website My live report on air was unpolished, I was still in that morning’s running kit, with a coat thrown over the top – I hadn’t had time to change. There was so much I wanted to say, and I was scared of rambling. But at that point, I said it all. About the gulf between the residents who shared that neighbourhood. How the Westway sports centre, where the Beckhams’ and the Camerons’ children both played football, was now a makeshift refuge. And I spoke to a vocal campaigner from the Grenfell Action Group, furious that the concerns of residents had gone ignored for so long. They had seen this was an accident waiting to happen. They had warned it would happen. They had been ignored. Normally, on air, we are cautious not to let one speaker voice allegations we can’t prove. My job is usually to temper those voices. This time, I just couldn’t: I let her shout and tell me how negligent the authorities had been. Behind us the fire was still burning. How could I stand there and tell her she was wrong? That night, I suddenly remembered, I’d been invited to a dinner with technology entrepreneurs at Kensington Palace. It still seems extraordinary that those two moments could co-exist less than two miles apart. On any other evening it would have seemed a huge privilege and a delight. I remember feeling quietly grateful I wasn’t there that night. The next couple of days passed in a haze. My kids and I went back to one of the centres, sorting shoes, taking old football shirts. Once again there was this overpowering sense of so much undirected goodwill. Everyone wanted to help, no one quite knew how. On the Friday, momentum had gathered ahead of a march against the Government starting at Kensington Town Hall. Theresa May was to be down at the church meeting survivors. I was presenting Newsnight. At 5pm, my editor rushed in. “Theresa May is on her way here,” he said, “and you’re doing the interview.” The Prime Minister had requested a brief BBC question on the new funding allocated to survivors. Instead she got seven minutes of me trying to understand how things could have gone so wrong. Many of you will have seen the interview with Theresa May. Friends told me it was the angriest they had ever seen me. So let me say here, for the record, that actually I had enormous sympathy for Theresa May that day. She looked spent and exhausted a week after a failed election, a summer of terrorism and tragedy on this inconceivable scale. The reason I went so hard that day was because – I think – I had heard and seen the anger first hand. This was no longer an intellectual exercise. My phone was full of messages from people asking me questions that I couldn’t answer. Why had they been placed miles away from their home, why had they only been told to stay in that place for one night? Where would they go for meals? How could they access the donation fund to buy small everyday things they didn’t have? All I did was ask someone whom I hoped would have more answers than I could give. It just happened to be the Prime Minister. In the end, she couldn’t really answer them either. And I think this takes me back to where I started. The reason this tragedy hit so profoundly was because it felt so local. The reasons I had those questions at my fingertips is because people had been asking me. The tragedy taught me things about this city, and my own borough, I didn’t know. It horrified and disturbed me for many nights to come. But it also – for those of us who need silver linings – was a reminder of what happens when a community comes together. The resilience, the support, the extraordinary side of human nature that takes over when the world of those around us is rocked to the core. Sign up for the free RadioTimes.com newsletter
Piers Morgan on Trump, feminism, quitting morning TV – and his bid to become an “international treasure”
ITV's Good Morning Britain presenter speaks candidly ahead of his new series of Life Stories
Piers Morgan helps himself to a cup of tea, sits down at the kitchen table, and asks me how I am. For the next five minutes, I tell him. My week, my month, my anxieties. Then I suddenly realise what’s happened. I’m doing all the talking. And that’s wrong – because I’m meant to be asking the questions. And that is also very Piers Morgan. There’s a reason he called his interview series Life Stories – because people talk to him. “On the way here,” he says, “just a 20-minute walk, I had three taxi-drivers calling to me out of their windows. At the café, six or seven people came over to talk about Trump.” Piers Morgan’s wife surprises him on live TV with an interview of her own Home Secretary Amber Rudd tells Piers Morgan that pardoning suffragettes is “tricky” Even with more than six million followers on Twitter, he’d prefer to be thought of as the bloke you strike up a conversation with over a fry-up. They’re talking to him about Trump because of January’s Davos interview – the first, lest any of us forget, “international television interview with the US president”. It took a year to secure. He had a phone call with Donald Trump – whom he’s known for a decade – in the month after he won the 2016 election and was promised, whenever an interview finally happened, he’d be the first. View oEmbed on the source website The reaction to it, Morgan is quick to point out, has been confusing. “It may not have been a traditional, conventional hard news interview, but that wasn’t my intention. My intention was 45 minutes of prime-time. They’re different animals. And I’ve been really struck by the public reaction, universally saying, ‘I saw a different side to him.’ Not that they thought better of him, but different.” Journalistic reaction wasn’t so generous. I’m wondering what Morgan made of veteran BBC world affairs editor John Simpson weighing in on Twitter to tell him, “The art of the political interview, Piers, is to push your interviewee hard – not let them spout self-evident tosh.” “I can’t remember a momentous interview that John Simpson has ever done with anyone,” he fires back. “A perfectly good correspondent – but he was, of course, most well known for ‘liberating Kabul’, as he put it. Which was a bit of a surprise to the British armed forces who had actually liberated Kabul at the time.” Was he hurt? “It doesn’t hurt, it annoys. The dismissive pomposity of what he said, and the way he called it showbiz, when it had actually led the BBC News… It p***** me off.” To observe that Morgan relishes a fight is to say WWE wrestler The Undertaker is fond of a tussle. It’s what he does. Who he is. A fantastical, larger-than-life character who hones his verbal pugilism to land it where it hurts. Possibly because, as he would readily admit, he knows how it feels. In the interests of full disclosure, I should admit here that the man I am interrogating for the purposes of this piece is actually Piers, my friend. The kitchen table we are sitting at is mine and he’s eaten at it before, between explosive rows with my head-shaking guests. I went to his wedding; I adore his wife, Celia [journalist Celia Walden]. So right now I’m trying to remember what is public and what is private knowledge. I recall how shattered he looked when we last met, admitting Good Morning Britain, the ITV breakfast show he co-hosts, was “killing” him. So, I ask, why are you still there? I’ve heard talk of a lucrative renewed contract, but he insists it came down to a renegotiation that allows him to start work at 5.30am, rather than the 4am he’d previously been required to report. “I actually quit in the summer. I said, ‘I’m out,’ because I couldn’t do it any more. Then we came to a new arrangement, which is great. I feel completely different.” The new studio start time allows him just 25 minutes to prepare for a three-hour show: “The only reason, really, I had to go in so early was because the female stars all have to. It takes them longer [to get ready] because they get more attention and pressure on how they look, how their hair is and everything else. I’m lucky – five minutes of slap and on I go… I said, ‘Does anyone really care if I come in at 5.30 and we just have a catch-up on the phone?’ Which is what we now do.” I’m struck by how carefully he’s tiptoed round the subject of women’s appearance. Where once he would have joked about “looking fit” or not scaring the horses, now, post-Weinstein – or maybe post-sofa-instruction by his clear-headed and unafraid co-presenter, Susanna Reid – he nods to the kind of external pressure women face. He is a self-declared feminist and will talk a lot about feminism over the course of the next hour. Is that, I wonder, because he found himself so publicly on the wrong side of many women with his remarks about the Women’s March a year ago? “No,” he corrects. “The Women’s March, particularly last year, was not about feminism or women’s rights. It was about screaming abuse at Donald Trump. It was Madonna saying, ‘I’ve been dreaming of blowing up the White House’.” She was only one person of the millions who marched, I remind him. But he’s unrepentant. “I will march for gender equality if I’m asked to. I’ll do that and I’ll march for women’s rights. But I’m not going to join a march with a load of abusive girls banging on about Trump. To me that’s a self-defeating waste of time. It didn’t achieve anything – what did it achieve?” His ire in the week we meet is directed at Formula One for its decision to ban the Grid Girls, whom it suddenly declared “at odds with modern-day societal norms”. “I don’t see them [the F1 bosses] leading the charge to help suppressed women in Saudi Arabia, for example. Even though they have a race in Abu Dhabi. They bowed to PC public pressure, which is happening everywhere.” Feminism, he says, has been hijacked by radicals and become “toxic”. “The same feminists that would cry for Page Three to be banned are more than happy to defend Kim Kardashian for constantly posting lewd topless pictures to tens of millions of people and pretending it’s feminist empowerment. Their ideal is that every woman should be free to do with their body what they like – right to the point when a woman does something with her body they don’t like. Then they have to be vilified and stopped. That, to me, is hypocrisy.” Does he think the same of the Presidents Club? “Look, some people behaved very badly. But I’ve seen hen nights. Is it going to be the same when the Chippendales tour Britain? I think women who go to Chippendales events and grope the men are no better and no worse than the men at that event, but I don’t see anyone calling for the Chippendales to be banned.” As I try to get a word in edgeways between Morgan and his frothing next column, organically forming as he speaks, he turns on me. “Have you ever been to a Chippendales event?” “I have,” I say. The trouble with being from Sheffield is that I occasionally confuse whole chapters of my life with The Full Monty. I can’t swear they were vintage Chippendales. But I’ve definitely been at something paid where the men danced and took off their clothes. (And, if you watched Newsnight recently, you’ll have seen I took the opportunity of visiting the Chippendales while I was in Las Vegas!) “Right,” he nods. “So you know what goes on at them. I mean, women paw these guys all night. I can see a big issue down the line with men just getting very resentful and feeling, ‘Why is it only about male behaviour?’” How will that resentment manifest itself? “I don’t know, but I think men feel slightly uneasy, tense and intimidated by what’s going on.” His view, I point out, compelling as it sounds, ignores the politics of power: in the Presidents Club, the men had the money and the clout. At Chippendales events, the men probably earn more than the women in the audience. “Yeah I completely get that.” He pauses. “But I would also say to people that the five or six most powerful people in the country right now are women. The PM, Home Secretary, head of the Met Police. It’s not bad. I think that we’ve moved very fast in a short period of time.” Does he have moments – opinions – he regrets? He cites singer Ariana Grande, whom he criticised for returning to the US after the bombing of her Manchester concert last May. “I felt that she should have stayed and gone to visit the victims. Then I gave it some thought and I realised she’s very young, early 20s, probably completely freaked out by what happened. And I’d been a little harsh and hasty actually.” Sure enough, even a change of heart can generate a new column and more press. So now I’m wondering if the worst thing in the world for Piers Morgan is not to be talked about at all. Is that death by silence? “I don’t see how you can be a columnist and not want people to talk about you. Every columnist wants to be read as widely as possible, otherwise why would you do it?” There wouldn’t, I later muse, be many people prepared to share a cartoon picture of themselves licking the presidential posterior. He posted the caricature online to condemn BBC comedy show The Mash Report for featuring it at all. And, by doing so, ensured global pick-up. When I ask him about the insults, the endless ribbing, the criticism, he talks about it being “annoying”, “frustrating”. Nothing more. For all the time I’ve known him, I’ve never understood if it goes much deeper and he actually finds it really hurtful, as it would be to, say, me, or any normal human being. “Celia [his wife since 2010] will tell you, I just laugh at most of it. I do. Although some days you wake up and they say [on Twitter], ‘I hope you and your family all get beheaded by Isis, have a good morning’ and you’re like... what???!!” It isn’t just the daily trolls, of course. In his life he has been accused of publishing fake photos, when he edited the Daily Mirror, and crimes: insider trading, phone hacking. Lord Leveson described his testimony on that at the public inquiry as “utterly unpersuasive”. “He was talking about a very specific part of it, and I would dispute it,” Morgan corrects me. “Yeah, look, I’ve been accused of lots of things. But I’ve not been found guilty of any of them, much as people would like me to be. I actually prefer to stick to the facts. I was not found guilty of insider dealing. I’ve never hacked a phone or told anyone to hack a phone and yet, on Twitter, every single day I get 20 or 30 people saying, ‘You hacked a dead girl’s [Milly Dowler] phone.’ Everyone in the media knows that was done by another newspaper. It’s probably one of the most awful things you’d be accused of doing and every day I have to bite my lip.” What is the legacy of that, I wonder, on his soul? Is it corrosive? “It’s fine, because I wasn’t found guilty. It’s just annoying. I have a very thick skin.” I ask him how Celia would describe what she both loves and loathes about him and he quickly says: “My self-confidence. My ability to ride the storm and survive the jungle.” I genuinely don’t know for a second if that’s in the loves or loathes column. It transpires he’s talking about what she most admires. And, tellingly perhaps, he completely forgets to tell me what she doesn’t like. I text him later when I find it missing from my answers. And he tells me she hates him “licking his fingers when he reads the paper”. Morgan’s answers come – for the most part – fluently. Except when I ask which politician he admires the most. There’s a pause. Then a longer pause. Then we laugh. “It’s not easy. Leave that as a pause, yeah.” Two days later he’s back in touch to say that he’s picking Conservative MP Jacob Rees-Mogg. “I don’t agree with him on many things, but he stays true to his beliefs and articulates his opinions with a clarity missing from most of his colleagues.” It’s curious that the question has been bugging him enough to get back to me. Does he hanker, I ask, to be taken more seriously by his newspaper peers? Would he relish the opportunity to edit, say, the FT or The Times? “No, with TV, Twitter and my columns, I have a far, far more fulfilling journalistic career. It’s almost like I’m running my own newspaper and I’m the only member of staff. I love that.” He has rewritten the rules of journalism in the same way Trump has rewritten politics. You can love it or loathe it, but most people would have to admit it’s audacious. He will never, I suggest gently, be called a national treasure. He bursts out laughing. “I think you’re being a little hasty there. You’d be surprised. People would be very surprised if they walked around the streets with me. I think more people see me as a panto villain. But with that comes the possibility of morphing into an international treasure, which I’m not giving up on yet.” He’s joking. At least I think he is, and it seems the right place to wrap it up. It will take me another 24 hours to realise that he might not have been joking. And it will be another 48 hours before I reflect that maybe, just maybe, he’s right. Piers Morgan's Life Stories with Pamela Anderson is on Saturday at 9.50pm on ITV and Good Morning Britain airs Monday to Wednesday at 6am on ITV
Gordon Ramsay: I was asked to dust a soufflé with cocaine
The chef tells Emily Maitlis all about his war on drugs, his bust-up with his father-in-law and his very public feud with Jamie Oliver
“Seeds…,” Gordon Ramsay is telling me. “Seeds should be inside a f****** cage. Fed to your parrot. Or your canaries. Seeds should go inside a cage and stay inside a cage.” It is vintage Ramsay. I have unleashed a small tirade by asking the multi-Michelin-starred chef what food fads most annoy him. “And foam,” he adds, for good measure. “Foam should go in your hair. Not on a plate. In the 1990s I had a cappuccino soup with white beans, but I moved on. Foams have to be abolished.” We are sitting in the Union Street Café in south-east London, one of his 31 restaurants worldwide, drinking coffee. He takes his short and black with – almost incongruously for a man with such a finely tuned palate – an injection of artificial sweetener on the side. But it is another ice-white chemical substance we are here to discuss today: cocaine and his loathing of it. And this is where shouty chef departs and in his place I meet a man who passionately wants to spill the beans on “the hospitality industry’s dirty little secret”. He’s made a two-part documentary to expose its prevalence and its power – not least over those he has loved. He lost a head chef, David Dempsey, in 2003 in a cocaine-related death. And his brother Ronnie is a long-term heroin addict who’s now been missing for six months. But the momentum for this film came, he tells me, at Christmas last year. “A customer took a side plate from the table, went into the bathroom, snorted a couple of lines of coke and handed the plate back to the waiter and said, ‘We’ve just done some lines of coke for lunch, can you change the sideplates…’ This started the whole dilemma of how far this is going on and the pressure restaurants are up against from customers.” The diners got a ticking-off from the manager. Ramsay says if he’d been there he would have thrown them out. He was shocked about the openness of the drug use, and decided to test the loos used by public and staff of his own restaurants – including the Union Street Café where we’re talking. He found traces of cocaine in every single place he owns – bar one. Maitlis & Ramsay He tells me about the celebrity book launch where a foil wrap of cocaine was pressed into his palm during a handshake. “The chef came up to me, shook my hand and said, ‘It’s on me’. No one saw that wrap. I put it into my pocket, went to the bathroom and flushed it down the toilet. It was about two and a half grams.” [Enough for at least ten lines]. The chef came back ten minutes later and asked Ramsay if he had any left, and high-fived him when he said no. “Being tarnished with that image, you know, not only upset me but started to worry me. That’s how they think you roll with money and success. He couldn’t be further from the truth.” But it was the moment he was asked by diners to garnish his own cuisine with cocaine that things really hit home. Where once a dusting of icing sugar would suffice, now it was class A drugs. The ultimate status symbol of a bizarrely indulgent host. “I got auctioned off for a big charity dinner three years ago. Someone paid [for me] to go round to their house for a good cause… You cook for 12-14 people and literally have to stand there, do all the meet and greets and photographs. And when dessert arrived the couple came to me and said, ‘Look, everyone on the table is happy you’re here, but can you make a soufflé like never before and combine icing sugar with coke and dust it?’ "I laughed it off but there was no way I was going to go anywhere near that. I dusted the sugar on top of the soufflé and caramelised it purposely so they had no idea whether it was on or off. I set the soufflé down. Didn’t even say goodbye. I just left out the back door.” He admits he was put off drugs very early through his younger brother, Ronnie, a long-term heroin addict. He recalls the day of their father’s funeral in 1998, which they went to via the drug dealer. “The condition that Ronnie said he’d attend the funeral was that I went [to his dealer’s] and sorted out his debt, paid it off and got him a fix. But I had to sit there and watch this brown murky water being fired up with a Zippo lighter in a spoon, a rusty spoon, though a needle. So yes, pretty shitty.” So is a relationship with Ronnie possible now? “No, I can’t. No. And everyone’s panicking discreetly because no one’s heard from him for six months. Last time we heard he was in Portugal, busking.” Ramsay tells me of a situation last December. “He turned up outside the [three Michelin-starred] restaurant at Royal Hospital Road begging customers for money and we had to get the police to move him on. It was that bad.” Ramsay in Columbia He speaks with sadness but also the frustration of someone who’s tried everything and seen it fail. Ronnie, he says, has been “clean” on six occasions but always ended up back on the drug. Now his own family has to come first. The father of four teenagers was not shy about throwing the horrors of drugs before their eyes. Gordon being Gordon, it came in the form of a recipe. “I sat them down and showed them the process of not just chopping or cutting up the coke – but also the cement powder, sulphuric acid, the battery acid [that are added], and then doused in gasoline. And that scared the life out of them. Now it may be a bit cruel for a 15-year-old to see, but no disrespect, if you can start talking about contraception and sexual education at 12 then I think at 15 they need to understand.” He says he and his wife Tana – who’s Montessori-trained – have been very disciplined with them. No music festivals, at least for now, “until they’re in a smart enough group that they’re not going to be influenced and persuaded”. Does he think he’s a good dad? “You’ve got to ask them. I’m a fair dad and I’m an honest dad.” The horror of his own childhood is something he’s written of extensively: an abusive alcoholic father who beat up their mother. “In many ways that’s been a huge advantage for me, on how not to be a dad. What you’ve done and how you treated me is going to set me up to do the opposite and it can only benefit.” The Ramsay family In fact, nothing about the extended Ramsay family is uncomplicated. His father-in-law, Chris Hutcheson, has just come out of prison, where he was serving time for hacking Ramsay’s emails, the culmination of a ten-year-long bitter feud. Neither he nor his wife visited him in prison but, he tells me, there’s been a breakthrough. “Tana had lunch with him here on Friday and I’ve met him for breakfast. He did some stupid mistakes that he’s put his hand up and accepted and I’d like to think that we’ve all moved on.” I’m trying to work out how their marriage, which has had its ups and downs, survived the imprisonment of Tana’s father. Ramsay admits it wasn’t plain sailing. “Until the truth came out it was very testing for Tana and me because I think there were moments where she thought, ‘Was that Gordon or was that my dad?’ It was a hard pill for her to swallow. Knowing her father was out to destroy us as a family. But she’s had it out with him. He’s laid his cards on the table. He’s apologised to all of us and I like to think there’s a line in the sand now.” I’m about to go on and ask further questions when his publicist steps in and gently but firmly reminds me this is off-topic – we’re meant to be talking cocaine and cooking, not family bustups. Then something remarkable happens. Gordon Ramsay cuts across her and says to me, “NO, go on.” I get the sense of a man so confident he has nothing to hide that I momentarily forget what I was going to ask. “About the kids?” he prompts me. “Oh, yes,” I say, “Thanks. So will they still have a relationship with their grandfather?’ A wry smile. “Yeah, I mean they’ve got to. But if my daughters approach me in the next ten years and say, ‘Hey, Dad, my boyfriend’s a chef and I want to invest in him setting up a restaurant,” it’s going to be a very polite no. With a big capital N and a big capital O.” He’s learnt that business and family don’t mix. So how does the businessman with 31 restaurants view Brexit? Will a curb on EU migrant labour be OK for the industry? “That level of influx of multinational workers in this country has sort of confirmed how lazy as a nation we are – when individuals from across the seas are prepared to come and work twice as hard for less money. If anything, it’s a big kick up the ass for the industry, and it’s going to get back to the modern-day apprenticeship. So not only do I welcome that kind of change, but I think it’s going to put a lot more emphasis on homegrown talent, which I think we need to do.” Ramsay in Columbia Our time is running out, and I’m keen to put my mind at rest about one question. All those cuttings I’ve been reading about rows with other chefs: the Marco Pierre Whites and Jamie Olivers of this world. I don’t want to sound gullible, so I say, 'They’re all confected, aren’t they, these rows? Sort of fun publicity?' And I see a shadow fall across his face. “It was fun,” he says, but then describes how he felt Oliver crossed the line. “Jamie turned round and said [in a newspaper], ‘I’ve got five kids, he’s got four kids.’ To judge someone else’s family on the amount of kids you have, that’s… that’s…” He tails off, speechless. I have the urge to laugh at something that seems so nakedly alpha male. Until I realise why it’s hit so hard. It came after what he describes as “a shit year”. He and Tana lost a baby at five months through miscarriage, his daughter had a collapsed lung and he ruptured his own achilles. What Oliver actually said was that as both of them were parents they shouldn’t be squabbling in public, but that’s not how Ramsay read it. His hurt remains palpable, and he launches his own blistering attack on what he describes as Oliver’s hypocrisy. “It’s all very well to spout off now about sugar tax and supermarkets. None of that was spoken about when he was label-slapping with Sainsbury’s for ten years. And no disrespect, but we’re chefs, not politicians. When you breathe that stuff down the public’s throat and say, ‘I’m leaving if we have Brexit’, then, I’m sorry, the door stands open. Stand for what you say. Sadly, the only time he opens his mouth is when he’s got something to promote.” He tells me he will never talk to Oliver again until he apologises to Tana. “Boys will always fight and butt heads but Tana was mortified, I mean really mortified.’’ And Marco? “When Marco turns around and says he made me cry when I was 19, you know, he made me cry in such an amazing way. He helped shape the guy I am today because he pushed me to the absolute limit. Whether you’re an athlete, a lawyer, a journalist, when you have a mentor who’s that good, [then] yeah, I had no issues with crying because I knew what I was becoming. What he was giving me.” The figure looking back at me right now is a man who’s – broadly – exactly where he wants to be. He remains intensely workaholic – throwing extreme physical endurance in there for good measure – and a man who’s unafraid to admit that family life, even for the most loving and devoted, can be messy and awkward and complicated. For the last hour, sweary Gordon has barely been seen, and I’ve had the thoughtful, intimate reflections of a man who’s witnessed death, drugs and disaster first hand and has a lot to tell. But that, of course, is all before I dare to ask him about food fads, and yes, whisper it quietly… seeds. Interview by Emily Maitlis Gordon Ramsay on Cocaine begins on Thursday 9th October at 9pm on ITV
Emily Maitlis: A guide to election night
From the polls closing to the final results – every second counts
Newsnight’s Emily Maitlis reveals how to keep up with the action on election night 10pm The polls close and David Dimbleby will announce the results of the joint BBC/ITV/Sky exit poll. At that moment we should have a pretty good idea which seats could be changing hands. Two years ago the exit poll predicted a Conservative victory while the opinion polls got it wrong... 10.45pm Sophie Raworth is in Sunderland which is usually the first seat to declare. This time there’s competition from Newcastle — which may mean that for the first time in 20 years there will be a proper race to declare first. 1am Watch Wales. The seats along the north coast of Wales have relatively small populations, which means there are fewer votes to count so they should be quite quick. If the Conservatives are having a good night they might see an early gain in Wrexham. 1.30am Islington North — Jeremy Corbyn’s constituency and one of the quickest seats in London. It’s obviously a safe Labour seat — but we will listen to his speech. And Nick Robinson will be there with him to read the runes. 2am The first results from Scotland. Will Nicola Sturgeon and the SNP, currently with 56 of the 59 seats, complete its near clean sweep north of the border, or will the Scottish Conservatives, under Ruth Davidson, push back and mount a serious challenge? Will Labour and the Liberal Democrats, each with just one sitting MP, be in attack mode — or defence mode? We’ll start to see the picture around this time. 2.30am Bring on the key marginals! This is where the night gets interesting, so I’ll be looking out for Darlington, Tooting and Nuneaton. Nuneaton was the centre of the psephological universe last time around when it stayed with the Conservatives. If Labour fights off an attack in Darlington with a larger returned majority, they might be safer than we thought. But if this town starts to wobble, Labour could be in trouble. 3am By now Jeremy Vine’s virtual battlegrounds will be colouring up at the rate of five results per minute. Will the Liberal Democrats manage to claw their way back after the disaster that befell them in 2015? Look out for Cheltenham and Bath — their key targets. 4am John Curtice — we call him “the God of polling” — will be in his element by now. Writing notes that direct our thinking, and speaking directly to the audience about the kind of patterns he sees emerging. We’ll have a good sense by now of whether the exit poll is right! 5am Brighton Pavilion should return Caroline Lucas to power as the only Green MP, but the party is hoping this time to gain an extra seat in Bristol West. As dawn breaks we should have both results. Can the Greens double their tally this time? 5.30am Keen eyes needed on Boston and Skegness. Ukip’s leader Paul Nuttall is fighting this one and polls suggest he could have an uphill battle. But his Conservative opponent was a Remainer in one of the most Leave areas of Britain — so anything could happen here. 6am Theresa May’s seat in Maidenhead may not have drama, but it will be fascinating to see what she’s made of the night’s results nationally as she speaks at her count. 7am Huw Edwards enters the studio as David Dimbleby departs. We’ll have a good idea whether Jeremy Corbyn or Theresa May is heading for the magical winning number — but there could still be another hundred results to be declared. 12 noon We should have the last results around now. St Ives includes votes from Scilly that are flown in by helicopter so this one is a late declarer. The Prime Minister, whoever he or she is, can probably watch the last declaration from Downing Street before leaving to meet the Queen. And then I’ll be off, preparing for the night’s Newsnight on BBC2! BBC1 will air coverage of the General Election 2017 from 9.55pm on Thursday
Emily Maitlis: "Reporting on the Manchester bombing hit me so hard"
The Newsnight journalist reveals the emotional repercussions of her coverage of the bombing
It is a thankless and ultimately futile task to start comparing one terror atrocity with another. I have covered enough. Too many. In Paris, in London, in Orlando, in Charleston, in Virginia. And recently in Manchester. I know what time and where the vigil will be without asking. I can predict the moment they’ll colour up, or darken, the Eiffel Tower in solidarity. I do not say this glibly. I say this with a knot in my stomach that’s like a rock. There is a pattern: prayers and poems, hashtags and hugs – it’s the aching familiarity of it all that’s so painful. Which is why I’m struggling to understand why the bombing of the Manchester Arena hit me so hard. On the day after the bombing I reported for Newsnight from Manchester. I spoke to Ian, a tough-looking Glaswegian barman who’d made Manchester his home for 20 years. The morn ing after the attack he turned up at the blood bank for the first time in his life, and he started crying as soon as he spoke to me. He didn’t really stop for the whole interview. I talked to Colin Parry, who’d lost his 12-year-old son in an IRA attack on a shopping centre nearly 25 years ago. A boy going to look at a pair of Everton football shorts. “He didn’t even have enough money saved up to get them,” he joked. A father who’s had decades to think of the ramifications of that one tiny act, and its devastating result. “What advice would you give these parents?” I asked. “I wouldn’t,” he said. “You spend the first months just surviving. You sleep and eat and sleep and eat and nothing else is required of you until finally you think, maybe I’m now able to hold a conversation.” It devastated me to hear his raw honesty of a life reduced to that. Much has been said about the loss of such young life in Manchester. The concert will have been a rite of passage for every teenager, every kid, falling in love with music for the first time, tasting what it means to leave your hang-ups – and your parents – at the door, and enter a sublime brave new world, which is all yours. But I think it hit me particularly hard because it strikes right to the heart of what parents constantly ask themselves: am I doing the right thing? Am I getting it right? Is she too young for a phone? Or a pop concert? Should I let him catch the Tube alone or insist I come along too? Am I being paranoid or protective? Am I suffocating or sensible? A friend of mine laughs at her own ridiculous inconsistencies: “I don’t mind them bowling in one shopping arcade, but I’d never let them go to the other,” she tells me. It chimes with my responses to my own 12- and ten-year-old children: yes to the bus, no to the Tube, yes to Madrid, no to Brussels. We make seemingly random choices for our kids, the whole time. Mostly, with little repercussion. This time it was different. I have found myself imagining every conversation between mothers and those dead daughters. Did they have to beg to go? Was it a birthday surprise? Did the mums hang around the nearest coffee shop, an easy mobile phone call away from harm? The suicide bomber was too cowardly to go for anything other than the softest target. The arena was no military barracks, no government office. There will have been no confusion in his mind: he came to kill the young. This was an attack on kids just trying to grow up and parents just trying to let them – on an ordinary Monday night in Manchester.
Matt LeBlanc on Chris Evans, Jeremy Clarkson – and Joey from Friends
"I would like people to sit down and try to watch Top Gear with an unbiased mind"
Like some great big fat cosmic joke, Radio Times has invited an interviewer whose motoring adrenaline falls some way short of Postman Pat’s to interview the World Famous Presenter of Top Gear. An interviewer who describes cars by their colour, who believes McLaren is a byword for a pram not a racing team, and who keeps one foot on the brake when driving on a motorway to kill her speed. Yes dear reader, I am that person, and right now I’m caught somewhere between trauma and thrill at what is about to unfold. I’m setting my phone to record when the door opens and there – in a baseball cap, jeans and a slightly too-bright blue sweatshirt, stands Joey from Friends. Except he’s no longer Joey from Friends, he’s Jeremy from Top Gear. Except he would hate that even more. So let’s just say there stands Matt LeBlanc. He looks trim, tired, slightly wary – little does he know how little I know! “Go gently,” I say. “I want to understand your passion for cars, but treat me like I’m engine blind.” And so it begins: “Well, a car is a box you sit in that has four wheels. No, five if you count the steering wheel...” But what emerges is not – as I had expected – the riff of a man who has been unsuitably parachuted into a role, rather like the character he plays in the sitcom Episodes, but a man who lives and breathes cars. A man who is not just at home behind the steering wheel but actually underneath any of the other four. A man who enjoys playing around with “the giant three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle”, who describes the thrill of “fixing things”, and who tells me, “I’m pretty handy... I was one of those kids who took stuff apart and put it back together and got into trouble for it.” His dad, he admits, wasn’t around much, but he was a mechanic who bought him his first set of tools. “I’ve got more tools than most people,” he tells me. It’s a cracking boast and I giggle because actually I am properly impressed. I had not expected him to sound this, well, useful. Does he feel sad, I wonder, that so much of the romance has gone now, that cars are more like giant laptops – data deliverers, not purring animals? He nods in agreement. “There’s not as much fixing these days as there is just replacing. You know, it used to be, ‘You need to change the gap on the points or file this down.’ Now you need to be a computer wizard to diagnose what’s wrong.” We are here because Top Gear is back on our screens, after a pretty turbulent year. A year that began on a low note – the filming of stunts around the Cenotaph in central London that seemed dramatically to underestimate how seriously this nation takes its war dead – and then somehow got worse. Those stunts were dropped ahead of transmission, but not before an excruciating apology was issued. And with it the rumour that LeBlanc and his co-host Chris Evans didn’t much get on. Within six months, Evans had quit. Was it bad chemistry? “Um... Well, first of all for me, personally, I think with any job that I do – any part – it’s nice to have good chemistry with people. If you don’t get along with people it makes it a lot harder, especially with comedy, because it needs to have a light environment where it’s OK to try things you think are funny.” He references Friends, the all-time supportive-cast show. So what happened here? Did he not feel safe enough to make mistakes? “We got along fine. We talked, you know, about creative processes, and pitched ideas... Everything was going along smoothly and then he started... all those stories in the press came out about him and he seemed a little stressed about it all. The next thing I knew he had resigned. I didn’t know.” LeBlanc admits he got no prior warning. I was a little surprised. I was like, ‘OK, well what does that mean?’ And then I spoke to Alex [Renton, Top Gear series editor], who said we were going to continue. And I said, ‘OK!’” Last time around Evans had creative control of the show. This time, it lies with Renton (who started on the show as assistant producer back in 2006 and became series editor in 2009) – and out of the hands of its stars. LeBlanc says it makes it more collaborative than it was and endearingly admits his jokes frequently get bawled out for being rubbish. “With comedy, you kind of leave your ego at the door and go in and feel free to try stuff. Sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s [he laughs]... less than good.” The advance clips I have seen of Top Gear have the three presenters (LeBlanc, Rory Reid and Chris Harris) staging a Bond-themed baddy chase in Montenegro, with a black tie-clad “Matt LeBond” in an Aston Martin DB11. It’s sweet and hammy. Gone are the withering put-downs, and the exhausting vertigo that came with constant flirtations with offence. LeBlanc has had lots of exposure to British versus American humour from the brilliant Golden Globe-winning sitcom Episodes, which is approaching its fifth and final series. The running gag on the show is what happens when BBC-type scriptwriters meet Hollywood-type executives. LA wants to sex up and dumb down; Britain wants word play. Has LeBlanc made the leap, I ask, between American and British audiences? “American comedy tends to hit you over the head with the joke... It tends to assume the audience isn’t very well educated. British comedy assumes the audience will pick up on this.” He’s happy to play on the dislocation, though, in Top Gear. “I think there’s still a lot of fun to be had with an American and a Brit, and their different takes on things. Like Chris Harris and I get along really famously and the comedy really jumps off the screen.” I’m wondering if he’s encountered resistance from the viewing public. Changing the Top Gear line-up was akin to changing the Archers theme tune or asking the British public to start calling the Queen by her first name: there’s only so much novelty we can handle. Has he felt he’s dealing with a sacred cow – something that’s Holy and Untouchable? “Yeah, I read some things on social media like: ‘Go home Yank’, ‘You Suck’, ‘Eff you’, ‘Eff this’, ‘Eff that’. They’re like armchair quarterbacks out there. But as a production team we are interested in moving the show forward.” He’s at his most impressive and his most charming when he’s insouciant. Chris Evans placed a lot of emphasis on ratings. Does he? “I look at the ratings, but I don’t dwell on them. My job is to make the best programme I have the ability to make. Once the show is broadcast it’s out of my hands, so the old saying, ‘Don’t worry about things out of your control’ works here.” And do the ghosts of Jeremy Clarkson et al haunt him? He says he’s seen a bit of The Grand Tour (the Amazon motoring show with Clarkson, James May and Richard Hammond) and thinks it’s good, but hasn’t spoken to the man himself. “I’m not friends with Jeremy. I’ve met him once [as a guest on Top Gear when he scored the fastest Star in a Reasonably Priced Car time] but I don’t have his phone number. Not because I don’t like Jeremy, I think he’s a brilliant guy. Super crafty, great writer, very funny. But he and I are not... mates.” The Grand Tour trio He says there’s room for both shows. Top Gear is more technical, more about the cars, and he leaves the camaraderie and the banter to The Grand Tour and its gang. He reminds me that Friends didn’t have the chemistry in season one that it had in season ten. So is he prepared to give this show ten years? “I certainly don’t plan on going anywhere,” he smiles, full of charm. “I’m having a good time.” There is the echo of Joey from Friends in the line – calling to mind his “How you doin’?” catchphrase. I wonder how often he hears that... “It happens pretty much everywhere they have electricity. If they have electricity they’re watching Friends.” It’s a bold claim, but he carries it through. “It’s funny seeing little kids do it. Because Friends every year tends to be discovered by a new generation, so young kids will watch it for the first time and when they see you they can’t believe how old you are. One kid called me Joey’s dad!” And I blush as I suddenly understand my own response to him. I had done that thing: confusing clean-cut Joey with a near 50-year-old Matt. It must be tiring. Or delightful. I can’t tell. I ask him what he would hope people would say about the new series, if he could write his own reviews. “Well, it’s funny, Top Gear seems to come with all these preconceived notions and baggage because it’s been so controversial over the years. I would like people to sit down and try to watch it with an unbiased mind and just give it a chance. Is it entertaining? Even if you don’t like cars – are you entertained by it? That’s what we’re setting out to do. A little bit of escapism.” So erase what you think you know? “Yeah, possibly... but will people be able to do that? And give it a fair shot? I don’t know. Are people going to watch it with Friends in mind? I don’t know. You know people have things imprinted in their brain. It’s hard to sit down and watch it with an unbiased mind. I just don’t know if people are going to be able to do that. I hope so.” Top Gear is on Sundays at 8pm on BBC2
David Attenborough on Planet Earth II, Brexit and the future of humanity
The legendary presenter talks to Emily Maitlis about everything from Mars to Jeremy Clarkson
Perhaps I should have guessed that a man who has spent a lifetime hiding stealthily in undergrowth should be able to enter a room without anyone seeing. But the first time I’m aware that David Attenborough is behind me is when he observes, “It’s the small eyes – too close together – and the length of the nose. The rat is never going to make it.” He has found me in the middle of a conversation about what makes some animals lovable to humans and some repellent. It is, of course, his home turf. Not just the understanding of the animals themselves. But of how we – the humans – respond to them. He leads me off to a more private room to continue our chat, making his own coffee on the way. I confess to him that I’m still having dreams about a particularly vivid scene from the first episode of his new series, Planet Earth II, where a newly hatched marine iguana has to escape a medusa-like string of snakes as it runs to the sea to find food. View oEmbed on the source website It’s my first warning – spoiler alert – that not every animal in the series makes it out of there alive. And from Attenborough, it elicits a gentle rebuke to my way of thinking. “We are very, very strange that we think every child has got to survive. There are very few creatures in the world like that.” It will be a theme he develops later – he’s passionate about population control, and realistic in the part we should play in it. He looks 60, perhaps, not 90. A head full of silver hair, a playful face that crinkles easily into laughter. Maybe it’s the youthfulness of a man who can say he has spent a lifetime doing what he adores. Or maybe – my eyes wander to the stash of KitKats on the table before him – he’s fuelling his old age with the right stuff. Either way, it appears to be working. He’s taken to the skies in a hot air balloon for this series, and seems shocked when I admit I’ve never tried it. “One of the best things is that suddenly you will hear much nicer things. You hear church bells, you hear clocks strike, you hear distant conversations… there’s nothing between you and 150 feet of silence.” There is poetry even in this thrown-away prose. If I shut my eyes I can imagine his voice narrating the lift-off. I’m curious to know if he experiences what astronauts call “the blue spot effect” – looking back on the planet with a whole different understanding of our place in it. Not from there, he corrects, but he understands the phenomenon well from his travels. “You’ve got no business thinking Africa has got nothing to do with you. I mean, you can just see the whole thing – realise that you’re finite, that you’re cheek by jowl with one another, all in the same boat.” I wonder if this intrepid explorer ever thinks about another planet: does all the talk of water on Jupiter or life on Mars rouse his curiosity even further? His answer is refreshingly direct. “No… I know it’s not the right thing to say in many ways, but really I think it’s irrelevant. We’re light years away – it would probably take 150 years to get anywhere. I’m not going to spend the next 150 years hoping I’m going to land somewhere and live in a space suit.” They are the words of a man who clearly hasn’t nearly finished with this planet yet. View oEmbed on the source website Planet Earth II revisits a series first made ten years ago – the camerawork more breathtaking, the landscapes more extreme. They are films he makes with obvious joy, but also with a sense of ecological concern. The original series ended with him reminding the viewer that “We can destroy or we can cherish – the choice is ours”. Ten years on, he muses on this verbal ticking-off. “I would love not to say it at all. I would love to say, ‘Just look at that, this is your heritage, this is where you belong… isn’t it wonderful?’, instead of saying, ‘You do realise that because of CFCs [ozone-damaging carbon emissions] we are all doomed…’ No, it’s horrid to say it, but it’s also an obligation.” Does he worry, then, that the beauty is somehow too seductive, that it makes everything seem fine? Why, I ask, in this day and age, doesn’t he show the reality of fish eating plastic bags? “Er, I do,” he jumps in. “I’ve just finished a film on them. An albatross chick waiting five weeks for its parents to come back with food, and when the baby opens up its mouth and the mother regurgitates the contents every single thing that comes out is plastic. Everything. Everything.” The new series also includes an episode on cities and the wildlife that inhabits them. Is he concerned that our cities have grown too big, that we are destroying wildlife habitats through encroachment? “We are going to be on their turf and there’s nothing you or I or anybody else can do about it. Population growth is terrifying. It’s no good saying you shouldn’t be there, what are all these people going to do? It wasn’t their fault they were born.” I remind him that China has just ended its one child policy and want to know what he advocates. He says population growth is the most fundamental of the world’s problems. He is against “interfering with the basic human right, which is having children… but we should use every argument we have, and every persuasion we can get, to convince people [not to]. Why is there urban violence? Why are there these problems with immigration, why are we running short of food and polluting? Every single one of those comes down to... because there are more people.” We might, I suggest, soon have a man in charge of America who believes climate change is a Chinese hoax (I’m referring to a Twitter comment made by Donald Trump in 2012). View oEmbed on the source website Attenborough’s head is in his hands but his response is curiously phlegmatic. Or perhaps pragmatic. “Yes, I know. Well, we lived through that with earlier presidents – they’ve been equally guilty… But what alternative do we have? Do we have any control or influence over the American elections? Of course we don’t. [sotto voce] We could shoot him," he jokes. "It’s not a bad idea…” He catches my eye and giggles. Talk of Trump takes him onto populism. “There’s confusion, isn’t there, between populism and parliamentary democracy. I mean, that’s why we’re in the mess we are with Brexit, is it not?” He cites Ken Clarke’s new book in which the veteran politician states that if people were asked whether they’d like a National Gallery or a funfair they’d say a funfair. “Do we really want to live by this kind of referendum? What we mean by parliamentary democracy is surely that we find someone we respect who we think is probably wiser than we are, who is prepared to take the responsibility of pondering difficult things and then trust him – or her – to vote on our behalf.” That depends, I suggest, on us believing our politicians are wiser. He agrees. “That’s why politicians getting up and saying, ‘We’ve had enough of experts’ is so catastrophic.” He’s quoting Michael Gove from the Brexit campaign, before moving seamlessly from politics to anthropology. “I can see the arguments. I mean, I’ve said for years that I don’t think any human society is prepared to make decisions which they may not like if they’re made by people who don’t speak the same language.” It’s funny to hear Brexit portrayed as a sort of survival call from an endangered species. I should have guessed. Attenborough isn’t scared to call it xenophobia. But he recognises it as truly primordial fear. “It’s very easy, as we all know, to be very tolerant of minorities until they become majorities and you find yourself a minority. It’s easy to say [he dips into an imitation of middle-class liberalism], ‘Oh yes, these lovely people – I love the way they wear such interesting costumes…’ [he giggles]. “That’s fine until some day you find that they’re actually telling you what to do and that they’ve actually taken over the town council and what you thought was your home isn’t. I’m not supporting it, I’m saying it’s what it is.” And perhaps the rise of Trump has made him even more aware of the value of facts. He is passionate about using scientific evidence to explain climate change, and says he refuses to be drawn by people who ask him to “prove it” using things he’s seen first hand. “I know if I say, ‘I’ve seen a glacier in South Georgia, I was there ten years ago and it’s shrunk’, they will say, ‘Well, I know a place in Greenland where in fact the glacier is bigger…’ You don’t want to be lured into the question of specifics because you will lose. You have to go to science.” View oEmbed on the source website I have heard somewhere an argument that if Industrial Revolution-style economic development had started in Africa rather than Europe, then sun and wave technology would now be at the forefront, not the old fossil fuels. Does he agree? His answer knocks me sideways. “Yes, yes, absolutely. But a little voice inside says to me, ‘Why are you going on about this?’ Because it could actually happen. And then will humanity have the sense to deal with unlimited cheap power? What are they going to do? Are they going to say, ‘Whoopee, we can now level mountains! We can exterminate forests!’ I mean, it’s Prometheus stuff. Once you get infinite power, there are consequences. How are you going to use it?” I am open-mouthed with the way he’s taken a tangible commodity and made it the stuff of Greek hubris, so I have to think about it properly for the first time. He sees my confusion and continues to explain, adopting the voice of a greedy developer. “Yes, why don’t we melt the Antarctic, you know there must be stuff under there, under the glacier where you could build houses…” “So…” I attempt, “running out of power may not be such a bad thing?” “No,” he says. It falls quietly between us. Silence. I suddenly realise why David Attenborough is the giant he is. It’s not just his geographic curiosity, not just his anthropological understanding, not just his gift for narration that simultaneously calms the soul and inspires the mind. It’s that behind it all there is a deep thinker. A man who, in his own words, doesn’t aspire to “the philosophy of Buddhist Nirvana”, but who recognises the finite nature of the individual and the remarkably small part we play in something much, much larger. It’s hard, though, to reconcile this adventurer with a man who spent eight years behind a desk, as it were, in BBC management, as controller of BBC2. I’m surprised it didn’t kill him. But he insists that for a programme-maker it was “the most fantastic job you can imagine. “When I joined there was this absurd mystique that somehow there’s magic about making programmes and only the BBC knew how… as if we gave it to the nation.” He laughs at the pomposity. Well, I say, perhaps that isn’t completely over. Look at Bake Off. That was “gifted to the nation”. Was the BBC right not to renew the deal? “Oh, absolutely right! To say to them, ‘If you want another million, go ahead, we’ve got plenty more ideas where that came from.’” What about that other figure we “gifted to the nation”? Was the BBC wrong to fire Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson? “Well, yes, I regret letting Clarkson go, because it’s very good to have a voice that’s anti-establishment, or so profoundly anti-establishment.” Even though he doesn’t mind running over mice? Attenborough shrugs. And I’m reminded of how we started. The rat with the too-close together eyes and the pointy nose that no one really likes. There is a knock on the door, and his salvation comes in the form of someone offering to shoo me away. So I throw out one last thought. What, in his 91st year, are the things that bring him joy? “People,” he says simply. And his eye flashes down to the one stick of KitKat that remains uneaten on the desk in front of him. “Oh, and chocolate. It goes without question.” And I leave feeling, somehow, like I have been up in that hot air balloon – uplifted, and calmer. Life feels a bit richer, a bit bigger, a bit more exotic for having had one extraordinary hour to myself with David Attenborough. Planet Earth II is on 8pm tonight, BBC1
When Newsnight's Emily Maitlis met The Daily Show's Jon Stewart
The British presenter turned fan girl to quiz the king of US satire
He is sitting at the bar, with his back to me, ordering a coffee when I get to the north London studio. Normally, I don’t get nervous. This time I am. And it takes me a second to understand why. As I stare at the back of his head, I realise I am willing this Jon Stewart to be the one I fell in love with on The Daily Show. The one I have just flown back from an Alp in order to meet. The comedian who has managed to teach me so much about my own journalistic profession, and has done it with an almost reckless ease at his own brilliance. I do not want to find out he’s a complete muppet in real life. That his thoughts are all tightly scripted, his jokes pre-prepped. I am desperate, in other words, not to be disappointed. I order a coffee as his arrives, and he insists on paying for it with “this English money” – which he throws around with abandon like Belarusian rubles – as if he has no intention of returning here, ever. We are here to discuss the film Rosewater, his directorial debut. It has been sent to me by the PR company ahead of the release date in cinemas on Friday 8th May. And, in keeping with current practice in the industry – as a foil to piracy, they have burned my name across every single frame of the film so I can’t share it. All the subtitles now appear to end with the phrase EMILY MAITLIS – which I admit to him makes for slightly unnerving viewing. “Yes,” he deadpans – without missing a beat. “Not just your copy, everyone’s. We made sure every single version of that film has EMILY right across the screen.” And my shoulders drop with relief. It is vintage Jon Stewart. His tone. His voice. Suddenly I know it’s all going to be fine. Rosewater is the true story of Maziar Bahari (played by Gael García Bernal), an Iranian BBC and Newsweek journalist who was thrown into prison for 118 days after filming incriminating footage of the security services during the election of 2009. It was Iran’s “Green Revolution” that brought social media – especially Twitter – to the fore as a powerful tool for telling the world about repressive states and fixed ballots. So far so simple. But there’s another reason Rosewater feels so personal. Bahari had participated in a Daily Show sketch – a goofy, spoof interview in which he is asked if he’s a terrorist. Once incarcerated, this footage was shown to Bahari and fellow journalists in prison as “proof ” they had been spying for the Americans. So I am wondering, as I sit down with Stewart, on a massive stripey sofa in a completely empty room, whether the film is partially born of guilt. “Not necessarily guilt,” he tells me. “I think we became involved based on an unlikely connection. Our main concern was that we still had pieces to run and if we ran them, would that put [the imprisoned journalists] in further jeopardy? Their families made clear they wanted more publicity, not less. They wanted to speak of it.” I’m intrigued by this sense of personal responsibility. After all, I say to him, The Daily Show has always maintained that it’s comedy. It’s entertainment. It shouldn’t be tarred with the news brush. Suddenly, Rosewater seems a million miles from that. One review called it “unabashedly earnest”. A phrase I have difficulty reconciling with Stewart. “Well, it’s not so much tar with the news brush,” he corrects. “I think that’s somewhat misunderstood. When we say we’re comedians, I don’t mean that we don’t stand behind the voracity of the research. We do. What I mean is, the language of news and the language of satire are two very different things. So they have to be judged on different metrics. In other words, the tools of satire may be a bit of a bludgeon if you look at them journalistically. But we seek to come to some kind of real insight into something through juxtaposition, hyperbole. In the same way a cartoonist might say, ‘I’m a cartoonist.’ It’s not a way of deflecting responsibility for their viewpoint, but as a way of saying, ‘The tools of my trade are of a different essence from yours.’” The Daily Show, at its most brilliant, has captured moments of America’s soul since the turn of the millennium. Stewart nailed the anger of the economic crisis when he brought CNBC’s moneymouth Jim Cramer to his knees . And, eight years earlier, there was a restrained but curiously moving address to his audience after 9/11: “We’re going to start by asking you at home the question we’ve been asking everyone here in New York, and that is: ‘Are you OK?’” Viewers see him as a natural Democrat, but he can be just as merciless to those on the left. I remind him of a Daily Show moment I watched from a Washington hotel room on the eve of the mid-term elections in 2010, with Barack Obama as his guest. He asked the President if that totemic campaign slogan “Yes we can” could still be a realistic position. The President’s bathetic response was: “Yes we can, but...” It was a soundbite that perfectly encapsulated his struggle with delivering what Sarah Palin once called “that hopey changey thing”. So has Stewart been disappointed in Obama? “I know the tendency is to want to make judgements on things – George Bush was this, Obama is this – but it’s a far more nuanced picture than that. It’s not black and white. It’s why we attach the word ‘gate’ to everything. Because it’s a scandal and it involves a politician, we put ‘gate’ on it.” It’s a diplomatic answer, which perhaps conceals more than it yields. But Stewart’s own political awareness was formed by the original one – Watergate, a seismic moment for a nine-year-old that coincided with his parents’ separation. Events, he now jokes, that have been conflated by his young mind. “My father resigned at the same time as Nixon,” he recalls. “They both resigned and walked to a helicopter and did that wave.” His father’s “resignation” took the form of estrangement. Donald Leibowitz left the family home. And never saw his son perform. Those looking for an understanding of why Stewart changed his surname may find it here. There is an agonising moment between us, alone on the stripey sofa, where I am trying to understand if there was reconciliation between father and son before his dad died in 2013. It is the only time in an hour and a half’s conversation there are pauses. “You hate talking about this?” I say. “Yes... [pause] Well, I don’t know what to say... Do you mean did I forgive him? And did he understand what that meant? Is that what you mean? Because I’m not sure what reconciliation is. Do you mean did we have a Steel Magnolias moment where we hugged and cried?” Stewart denies that adult success came as the result of being an unhappy kid. “My childhood was anything but tortured – my parents split up, I didn’t live in the middle of the civil war in Sarajevo.” There is, constantly, with Stewart, the sense of a man who has to be participating rather than just observing. Growing up, he would always rather bartend at a club than go to it. “I worked in a punk club because I really liked the music. But just going there felt aimless so I thought well, s**t, I’ll just get a job here, then I can see the music and have a reason for being here.” Stewart recently announced his retirement from The Daily Show, his spiritual home for the last 16 years (his final show is on 6th August). “I’m going to have dinner on a school night with my family, who I have heard from multiple sources are lovely people.” Although he later admits to me they actually couldn’t take more than about 20 minutes of him at one sitting. I ask if he fears that aimlessness he talks of, without being the anchor of a nightly show? “It’s a luxury. I have been fortunate enough in this business to make enough money... to be able to say (adopts the voice of Skipper from Penguins of Madagascar), ‘I’ve worked far too hard for too long, and I’m going to take some time with the kids.’ I love creating, I love writing. But you may be right, without that structure, my brain can eat itself.” Before the announcement of Trevor Noah as his replacement, he tells me he’d love to see Amy Poehler in the role – the actress, comedian and pioneer of the AskHerMore! hashtag that encouraged journalists to ask red-carpet actresses more than how long it had taken to get dressed. “I just think she’s talented and has a quality that’s awfully special.” For a man who hates doing film junkets, he’s been more than generous with his time. We have discussed Isis: “I’m not a military strategist, but I think the best way to fight them is, like, to fight them.” And on the use of social media by terrorists to recruit, communicate and strike fear, he offers this analogy: “We’ve learnt how to split an atom – if you split it one way, you can derive energy that can light and heat thousands; if you split it another way, you can blow a ton of s**t up.” Stewart is engaging and fluid and thoughtful and unashamed to have a view – a novelty in my world. I am momentarily lulled, stalker-like, into believing we are having a genuine conversation. Then the production company tactfully reappears at the door and I am reminded he is simultaneously jet lagged and about to fly home. “One last question before you go?” I ask. And he shoots back, “Sagittarius!” He is someone who has pioneered an entirely new way of formatting news and comedy, satire and politics, and I’m excited by what he will do next. Right now though the answer is obvious: get some sleep. And spend the rest of those darn Belarusian rubles. Although I do hope he saves some for his next visit. Rosewater is released in UK cinemas on 8th May Read more: Jon Stewart explains decision to leave The Daily Show Who is Trevor Noah? Meet the new host of The Daily Show Why The Daily Show's Jon Stewart was a formidable news force