This is a longer version of the piece published by You magazine for the Mail on Sunday last month. I am as ever grateful to the You team for allowing me to run it here.
Cathy Newman is late. She texted me to say she would be late. I am waiting for her in Lantana, a breezy, friendly, noisy restaurant near London Bridge: the kind of place where young publicists think it might be fun to conduct an interview but that old interviewers with sensitive recording devices hate. When Newman arrives she is unflustered, mildly apologetic and looks a million dollars.
“Oh, God, I'm always late”, she says. “I mean, I was late today, but not very late. I'm always 10 minutes late. Always. That's like standard.” “Why?” “Because I think what you could do in that extra 10 minutes. The thing is, it’s an illusion, isn't it because obviously if I was on time, then I'd be 10 minutes earlier at the end? So it's ridiculous.”
This is quite revealing - a life led in which ten stolen minutes (let’s not go into who they are stolen from) could somehow be put to great use. It’s a very busy life.
Before she sits down I ask her to help me describe what she’s wearing because men rarely know what women’s clothes are actually called - and some of us are not great on colours. She obliges. “This is a boyfriend coat from Paul Smith, short, bright blue – almost teal.” Her blouse and trousers are “cosmic”, apparently. Her scarf, given t0 her by her mother, is from Peru and can be seen from space. Her boots are bright, maroonish (I warned you) and have very high heels. “£20 from Zara”, she says proudly.
ooBut why does she wear such high heels? Aren’t they uncomfortable and well, unfeminist? Two reasons, she tells me.
“A lot of blokes are very tall. And if you're interviewing a tall bloke and you're very short [she’s 5’ 4”] you're instantly at a disadvantage. So it's partly professional. But also it just looks elegant. I like to wear a pencil skirt and a lovely blouse and nice high heels. Just old school 40s Hollywood chic. That's what I'm aiming for.”
Her skin regime is from the same period. Her husband John had told her that Marilyn Monroe simply used baby oil before she went to bed, “so I thought I'm gonna take my cue from Marilyn”. I already know that Newman will never do injectables. I’m not an expert on Botox, and no self-respecting person would ever take advice from me, but Newman seems simply not to need it.
And what about her unmistakeable mop of blonde hair? “My hairdresser would disagree,” she says, “but there's not a lot you can do with curly hair. I did once get my hair straightened and it looked awful because I've got quite a long sort of skinny face and this straightened hair just made me look like a really hard hatchet kind of person. And I’m not.”
The ostensible reason we are meeting is that she has a new book out, her third, titled The Ladder: Life Lessons from Women Who Scaled the Heights & Dodged the Snakes. It’s based on conversations on Newman’s Times Radio show The Ladder, with height-scaling, snake-dodging women, like Angela Rayner Joan Bakewell and, er, Nicola Sturgeon. Her two previous books – Bloody Brilliant Women and It Takes Two were well-reviewed.
‘Have you read the book?” she asks me. “No”, I tell her. “This interview was set up quite quickly”. I think she is split between appreciating my honesty and disapproving of my lack of application. What I don’t say is that I have a prejudice against compendium books written by celebrities and solicited by publishers and with titles like Profiles in Courage and Against all Odds. In any case I’m here to find out about her.
I first met Cathy Newman when she was just starting out in newspapers in the mid 90s. I had just made the transition from working for the BBC and we were both employed by the increasingly cash-strapped Independent in Canary Wharf. She was not long graduated from Oxford where she read English, and she was ultra-bright, with a kind of hyper-alert quality to her. It was not an easy time for either of us. Our immediate boss was a nightmare to work for.
Newman had the job of collating a “top ten of whatever” for the News Analysis page. So, for example, if there was a business piece on tourism she had to list the top ten tourist attractions in Britain. And back then there was no Google, so, she recalls,“It would take all day to find like the top three, let alone the top 10. And then when you didn't have it, the fury of the boss was like, dumped on your shoulders like a big bucket of shit”.
“That was scarring. Also I was paid below the minimum wage. And I was living in this crappy little flat in South London, where I got followed home from the tube. It was quite a miserable time. I just thought this is my dream of national newspapers. And it's a bit shit.”
She persisted. Her next job was at the trade magazine, Media Week, where she gained expertise in the economics of broadcasting. The Independent, under new management and the editorship of Andrew Marr, brought her back as media correspondent and, “I really started to fly”. So much so that she was poached by the Financial Times.
After eight years there as media business correspondent she got call form the editor of the Sun, David Yelland. He offered to double her salary and give her her own business column. “He wrote me this letter - which I kept - saying, ‘you won't regret this move; this time next year, you will be a major star.’”
So she went to see her editor at the FT to tell him she was leaving. His response? “’What can we give you to make you stay?’ And I said, ‘Well, you know, obviously match the money and send me down to Westminster’, which is what happened.”
In the business everyone knows that if your beat is Westminster you are several times more likely to get your byline in the paper or on screen than if you do any other job. It’s what every ambitious journalist wants to do. The second thing that Newman’s career progression tells you, is that the best senior journalists in Britain thought that she had what it took.
Her transition to screen was gradual, starting with pundit spots on news analysis shows and then graduating to stand-in presenter of a Sunday morning show. The usual presenter, Alastair Stewart, took her to lunch at the Ivy and told her “remember, you are now part of a club of about 12 people – the TV presenters of Britain”.
And then Channel Four News came along. “You know,” she says, “I used to watch John Snow when I was at university in our little student kitchen, and he was kind of journalistic hero and no way, never in a million years would I have thought that I'd be in the studio presenting alongside him.”
All the time, she tells me, she was having a battle with “imposter syndrome” – that feeling that you don’t really deserve to be where you are. It’s a feeling, she says, that women suffer more from than men. It can be debilitating “but also it sort of drives you on. Because you think well, I'll work twice as hard and get twice as many stories to make sure.”
And she adds, “I'm very driven person anyway. But I think part of that drive is fearing that at some point, I'll get found out, that I'm not as good as people think I am.”
Note, however, that “anyway”. Has she always been driven? She replies, “everything, all my life has got to be perfect. I had to get top marks in everything. It had to be a clean sweep– all A’s.” Was it her parents made her that way?
“No, my parents were not pushy at all. I got up at 5.30 in the morning to do all my schoolwork so that I could then practice the violin in the evening. But that wasn't them telling me to do it. In fact they were begging me not to, you know. It’s just the way I popped out.”
Every question I ask Newman she takes on the chin. She is candid to a fault. Even to the extent of having me ask from time to time whether she really wants something she’s just said kept on the record. I have always liked her, but I am liking her more as we talk.
However we steer clear of politics because she is adamant that her own political beliefs are not up for discussion. “I am a public service broadcaster,” she explains, “so I've got to be impartial. I've got to watch my words. I've got to be careful about that kind of stuff.”
Is she competitive? “I'm very competitive”. Very competitive with other people?“Oh yes. When you're a reporter you've got to do better than the opposition every time otherwise, you're not gonna get paid. So you look at what the opposition does. All the time.”
Competition acts as an incentive, and Channel Four News’ competitor has long the BBCs Newsnight, which is now being cut back in time and budget. Newman regrets this. She thinks public service broadcasting is more necessary than ever in the age of misinformation, but the money has never been tighter. Channel Four News, she reminds me, has a contract from the channel till 2025. That’s not far away.
It's time to talk about how she does her job. When I told an old friend – a veteran journalist - that I was interviewing Newman he told me how impressed he had been by some of her almost pioneering work in holding the powerful to account. He mentioned her exposure back in February 2013 allegations of sexual harassment of women by the senior Liberal Democrat Lord Chris Rennard.
Her investigation, she tells me “took years to actually bring to earth, because the women reporting the harassment were worried that they would never be able to work in politics again - and they were incredibly brave to say ‘you know what, I am actually going to talk about this’.” She becomes animated. “And I feel proud of that work because that was before #MeToo. It was before anybody in the media was even thinking about it. And I feel that we identified a problem that then was taken up by others”.
But wasn’t just the abuse of women that Newman took on. In 2017 she also investigated allegations of physical assaults on young men and boys by a prominent Anglican and associate of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s John Smyth. The investigation took six months, and involved Newman doorstepping Smyth, who had run Christian holiday camps for school students. The church subsequently apologised saying that it had “failed terribly”. Smyth is now dead but the church’s own Inquiry into what happened has not yet been published.
“You know what?”, she says, “those men were still broken all these years later. They were teenagers when it when it happened, and they lived with that all their life, and they unburdened themselves of this terrible trauma.
I was angry, I wanted to get justice for them. And the sad thing is he died before they could get justice, which still haunts them”.
So she;s certainly committed, but is she ever nervous on screen? “I was the first few times I did it. Now I don't really get nervous, because it's, kind of routine. But if you told me tomorrow I had an interview with Vladimir Putin that would make me nervous, because there's a lot of work involved in doing that. Not to mention whether he's going to slip polonium into your drink. But I prepare very hard for my interviews and the more I prepare the less nervous I get.”
And she adds, “I do all my own research”. At which point an alarm bell goes off in my head. I’ve presented quite a few radio and TV shows over the years, from books programmes to news analysis, and I have never done all my own research. I’ve always had help and it’s always been a team effort.
THAT interview
So we address that elephant in the room. In 2018, by which time Newman was a well-established and well respected presenter, she interviewed professor Jordan Peterson, the Canadian academic, who had just published his hugely successful book 12 Rules for Life. The encounter became notorious. Douglas Murray wrote in The Spectator that Newman, deploying her “trademark sourness” had treated the interview as “just another chance ot burnish her own social justice credentials and expose her guest as a bigot”.
Posted online by Channel 4 the unedited interview went viral receiving 6 million views. Even critics who might usually have been sympathetic to Newman felt she had got it wrong. In the words of one Guardian writer “the more Newman inaccurately paraphrased his beliefs [mostly about women and equality]and betrayed her irritation, the better Peterson came across”.
One result was a campaign of vilification aimed at Newman, including the publishing online of her address (a practice known as ‘doxxing’), horrible name-calling and even death threats. The male culture warriors were out in force and Newman, who had a stellar record in exposing stories of harassment, predating the Me Too movement, was a glorious target.
What does she feel about it six years later? “I don't really mind”, she says, “It's just like another interview to me. I did three interviews that day.” Her only worry in discussing it she adds, is that it just give another turn on the story which will result in an uptick in the abuse. And that bit rings true. But I’m not at all sure that I believe that she doesn’t really mind. So I push a bit.
As the story unfolds Newman is ultra careful, not so much to protect herself, I feel, but to protect her programme. She had three interviews to do that day, she tells me, Peterson – who she had not heard of before - had only been booked a day earlier and she had an evening to skim read his book. So when the next morning they met, “not being a Lacanian psychologist” (as Peterson is) she zeroed in on the one aspect she knew about: equal pay. So yes, it wasn’t the best interview, but you can’t win them all.
There’s possibly an irony here, or even a motivation. Shortly after the Peterson interview it was revealed that ITN (which makes Channel 4 News) had an 18% gender pay gap. Newman was quoted as saying that this demonstrated “just how pervasive inequality is”. And her co presenter Jon Snow – the biggest name on the show – then took a 25% pay cut in an act of solidarity.
So here’s what I think happened. I think Peterson was booked by someone else with minimal warning to Newman of his burgeoning celebrity and his culture wars significance. Or indeed of his fluency (that was six years ago, since then he has become noticeably more erratic). And there was no one, researcher or producer, to tell her any different.
In the interview Newman took umbrage, given her own experience, at the apparent suggestion that women were not that hard done by and that they themselves were partly responsible for the failures of men, and so was exasperated almost from the beginning. And fatally let it show.
I put to her that she should have refused the interview. “But I never refuse”, she tells me. And I wonder whether a male presenter would have said the same. Is there anyone else she’d really like to interview. “Donald Trump” she tells me, “and I would have loved to interview the late Queen. Literally, she would only have had to open her mouth and you'd have a story. you know?” I don’t ask but I wonder what she thought when Emily Maitlis at the BBC scooped that interview with Prince Andrew.
How about fun?
But now I want to go back to her life and how she lives it. It’s well known that her husband John largely gave up his a career to look after their two daughters, Molly and Scarlett, now aged 15 and 19. And a bloody good job she thinks he’s made of it. And yes, she did “the talks” with her daughters, “but John bought the sanitary towels!” And yes of course she missed out through working so hard, but the, “having it all” was always a myth.
What about fun? “I am learning Greek,” she says, “that’s what I do for fun”. She then utters a couple of sentences which are transcribed by my AI system as “Lineker, Allah in politics. Hello. Polly disco. In May May, Polly Agha.”
It turns out that the family go to the Pelion peninsula on Greece’s east coast (inevitably described by travel guides as a “hidden gem”) three times a year. She shows me a picture of the view from a balcony over the Pagasetic Gulf and from which you can see dolphins. Outside Lantana it’s grey, she points out. “I'm dreaming of being by the sea eating nice fresh fish and you know glass of retsina - no one likes retsina except us but we love it.” I don’t tell her that to me retsina is to wine what meths is brandy.
Actually, she tells me, it’s where she’d like to live when she retires or gets the boot (“I'm under no illusions that at some point all broadcasting careers end in failure”). She has a fantasy (though with her it’ll probably happen) of writing books in the genre of The Suspicions of Mr Whicher – history and biography told through an extraordinary story.
But not any time soon. It’s a point she makes to me in the restaurant, makes again while we are walking to the tube, and for a third time in a follow-up text. “I'm 49” she says, “and I'm hoping I'll still be on telly when I'm 59 Why not? Loads of the blokes are.” And she reels off some names of men who are happily ensconced in their presenting jobs after the age of 60 and of some women who were prematurely retired. She does not intend to join them and to me, there’s absolutely no reason why she should.
Newman was so clearly ill prepared for the Peterson interview. It may have sullied her reputation for a while but it also exposed Peterson as the misogynist he so clearly is.
She goes to Pelion three times a year? That is a sign of great wisdom. (I have retired there too). Καλός ορίσες!