Laura Kuenssberg

Laura Kuenssberg, the youngest ever - and first female - BBC political editor, and now host of the BBC's flagship political discussion programme, Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg, is Gyles's guest today. Laura tells Gyles about her fascinating family history: about her impressive great-grandmother who helped the family escape Nazi Germany in the 1930s, and about her grandfather's journey across Europe with his money hidden in a hockey stick. She talks about the work ethic she inherited from this family of determined migrants. She talks about growing up in the Glasgow, about her close-knit school friends and their love of A-Ha, and about her formative experience working on a political talkshow in Washington DC. She talks about the murder of Jo Cox and a disconcerting encounter at a party conference. Laura's new book, Pay Attention, is out now and is available here https://www.waterstones.com/book/pay-attention/laura-kuenssberg/9781472161833. Our thanks to Laura for her energy, intelligence and insight. Enjoy this, Rosebud Family! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:30Speaker 02

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• 1:14Gyles Brandreth?

  Christmas is coming. Oh, but that's so next month. Let's live in the here and now. This is Rosebud.

• 1:41Gyles Brandreth?

  Hello, I'm Gyles Brandreth. This is the Rosebud Podcast. And today we have a guest who is, well, she's a political journalist. She's an unusual political journalist. She's in the record books because she became the BBC's first female and youngest ever political editor a few years ago. She is Laura Kuenssberg and she sent me her book that she's just written. It's called Pay Attention and it's really a book about what she's learnt covering politics over the last 20 years or so. And I find it very interesting. So I wanted to talk to her about that. But I also wanted to find out who she was, what her background is, where the name Kuenssberg comes from, what is her story? Who is she?

• 2:25Gyles Brandreth?

  I mean, I know her, I admire her, I like her. What are her roots? What made Laura Kuenssberg the really recognized, distinguished and admired, respected journalist? And well, presenter that she is. So that's the idea of this particular episode of Rosebud. It's a bit different from the usual. There's more politics than usual. But I like that because believe it or not, once upon a time I was a member of parliament. So here you're going to get a mixture of family history, politics, gossip, tales of, well, going back to Lloyd George and Winston Churchill, coming forward to Tony Blair and Andy Burnham.

• 3:09Gyles Brandreth?

  Oh yes, and there's even a touch of a possible political threesome somewhere along the way. This is my kind of episode of Rosebud. Enjoy. Hear the music.

• 3:33Gyles Brandreth?

  Oh Laura.

• 3:34Speaker 04

  Oh Giles.

• 3:35Gyles Brandreth?

  This is all about firsts. Can you remember your first prime minister? The first prime minister you were aware of, and then the first prime minister you met personally?

• 3:45Speaker 04

  The first prime minister I was aware of was Margaret Thatcher. So I was born in 1976. So as a kid, as I grew up and I suppose you grow a consciousness of the world. I absolutely remember her and I remember her, I remember her voice being on the radio in the kitchen as a child when we were sitting around and having breakfast. You know, we were one of those families, we had the news on rumbling in the background. And so I remember her voice and I think I remember as a kid looking at her and thinking, wow, that hair, this enormous great halo of hair. So Mrs. Thatcher was the first prime minister I remember. And the first prime minister that I met was Tony Blair.

• 4:31Gyles Brandreth?

  And what was your first impression of Tony Blair?

• 4:33Speaker 04

  Well, I at the time was a fairly junior political reporter and producer and all of those things. I mean, he was then as he is now. I mean, somebody just incredibly polished, always taller than you think. I don't know if you think that when you see him. He is taller than he looks on the telly. Unlike quite a lot of celeb types who are often then tiny pocket people when on the, in the movies or the TV.

• 4:59Gyles Brandreth?

  Or like Keir Starmer, a little bit shorter than you expected.

• 5:02Speaker 04

  Yeah. But Tony Blair was taller, I think, than I expected and incredibly, you know, possessed of himself, possessed of his message, very smooth or incredibly sort of professional.

• 5:12Gyles Brandreth?

  People, for example, if their first president was Bill Clinton, almost everybody except one person I've met goes, wow, the, I was overwhelmed by him. I was really not like him. I was, oh, that is a reaction to Bill Clinton. Did you have a personal reaction to Tony Blair?

• 5:28Speaker 04

  He certainly has. I mean, no, I don't think it was a personal reaction because I think,

• 5:36Speaker 04

  you know, I was already working for the BBC, really girl and woman. I've only ever really worked for the BBC. I have worked briefly for other people. But I think even, you know, by then, I suppose I would have maybe done a short clip with him or something in about 2005.

• 5:52Speaker 04

  You know, by that point, you're still already kind of absolutely stapled into your head that you don't have any personal feeling about politicians, but you can have a, you know, a sort of professional feeling as he was someone with charisma, with an element of star power. And someone who definitely still does actually would come into the room with an air of power and grandeur.

• 6:13Gyles Brandreth?

  For what it's worth, to show what a different generation we come from. My first recollection of prime minister is Winston Churchill.

• 6:19Speaker 04

  Well, how amazing though.

• 6:21Gyles Brandreth?

  And my first proper encounter being just a giant.

• 6:28Gyles Brandreth?

  And making you feel, and in a sense, I think Margaret Thatcher did this, whatever your politics, making you feel that he was in his time of the country and emblematic of the country. That there was greatness here.

• 6:42Speaker 04

  But now we've had so many prime ministers in the last 10 years, will people speak about them in the same way? Like these sort of mythical heroic figures, whatever their party politics?

• 6:52Gyles Brandreth?

  You talked about Tony Blair and around Tony Blair, you had people like John Prescott, David Blunkett, George Robertson, Peter Mandelson. These were figures in their own right that were also household names and that we had views about. I don't feel that's happened in recent years. Am I right or wrong?

• 7:10Speaker 04

  I think, I think it's true that awareness of people who occupy the great offices of state has faded. Part of it's really simple. It's just because we've spun through them so quickly. And I talk about that in the, you know, in the book about just how we've been through these, all of these different prime ministers and therefore of course have been, you know, more reshuffles than shuffling a pack of cards, you know, it's been relentless. So in a way, how could you expect that they would have time to develop, you know, huge personas and the public to feel like they knew them, let alone could look up to them? But I also think something, something else has happened. It's that I think we've seen over a period of time

• 7:53Speaker 04

  that it's been a whole trail of big events that have each in their own individual way, which collide together to really dent people's respect for politics, politicians and our institutions. And, you know, quite often at the moment, people say, oh yes, well, it's all because of Brexit. It was this terrible big clash and it didn't make anybody happy and all of these things. And that's why things have gone completely bananas in the last 10 years. I think actually, and I've tried to do this in the book, is you go back to the Iraq war. Which people often forget, a majority of people polls suggested supported to start with.

• 8:36Speaker 04

  Parliament voted for it. And then we all know what happened when there were no weapons of mass destruction. So too fell away a big chunk of public trust. Then you have the expenses scandal, which we don't talk about now that much. That was not just bizarre and farcical, but also really profound to people. They've been doing what on my dime? And that was really corrosive to the public's faith, such as it was in politicians. And the financial crash too, you know, when we didn't even over a period of days, you know, know if you were necessarily going to be getting your money out of the cash machine the next day. And that's even before you then get to the sort of Herculean Brexit struggles and how people felt they were misled over immigration and all of those things.

• 9:21Speaker 04

  So, so I think this partly, politics is just so fast now in the way that modern life is so fast, that there isn't the kind of time and capacity for people to develop a connection with politicians. But I also think there's been that real hammering and lots of different ways that has taken away or eroded people's trust in politicians. And I also just wonder, and I'm wondering out loud.

• 9:52Speaker 04

  Because it'd be hard to measure this in any scientific way. But I think that politics has become so brutal and brutish. That actually, there are all sorts of really smart people in the UK who in another era might have said, yeah, I'll give it a go. And now they look at it and think, not a chance. And is there a miss, is there a missing generation?

• 10:15Gyles Brandreth?

  Well, we'll ask that question. We're going to come, I want to discover the roots of your passion for politics and maybe answer some of those questions.

• 10:22Speaker 04

  Yeah. And I've also, I have huge admiration for people who put themselves forward. I really do. I don't, I don't. And also let's, we shouldn't kid ourselves and think, oh, there was some house on days when politicians were all marvelous and they were all geniuses. And actually, if you really think about it, exceptional or, or, you know, truly towering prime ministers are the exception, right? Think of the 20th century, well, George, Thatcher, Blair, Churchill, who else would you?

• 10:48Gyles Brandreth?

  Often a war is involved as well.

• 10:51Speaker 04

  Moments of a real national emergency.

• 10:53Gyles Brandreth?

  Many people will put Clement Attlee in there, but we'll play that game in a minute. I want to get back to the roots of you. Though I should say that all those prime ministers that you talked of coming through, I've got the explanation for this.

• 11:04Speaker 04

  Go on.

• 11:04Gyles Brandreth?

  Because you remember the day the late Queen died, two days before, she was saying goodbye to Boris Johnson and hello to Liz Truss. This was deliberate policy at the time to rush through as many prime ministers as possible during her lifetime. Because otherwise Queen Victoria would have won the accolade as our sovereign with the most prime ministers. It was government policy to put Elizabeth the second in the record books. If, if only people had, that had been explained.

• 11:30Speaker 04

  If only that had been explained to people. And then that's the kind of joke that I think only someone with your impeccable connections would be entitled to make. Or else you'd be off to the terror.

• 11:38Gyles Brandreth?

  And it's interesting that you think it's a joke. I think it's actually fact. Let's get back to the beginning. You are Laura Juliet Kuenssberg.

• 11:46Speaker 04

  Yes, I am.

• 11:47Gyles Brandreth?

  Born on the eighth of August, nineteen seventy six. What is your very first memory?

• 11:55Speaker 04

  So I think my first memory is climbing out from underneath some piece of furniture or other. And cracking my head on a marble windowsill in our family's flat in Milan, where I was a toddler. Having been sent to play hide and seek with my older brother and sister, who made me hide and then didn't come and seek me. And after a while, as a two year old, I thought, well, I've had enough of this. And I came out from under whatever the furniture I was and then smashed my head. So not only abandoned, but then hurt. Now, that may be a complete hokum, but that's what I remember in my bones.

• 12:37Gyles Brandreth?

  It's not hokum for a variety of reasons. You've combined two of the most common memories. One is fear of abandonment and the other is some kind of physical trauma.

• 12:47Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 12:47Gyles Brandreth?

  So it's not unusual. I accept that as your first memory.

• 12:51Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 12:52Gyles Brandreth?

  You've got to tell us why you are in Milan, who your parents are and who these siblings are.

• 12:57Speaker 04

  So my dad, my parents were expats. My father worked for a big international textiles company for a long time. Boy, boy and man, his name is Nick. And they lived all over the world. They lived in South America. They lived in lots of different European countries. And then their last foreign posting, as it was, was in Italy. And they lived in Italy for six years, I think. And then we moved back to Scotland when I was two. So I suppose I'm from a family where, you know, being in other countries was a nor, was a normal thing. And having a worldview of the world is bigger than your own street and your own city and your own country was a normal thing. We might come on to this part of that is because my father's father was a German refugee.

• 13:41Speaker 04

  So, and I, and I think it's a great.

• 13:44Gyles Brandreth?

  Well, come on to that now. So who was your father's father?

• 13:46Speaker 04

  So my father's father was an amazing man and his mother, so this, that, I've worked on that quite a lot. So my great grandmother. So yeah, to, to cut a very long story relatively short. My great grandmother was Jewish. She'd married a Christian man and they lived in Germany.

• 14:05Gyles Brandreth?

  She married a Kuenssberg?

• 14:06Speaker 04

  Yes. And she was a Samson. And an amazing woman, academic woman, a young kind of, you know, trailblazing academic. They essentially saw what was coming. And my grandfather actually had then gone off to be a student in Austria. While he was a student in Austria, he and some other friends were helping Jewish people escape, get out. And then she essentially, the, the family essentially, one by one, my great grandmother got her kids out. Anyway, he, he was the first to leave and he came to the UK.

• 14:45Gyles Brandreth?

  Forgive me, do you know how he left?

• 14:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, he left. I mean, he left on trains and ferries and things because it was, this was before the war. So it was possible to in the nineteen thirties.

• 14:53Gyles Brandreth?

  It was if he was going away on holiday or something.

• 14:55Speaker 04

  But he left because you couldn't, it was difficult to get money out of Germany by that, by the time he left. He had a hollowed out hockey stick with money on inside.

• 15:04Gyles Brandreth?

  A hollowed out hockey stick?

• 15:05Speaker 04

  A hollowed, hollowed out hockey stick.

• 15:06Gyles Brandreth?

  He was a young sporting type. He had his hockey stick.

• 15:08Speaker 04

  And a tennis racket frame, also hollowed out. You know, those, like a press? Hollowed out so he could get money out to come to the UK and start a new life. And he arrived here. And he'd been a student, he was an academic guy, scientific sporty, you know, blue eyed, he'd ski across the Alps when skis were two and a half meters long, made of wood. You know, he was an amazing guy. He came here. Banged on the doors of lots of universities, said, I want to be a doctor, I want to study here. And by chance, Edinburgh University was the one that let him in. And so begins then a life in Scotland.

• 15:50Gyles Brandreth?

  And how did he pay for that? From money from the?

• 15:52Speaker 04

  Maybe from the hockey stick. I, I don't, I, I don't.

• 15:54Gyles Brandreth?

  But he left his mother and brothers and sisters back in Germany.

• 15:58Speaker 04

  And then one by one, they got out, but she didn't get out.

• 16:02Gyles Brandreth?

  What happened to her?

• 16:03Speaker 04

  She survived the war. She was hidden for some of it by a friend of hers.

• 16:09Gyles Brandreth?

  I mean, literally hidden in a house so that the Gestapo and the Nazis couldn't find her.

• 16:13Speaker 04

  Well, I was recently, it was a very eerie thing recently. I found in a pile of papers her ID card. With a big J on the front. She, of course, had years where she didn't see her children. And there were letters, but she survived the war and then she stayed in Germany. And she then did a lot of work for the Red Cross and tried to reunify families. And she was an amazing person. I don't remember meeting her. I know I meet, I know I did met her. Meet her and seen a family photograph where she's holding me as a baby, but I, I, I, I don't remember her at all. But then.

• 16:56Gyles Brandreth?

  She was a remarkable woman.

• 16:57Speaker 04

  She was an amazing woman, absolutely amazing woman. And I wish I'd know, I wish I'd known her, you know, I wish I'd known her. And there are, there are various kind of tributes to her and things in Germany now for the work that she did because she, she stayed after all of that, that her family had been through and the danger that she lived in.

• 17:14Gyles Brandreth?

  Do you know how it affected your grandfather, leaving his mother behind in Germany through the war?

• 17:20Speaker 04

  The impact I think it had on him, the whole thing was, he was, he was a doctor. I was incredibly committed to his work. And I think that is what the impact that it had on him is I think he felt, and I never spoke to him about it. But my sense is that he felt, and I think it's something that was passed down actually in a way to everyone in the family is a, just a massive sense of appreciation of, and in a way, a sort of debt of gratitude actually to Britain, to provide safety and opportunity. And then he gave back, to use this sort of cliched phrase, but enormously by, you know, I think working all the hours God sends.

• 18:04Gyles Brandreth?

  What was his first name?

• 18:05Speaker 04

  Ecker.

• 18:06Gyles Brandreth?

  Ecker?

• 18:06Speaker 04

  Ecker, as in Eckerhart, but yeah, Ecker Kuenssberg, yeah.

• 18:09Gyles Brandreth?

  What do you think he gave your father? What does your, what does Nick, your dad have from him?

• 18:13Speaker 04

  Massive work ethic.

• 18:15Gyles Brandreth?

  And you've got that too.

• 18:16Speaker 04

  I suppose so, yeah. And I think, I think that's probably not unusual. I mean, I, I suppose families and, you know, there are many, many families in Britain who somewhere down the line, you've got a refugee story. And.

• 18:33Speaker 04

  I think that does give you a sense of drive and of that things are worth doing and a desire to pay back and maybe a belief in service.

• 18:45Gyles Brandreth?

  What's in you that Nick has? What does Nick, since we're dealing with your father now?

• 18:50Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 18:51Gyles Brandreth?

  What's he given you, Lauren? What have you got from Nick?

• 18:54Speaker 04

  He, I suppose that, well, there's two things that, well, there's so many things I could say. He

• 19:01Speaker 04

  nearly always said yes to things. And I think I got that from him in a kind of, well, there's an opportunity. Your default is to say, yeah, sure.

• 19:11Speaker 04

  Why not? Rather than saying, oh, I don't know about that. You know, he was probably irritatingly positive. And I think some people who know me well would probably say that about me too, you know, come on, let's do it. That kind of thing, not, might be difficult.

• 19:23Gyles Brandreth?

  And how did you meet your mother?

• 19:24Speaker 04

  Oxford University. Yeah, they met in the, well, actually that's, they were both at university together in nineteen sixty one and they met, but they met in the Christmas holidays. After their first term at a fancy dress party where my mom was dressed in a sack that says gold, that said Golden Wonder nine and six or something. And she was dressed as a sack of potatoes. But a sack's not very long, is it? If you're tall with long hair and amazing legs at the age of nineteen or whatever she was. And my dad was dressed up as a co-respondent, which you might want to explain to people.

• 20:02Gyles Brandreth?

  Well, there we are, as in shoes.

• 20:04Speaker 04

  No, as in the kind.

• 20:06Gyles Brandreth?

  Oh, and illicit, oh my gosh, I will explain to people.

• 20:09Speaker 04

  Yes, because that's not from my era. That's your era, not my era.

• 20:13Gyles Brandreth?

  Era when there was divorce with blame. You had to show that there was somebody who had caused the adultery, which was going to give the judge grounds on which to say, yes, you were divorced.

• 20:24Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 20:25Gyles Brandreth?

  Who is the co-respondent? Who is the other person who has been in this case?

• 20:28Speaker 04

  Yes. So my nineteen year old, blonde haired, blue eyed father, I was dressed in his pajamas and my.

• 20:35Gyles Brandreth?

  Yes, because it ought to be explained. The co-respondent would go to a hotel room, often in Brighton, and would position himself in bed with the lady who was wanting divorce. And then they would be caught. Somebody would step out of the cupboard and would take a photograph. And that would be the co-respondent and the lady in question.

• 20:52Speaker 04

  So yes.

• 20:53Gyles Brandreth?

  You could hire these people or you could genuinely be having an affair.

• 20:56Speaker 04

  Right. So yeah, my, this was like a great gag for my nineteen.

• 20:59Gyles Brandreth?

  How marvelous. So he comes in. I'm liking these people. He comes in as a co-respondent.

• 21:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, my mom, she's dressed as a sack of potatoes.

• 21:06Gyles Brandreth?

  But you like.

• 21:07Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 21:07Gyles Brandreth?

  If I may say so.

• 21:08Speaker 04

  Basically is a mini dress, I suppose.

• 21:10Gyles Brandreth?

  I'm with them. This is the sixties.

• 21:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. But, but the early sixties, right? This was six, and I, and I think that there's a, I think there's a difference between people who came of age, and my, I talked to my mom about this years ago. Actually, I hadn't thought about this conversation for a long time, but I think there's probably a difference between people who came of age in the early sixties, who remembered the war, and then people who came of age in the late sixties. And, you know, my dad used to tell a story about rationing and because his, one of his naughty little sisters got into terrible trouble once, but because for eating

• 21:48Speaker 04

  the sugar and raisins that had been saved for a long time for a birthday cake. And he always used to tell that story, probably if we didn't want to finish our dinner or something. And he used to tell that story. But I think there's a difference between the.

• 21:59Gyles Brandreth?

  You're so, may I say so, so well observed. Beginning of the sixties and the end of the sixties, one of the big differences

• 22:04Speaker 04

  Right.

• 22:05Gyles Brandreth?

  was the advent of the pill.

• 22:06Speaker 04

  Right.

• 22:06Gyles Brandreth?

  So that people's relationships in the sixties are quite different from the end of the sixties.

• 22:11Speaker 04

  We're, we're ranging wide and far. This is great.

• 22:15Gyles Brandreth?

  But this is social history.

• 22:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, it is. It's social history.

• 22:17Gyles Brandreth?

  So how did they get on together?

• 22:19Speaker 04

  Oh, well, I think it was a, I mean, I think it was.

• 22:21Gyles Brandreth?

  Like that.

• 22:22Speaker 04

  That was like that. Yeah.

• 22:23Gyles Brandreth?

  So what, are you the first to be born?

• 22:25Speaker 04

  No, I'm the youngest.

• 22:26Gyles Brandreth?

  You're the youngest. So who are the other siblings?

• 22:28Speaker 04

  I have a, my brother's eldest and my sister is the middle. Yeah.

• 22:33Gyles Brandreth?

  How do you picture your parents together though? Give me a flavor of us, of them together. Not just, I mean, they, they were well, but give, give us an example of them at their best together.

• 22:43Speaker 04

  Oh, at their best together. They loved their whole time together. They loved Italy so much. And if I think of their best, I think, because we used to go back all the time. So we came, we moved back to the UK when I was two, but we used to go to Italy on holiday a lot. And if I think of them at their sort of best and happiest, I think of them on a lovely terrace in an Italian villa, having invited some friends and family to go and stay for a few days with them and sitting outside laughing and looking around at beautiful views and being very easy and relaxed and probably having an argument, but not, you know, an argument about

• 23:30Speaker 04

  politics or, it sounds pompous, but I suppose debate, right? And they're funny as well. Well, my mom was really funny. She's really, really funny and sharp. And her mom was very funny as well. So it was the kind of Dorothy Parker kind of, you know, sharp. Oh yeah, sharp, really sharp, really funny.

• 23:46Gyles Brandreth?

  But this is a lovely childhood to have, because these are intelligent, entertaining.

• 23:49Speaker 04

  We're so lucky.

• 23:50Gyles Brandreth?

  People.

• 23:51Speaker 04

  I mean, we had to, yeah.

• 23:53Gyles Brandreth?

  I mean, if I said to you, just to show there is some shade as well as light.

• 23:56Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 23:57Gyles Brandreth?

  The worst moment you could remember until you were thirteen at home, is there a bad moment that suddenly springs into your head?

• 24:03Speaker 04

  I was in a bus crash.

• 24:04Gyles Brandreth?

  Oh.

• 24:05Speaker 04

  That was a terrible thing that happened with my cousins. We were in a bus crash that tipped over. Also, I stole my sister's chocolate bar once.

• 24:12Gyles Brandreth?

  Tell us about the bus crash.

• 24:14Speaker 04

  I still haven't told her the truth about it.

• 24:16Gyles Brandreth?

  She's a Rosebud fan, so she's going to hear about it now. But let's deal with the bus crash first.

• 24:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, that was really bad.

• 24:22Gyles Brandreth?

  Where was that?

• 24:22Speaker 04

  I was with my cousins and we were on a Sunday school trip because my mom and dad had gone away for the weekend, I think for their wedding anniversary or something. And there was a giant gust of wind. There were kind of more than forty children on the top deck of a bus because kids all choose to go up to the top. And genuinely, it was a big gust of wind and the bus went over into a field. If it had gone the other way, it would have gone into a lane of oncoming traffic and, but it went the other way into a field. And then it was, I, I, I remember the noise actually, crack of the seats and things coming off the floor. And of course, the world turned not upside down, but on its side. So suddenly the wall was the ground and the seats were, I thought it was terrifying. And out of the back. So if you ever think, why did they have exit doors on the back window of a bus?

• 25:07Speaker 04

  It's because what happened was we walked along the wall of the bus, which was, had become the floor. And then we were bashing the window at the back and eventually a lorry driver, I remember, because we were little, we couldn't get it open. I remember being, being with my cousin and we were like hammering on the door. I'm about seven or something. It was really frightening. And me and my cousin, and we were, because we were a very tight family, we used to hang out with our cousins all the time. We actually still do some of. And, but I remember seeing a lorry driver, because obviously all the traffic stopped, a lorry driver, a man with a check shirt and a big beard. I can't picture his face, but I remember seeing this kind of giant, it looked like, coming towards, I remember seeing him wrench the door,

• 25:47Speaker 04

  which was the window at the back of the bus. And then we got out and then we were taken to Saltcoats Police Station and it was all very, very dramatic. It was terrifying. So that would be a bad thing.

• 25:56Gyles Brandreth?

  Yes. And the chocolate bar, did you end up in the police station for that?

• 25:59Speaker 04

  No.

• 25:59Gyles Brandreth?

  What happened?

• 26:00Speaker 04

  But I will do now.

• 26:01Gyles Brandreth?

  What, what did you do?

• 26:02Speaker 04

  I just took it.

• 26:03Gyles Brandreth?

  You took your sister's, well, you were the youngest, you were the golden child.

• 26:07Speaker 04

  I would never have kept a chocolate bar. So only my sister, and I, I love my sister dearly, only she would have had the self-discipline to have a crunchy.

• 26:18Gyles Brandreth?

  Oh, was it crunchy?

• 26:20Speaker 04

  I mean, imagine not just eating a crunchy. If there's a crunchy anywhere near me, I'll just eat it. But my sister had kept it. She'd kept her crunchy and she used to have this like cloth kind of hanging thing. Do you know the things I mean? Like little kind of pockets that were, yeah. And she had a crunchy in that. And I must have been about six and I went and took it and ate it. And I've never, she accused me and I denied it, probably with chocolate all around my little face.

• 26:53Speaker 05

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• 27:52Speaker 02

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• 28:34Speaker 06

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• 29:16Speaker 06

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• 29:26Gyles Brandreth?

  Who's your first friend outside the family?

• 29:29Speaker 04

  My first, well, I mean, I'm one of these people, I'm lucky, my, my old friends are kind of still my best friends, really. My first friend, my first friend is probably a woman called Lindsay, who's still my best old friend. Yeah.

• 29:44Gyles Brandreth?

  Was she at school with you?

• 29:45Speaker 04

  Yeah. So I have a group, a kind of gaggle of, a gaggle of friends, there's a group of seven of us. We call ourselves LB's finest. It's our, our very modest name on our WhatsApp group.

• 29:57Gyles Brandreth?

  LB's?

• 29:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, our school was called Laurel Bank, which is now defunct tragically.

• 30:01Gyles Brandreth?

  And Laurel Bank was a primary school, secondary school?

• 30:03Speaker 04

  It was both. Yeah, they had such a nice time.

• 30:06Gyles Brandreth?

  What was it special about the school?

• 30:08Speaker 04

  Oh, we just had such a nice time.

• 30:11Gyles Brandreth?

  Where is it?

• 30:12Speaker 04

  It's in the west end of Glasgow, so Glasgow, which is my, my, you know, the, the kind of city that's in my bones. The finest place in the land.

• 30:22Gyles Brandreth?

  Why did the Kuenssberg end up in Glasgow?

• 30:25Speaker 04

  My dad got, that was where we went back to because of my dad's work.

• 30:27Gyles Brandreth?

  Fine.

• 30:30Speaker 04

  And it was there, my parents sort of adopted home, really.

• 30:34Speaker 04

  And it was just, we just had a really nice time. You know, it was benign, it was fun, it wasn't too serious, we did kind of just, we had a, and I was just lucky, I had a great group of friends, right? So serendipity is, is, is all, isn't it, in our lives? And it's sort of the way, and I know I'm meant to be talking about this, that's how I ended up doing the job that I've done, really, was chance rather than design. And I think part of life, isn't it, is you take, things happen by accident. And the question is whether you're open to it and you say, hooray, but I was serendipitously.

• 31:05Gyles Brandreth?

  But these seven girls who still know each other? Yeah. Give me an example of how you got on. Well, give me a game that you played.

• 31:12Speaker 04

  A game?

• 31:13Gyles Brandreth?

  Or music that you listened to?

• 31:15Speaker 04

  Oh my God, well, we were all deeply in love with Aha. So do you remember Aha?

• 31:18Gyles Brandreth?

  I do remember.

• 31:19Speaker 04

  Oh my God, the first love of my life, Morten Harkett. We loved Morten Harkett. And it was the age of, I think we were nine.

• 31:26Gyles Brandreth?

  This is rather alarming, people I knew, I had to be people that you as a little girl were worshipping.

• 31:30Speaker 04

  Did you know Morten Harkett?

• 31:32Gyles Brandreth?

  Yes.

• 31:32Speaker 04

  What? Do you still know Morten Harkett?

• 31:35Gyles Brandreth?

  I'm afraid not. I wasn't very interested. But anyway, that's by the by. That tells more about me than it does about you. Go back.

• 31:41Speaker 04

  We loved Morten Harkett. We loved Morten. And I remember having the album, Hunting High and Low. I remember having the album and we would sort of just carry around the album. You know, I mean, this was a big deal. We were kind of nine or 10. And we had the album and we just sort of carry it around and look at it. And we would just sort of look at the album, like, it's just so exciting. And we loved, we loved them. I mean, we just loved them. And we enjoyed sort of loving them together, you know? And then we got to a lot, we got up to a lot of mischief as we became teenagers. Well, of course, we were all quite interested in boys and then we were quite interested in cider. And then we were quite interested in trying to get into nightclubs and quite in trying to get into bars, well, you know.

• 32:26Gyles Brandreth?

  When was your first awareness of politics? I think I was 11 when I actually became actively involved in politics. When, when did you become involved, interested in politics and what prompted that?

• 32:40Speaker 04

  Well, in a funny way, I wasn't.

• 32:43Speaker 04

  So it's all a bit of an accident, really. So I wanted, I wanted to be, I wanted to make TV, right? Because I'm nosy and I love watching TV.

• 32:51Gyles Brandreth?

  This was when you were a teenager?

• 32:52Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 32:52Gyles Brandreth?

  And what did you love watching?

• 32:54Speaker 04

  Everything. Dallas, loved Dallas. Neighbours, loved Neighbours. Liked documentaries, I liked, you know, Panorama, World in Action, loved Dallas so much.

• 33:04Gyles Brandreth?

  Did you watch with your parents, your brother and sister?

• 33:06Speaker 04

  Yeah. Neighbours was something we used to, we used to tape Neighbours and then watch it after school before it was on and they after, I mean, just nonsense. But I just loved watching TV. Watch anything, you know, you know, you put on what was on. Because there were four things to choose from. And I wanted to work, I sort of thought I might want to work in TV. And I'm very nosy. And if you put those two things together, then becoming a TV journalist is quite a good thing.

• 33:31Gyles Brandreth?

  At school, what were the subjects you were good at?

• 33:34Speaker 04

  English and history and languages. I did the school magazine, you know, that, I was one of those people. It's a bit of, yeah, sorry to be told.

• 33:42Gyles Brandreth?

  Been there, done that. Absolutely.

• 33:43Speaker 04

  But yeah, writing, speak, you know, all of that. And I, and.

• 33:46Gyles Brandreth?

  Was there a teacher who was particularly influential?

• 33:49Speaker 04

  Well, I did a history degree because our history teacher was the nicest teacher.

• 33:52Gyles Brandreth?

  And what was she or he?

• 33:54Speaker 04

  She was called Miss McFarlane and she's a lovely woman and she's still, I don't know if she listens to Rob's butt, but I know that she's still alive and well. And she was very young. Did you have a young, a teacher who was close to you in age?

• 34:04Gyles Brandreth?

  Miss Whiting, who actually was a history teacher at our school as well.

• 34:07Speaker 04

  Well, there you go. So I did a history degree because of her, really. And then the year after school.

• 34:14Gyles Brandreth?

  But what did she have, given you're giving us the kind of Gene Brody of your lifetime?

• 34:19Speaker 04

  It's my favourite book. She was fun.

• 34:26Speaker 04

  She seemed to, I think she was just, that's really nice. And she seemed to us, I think she seemed to us not like the other teachers. She was sort of more on our side somehow.

• 34:36Gyles Brandreth?

  Were you quite popular at school? Was it a girl's school or was it a boys' school?

• 34:39Speaker 04

  It was a girl's school, yeah, which is really good because if I'd been at a mixed school, I would have paid a lot less attention.

• 34:45Gyles Brandreth?

  You would have been distracted. I mean, were you distracted by boys at that time?

• 34:48Speaker 04

  Yeah. Oh, yeah. Well, it was fun. And I, you know, I suppose, yes.

• 34:52Gyles Brandreth?

  Well, I don't know, because I was one. So I don't know what the effect was, I'm afraid.

• 34:57Speaker 04

  Well, I was social, right? I'll put it that, I was social.

• 35:00Gyles Brandreth?

  Because you came from an outgoing, and you, were you funny like your mother?

• 35:04Speaker 04

  I'm not as funny as my mum. But I don't know, am I funny? Have I been funny?

• 35:09Gyles Brandreth?

  You're very funny. I think you're very funny.

• 35:12Speaker 04

  I was very social and I still am sort of very social, a very sociable person. I like going, I like being with other people. I like spending time with, and I like meeting new people. And I think, you know, I get a lot of energy from.

• 35:23Gyles Brandreth?

  Was that comfortable for you? Were you, were you at ease with that? So you're, so if I say, you know, do you remember your first crush, your first kiss, your first, it's, it's all easy. It's, you don't have any trauma. Some people go, oh God, yes, or.

• 35:37Speaker 04

  Oh, I think, I mean, you have a fair share of heartbreak and drama, of course, but I mean, that's sort of part of, you know, life's rich tapestry, isn't it?

• 35:44Gyles Brandreth?

  Taking your stride.

• 35:45Speaker 04

  Well, I mean, you know, I suppose if you're at 17 and something goes terribly wrong, whatever, but I, I, you know, I, I, I think my growing up was largely, you know, I feel I was very fortunate. And, and I think very, I think a gift that my, my, my parents gave and our growing up and being in a, having that lovely group of friends where everything was always pretty stable. And that allows you then to feel, oh, you know what, well, I can go and take on the world. And when I was 18, I went to go and live in Paris for a year after I left school.

• 36:15Gyles Brandreth?

  Wow.

• 36:15Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 36:16Gyles Brandreth?

  On your own?

• 36:16Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 36:19Speaker 04

  I remember a conversation with my parents, they said, do you think that you might kind of rather maybe go and be an au pair? Or like, you know, something that where I, I was like, no, I just really want to go and live in Paris and I want to work in a bar.

• 36:30Gyles Brandreth?

  There's the glorious gap, yeah.

• 36:31Speaker 04

  Oh, it was, it was great. And I, it was, and I was working and I felt like, you know, I felt like I was, I felt like an adult. I had a job. And then I went home and I got a job in a restaurant in Glasgow and blah, blah. And then I went to university in Edinburgh.

• 36:46Gyles Brandreth?

  And what did you read?

• 36:47Speaker 04

  I did history.

• 36:48Gyles Brandreth?

  And did that, was that transformative? Were, are there transformative years at all?

• 36:51Speaker 04

  Going to France was. And then the next year, that was a really big, really important one for me, was actually not the year, the years in Edinburgh. It was my third year, I did one of those cunning switches where I did the third year in Washington DC.

• 37:05Gyles Brandreth?

  Georgetown. I know that. Because I went to, I mean, I visited Georgetown University.

• 37:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, that was so cool.

• 37:11Gyles Brandreth?

  Georgetown is so cool.

• 37:12Speaker 04

  It's so cool.

• 37:13Gyles Brandreth?

  It's like Paris and Washington DC.

• 37:14Speaker 04

  It was wonderful. And America is, I don't know, I've always been, as a teenager, I loved like St Elmo's Fire and all those kind of films about, you know, campus life and American teenagers and young people. And then suddenly I was there, I was like in St Elmo's Fire. Yeah. But the crucial thing then, the crucial, crucial thing was I answered a little advertisement in the Hoya, which was the Georgetown campus newspaper, to be an intern on an NBC TV political programme.

• 37:45Speaker 04

  And I went and did that. And I worked on a show called McLaughlin, One on One. And John McLaughlin was a bit like the kind of Andrew Neil of the States at that particular moment.

• 37:58Speaker 04

  And that was, that was transformative. So suddenly I was in, working on a news programme about American politics. Exposed to these people, sitting in a room, taking the coffee onto the set for the conversations and the things that were going to happen between the, you know, the Democrat in one corner, the Republican the other, and the host and them all going at each other. And that was, it was like, oh, okay.

• 38:23Gyles Brandreth?

  And those anchors, those hosts were treated like demigods. I was a friend of Walter Cronkite.

• 38:31Speaker 04

  You weren't.

• 38:32Gyles Brandreth?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 38:34Speaker 04

  Did I just break the microphone?

• 38:36Gyles Brandreth?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 38:37Speaker 04

  Seriously?

• 38:38Gyles Brandreth?

  Absolutely. So I know that generation. And people won't understand the giants that these people were.

• 38:45Speaker 04

  I think that's right, yeah.

• 38:46Gyles Brandreth?

  And your man was in his own way in that school. And there was a presence about them and they were treated like demigods. And the whole thing was on a scale. So this is suddenly introducing you to this world.

• 38:57Speaker 04

  It's suddenly introducing you to that world.

• 38:59Gyles Brandreth?

  Can I say?

• 39:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. And, and, and that was just.

• 39:02Gyles Brandreth?

  Now you've had the crack cocaine of, no, but that's what it is. And you've been hooked on it ever since. Yes or no?

• 39:08Speaker 04

  Well.

• 39:10Speaker 04

  I I knew then that TV was the thing. I didn't know then that politics was the thing still. So I thought, I want to work in TV and I want to be a journalist. And because it's like, if you want to get into TV and make documentaries and things, it makes sense to be a journalist. I was not at that point, super like, oh, I'm definitely going to do politics at all. Although it was a very exciting year, it was when Clinton got caught with Lewinsky and all of that was going on. But I came back thinking, I want to work in TV. I want to work in television and I want to work in journalism somehow. But I thought I wanted to work in documentaries. And then I came back and I'd done student radio and all of those kinds of things, which were great fun. Um, and then I came back, I got a job at uh Live TV. Do you remember that cable TV station?

• 39:54Speaker 04

  Uh, while I was a student, I worked there. And then I did my last year of university and I just started applying for everything that goes.

• 40:02Gyles Brandreth?

  But this explains everything to me. Because you had no, your role models you discovered when you were in DC.

• 40:10Gyles Brandreth?

  And the way of doing it, and I can I say.

• 40:11Speaker 04

  It was like, you know, live TV is electrifying, right?

• 40:13Gyles Brandreth?

  It is, of course, but I've seen you in action. I've been lucky enough to be a guest on your Sunday morning programme. And I've seen the way you bestride the studio.

• 40:22Speaker 04

  Oh, goodness.

• 40:23Gyles Brandreth?

  Uh, no, I have. And you belong to that tradition. The authority that you give it.

• 40:29Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 40:29Gyles Brandreth?

  Which is very interesting. I now understand totally where it comes from.

• 40:34Speaker 04

  John McGloughlin, one on one.

• 40:36Gyles Brandreth?

  Absolutely, and one behaves like that. I mean, how long have you been doing this? Mostly for the, mostly being a reporter initially for the BBC, then you go away, then you come back.

• 40:45Speaker 04

  So I started, I was a BBC trainee in two thousand. But with, which does not include my time working on the Teletubbies magazine in Wood Lane, which was a formative experience, making sure that the adverts for Postman Pat were delivered on time. Um, but yeah, I was a BBC trainee from two thousand. Uh, and then I did general news and lots of different things for a few years, which I loved, loved, loved, loved.

• 41:10Gyles Brandreth?

  And how did you get to be, you were the youngest ever political?

• 41:12Speaker 04

  Yes, I was, I was the youngest ever political editor, yeah.

• 41:15Gyles Brandreth?

  And how old are you then?

• 41:16Speaker 04

  Thirty nine.

• 41:17Gyles Brandreth?

  Very good.

• 41:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's quite scary. It's funny, if I think about that now, I think, God, that's really scary.

• 41:23Gyles Brandreth?

  Were you scared at the time? Were you apprehensive?

• 41:25Speaker 04

  Uh, yes, of course, of course.

• 41:27Gyles Brandreth?

  But you didn't hesitate to say yes?

• 41:28Speaker 04

  No, of course not.

• 41:29Gyles Brandreth?

  This was the completion of your destiny?

• 41:31Speaker 04

  Well, it's not a job I'd ever thought I would end up in. I mean, I think it was not at all what, I think some people go into careers and they are like an exorcism. It's like, when I'm going to grow up, I'm going to be an astronaut. Or when I'm grow up, I'm going to be an MP. Or when I grow up, I'm going to be a political editor. That was not my plan at all. And I didn't want to cover politics until I had a boss. And I think lots of people have a kind of formative boss.

• 41:55Speaker 04

  And I had a boss who was starting a new programme with Andrew New, said, who said, I want people who haven't covered politics before. Uh, and I want them to come and work on the show and bring sort of fresh pair of eyes to Westminster. And I was like, I don't really want to cover politics. I think Westminster is full of weirdos. I wasn't necessarily wrong.

• 42:13Gyles Brandreth?

  Who was the weirdest weirdo you ever came across?

• 42:16Speaker 04

  Oh, nice try.

• 42:18Gyles Brandreth?

  Well, I'll ask the question seven times.

• 42:20Speaker 04

  My explicit job, though, initially was to cover politics and not be in Westminster. So I used to go around the country trying to find interesting and important stories that people wanted to raise, and then we would put it to MPs. And I even used to trog about with a cardboard cutout of Tony Blair and go up to people in the sort of funeral marketplace in Ashby de Loush and say, what would you like to tell Tony? Oh, so the problem with the cardboard cutout is in a British winter and in the end it gets a bit soggy. But I didn't, you know, I didn't choose to become a sort of inhabitant of Westminster. So when eventually I arrived in the lobby, you know, which is the press pack and in Westminster, I didn't know anyone. You know, some people arrived there straight out the box.

• 43:05Speaker 04

  They've been in the Oxford Union, their friends are all researchers for MPs, or they've been a special advisor or whatever. And I didn't know anyone and I didn't, and now looking back, I didn't know anything. Um, but I suppose I, you know, I worked my way up and I did various different things. And then I suppose it's about ten, about a decade or maybe 12 years after that, I I became the political editor, which.

• 43:28Gyles Brandreth?

  And what was the best and worst moment of those years?

• 43:31Speaker 04

  Hmm, the worst day, undoubtedly, and the worst day of my career was the day that Joe Cox was killed.

• 43:42Speaker 04

  It was a terrible, chilling, distressing time. And it was right at the height of the Brexit referendum, nearly at the day of the vote, when the arguments had already got very divisive, very noisy, a lot of distress on both sides. Um, also a lot of people excited by debate. It's good when people are passionate about political ideas. But the tone of that referendum, everybody listening will remember if you were in the UK at that time, was tipping into nastiness. And I'll always remember the day I was on the road. Um, we were working in Sheffield, working away and it was, you know, we're covering a campaign.

• 44:23Speaker 04

  There's a lot of trains and planes and automobiles and bad sandwiches and, you know, and takeaway coffee and late nights. And so by that point, everybody's already pretty strung out and worn out and wrung out and, and, you know, hugely lucky to be doing the job. But I'll always remember that day, my phone rang and it was the news desk saying, had I heard, because we were starting to get reports that Joe Cox, the MP who everybody kind of liked, uh, had been hurt. And had I heard and could I find out, try and find out more? And even that was such a massive shock.

• 45:03Speaker 04

  And then it was, okay, right, well, I'm going to have to get back to London because obviously this is going to be a huge story. You know, and there's that tension between being a human being and someone who knew Joe, who was a delightful person. I mean, I'm not friends with politicians, but you could see from a thousand miles off, she was a delightful person.

• 45:23Speaker 04

  So you have that tension between a human being and then also being a journalist. And then being a journalist, it's got to find out what's happened, is going to have to make a plan, go on the new, what are we going to say? What are we going to write? Write a script, do the whole thing. And so I sort of was rushing back to London as fast as I could to get there. And there was a second phone call when I was sitting on the train platform in Sheffield, waiting to find the London train and it was packed with people. Um, and the news desk phoned again and it was one of my various, very close colleagues who told me that she, she had died.

• 45:59Speaker 04

  And this, the strangest feeling I remember having, and I did start to cry, I was so shocked and sad. And, but I just remember this really curious feeling. Was that I knew that within a few hours, all of the people who were going about their business, busily in the station with bags and kids and trying to get to work or trying to get home,

• 46:27Speaker 04

  they would all in the next few hours hear this terrible news. And I, I knew it would be a huge story. I don't want to say story, but it would be a huge story. Um, but I knew and they didn't. And I remember having, it was almost like a sort of out of body experience, it was so weird.

• 46:48Gyles Brandreth?

  For you, is this a seminal moment?

• 46:52Gyles Brandreth?

  Because there'd been the tragedy of MPs being murdered before.

• 46:57Speaker 04

  There had, and of course, if you go back in time, you know, Erin Neve and other, I think,

• 47:04Speaker 04

  I think something had bubbled, probably about kind of the early twenty teens, I suppose. And then, of course, you started having a real ugliness emerging in politics. And in, in the kind of centre of politics. So you're absolutely right, it's silly to say there was never any threat or never any danger to British politicians.

• 47:31Speaker 04

  But in the set, in the, in our kind of communal debate, if you like, in our collective conversations, there were tones of nastiness and.

• 47:41Gyles Brandreth?

  And you feel this has gone on? You feel this is going with us?

• 47:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, and, and you know, it's been enabled by social media, undoubtedly. People talk to each other in a way that they just wouldn't. You now have, and I talk about this a lot in the book, about how the kinds of language that politicians use has changed, the kind, how far they might go. If you think about how politicians now talk about immigration and race, you know, when I started and arrived in Westminster, most politicians in the mainstream, we should always, you know, I'm talking about most politicians, would be so careful not to say anything that could even remotely be construed as offensive. Now, a lot of people would argue that went too far. It meant that people didn't always tell the truth, that they didn't acknowledge enough people's concerns about immigration, for example.

• 48:32Speaker 04

  But now you almost have a situation at, at, at the other end, where you see politicians really happy to have debates in a very controversial way. And if we just think about two, you know, two examples, at the moment, you've recently had.

• 48:51Speaker 04

  The very divisive debate in the Green Party about antisemitism. And of course, there are all sorts of contested positions on that, and I am not going to take a position, I'm a BBC journalist, I'm not going to take a position on that, clearly. But it's fascinating to me that that was obviously controversial, right? When we did an interview with Paulansky recently, and I talked about some of this in the book, he said, it's not controversial.

• 49:16Gyles Brandreth?

  I remember.

• 49:16Speaker 04

  So whatever you think of the subject, it is controversial. But even to say, to tell people it's not controversial is, is so far from something you might have had 20 years ago, where people have quite carefully said, of course, this is a very sensitive subject and we must all be, and by the same token, in the aftermath of the awfulness of what happened to that poor family, the Novaks, Henry Novak.

• 49:44Speaker 04

  There is a really important debate to be had about whether or not some well-meaning attempts to correct sort of historic wrongs and discrimination might have in some instances had weird consequences. There's a really interesting debate to be had about that. And politicians in all parties, including, you know, had a conversation with David Lammy about it, it was a very prominent Labour politician, sort of saying, yeah, maybe things have, in some areas, we need to look at this very carefully. But in the aftermath of that, you then have Nigel Farage writing an essay about about

• 50:22Speaker 04

  whiteness in a way that many people would find very offensive. Now, I'm not judging any, but I'm just pointing out, that's a real distance travelled from where we were in our political debate.

• 50:39Gyles Brandreth?

  What I think is fascinating about your book is you depict all this very clearly, indeed, very lucidly, but you don't offer a resolution. You are reporting on the state of play.

• 50:50Speaker 04

  I'm a reporter.

• 50:52Gyles Brandreth?

  Um, but in your head, is there an answer to this? Are we just a feel a bit depressed?

• 50:57Speaker 04

  Well, no, the first, the first thing is, and in a way, this is why I've, I mean, this is absolutely why, well, this, I've written the book to try and help people understand, right? We've had so much in the last 10 years, particularly in the last five years, people are going to throw their hands up and go, goodness me, it's all crazy, bonkers is the new normal. What I'm trying to do is say, let's dissect that, let's open it up, let's work out.

• 51:17Gyles Brandreth?

  Well, you do that very effectively.

• 51:18Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 51:19Gyles Brandreth?

  And but I'm asking you, as somebody who observes this on a daily basis, if you've come to any conclusion about where we go forward.

• 51:25Speaker 04

  The first step is to understand it, isn't it? Right? You can't hope to understand, to try and come up with solutions if you haven't really understood or paid attention, ha, ha, ha, which of course is the title of the book, to how you got here, you know, it's just that sort of diagnosis. And I suppose what I'm, maybe what I'm trying to do is challenge both citizens and all of us to take, to be conscious of it and conscious of these changes, and also for politicians to pay more attention to the public's concerns. You know, one of the things that has happened that I document is that politicians have chosen to spend a lot of time debating things

• 52:04Speaker 04

  that they are very, very interested in, that maybe don't interest most of the public. And their focus has not always been on the things that are at the top of most people's lists.

• 52:21Gyles Brandreth?

  Do you ever, when your head hits the pillow at the end of the day, worry that you haven't been as impartial as you ought to be, that you're natural, and I mean this positively, liberal with a small L instincts, the kind of way you were brought up, uh, comes over as being perceived by some people as not being as neutral as you would like?

• 52:41Speaker 04

  Well, being neutral isn't being impartial.

• 52:44Gyles Brandreth?

  No, right, but.

• 52:45Speaker 04

  So impartial is, and no, but I'm glad you've asked me about that, because impartial, so there are a lot of Ernest Holmes written about impartiality, and a lot of ink has been spilt.

• 52:54Gyles Brandreth?

  I want to ask you, if your head ever hits the pillow, and you feel, I'm just doing what you do, that was the question.

• 53:00Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 53:00Gyles Brandreth?

  And don't answer it with, with what you want to say, but answer the question. Does your head, the question is, does your head ever hit the pillow, you think, I didn't get that quite right today, and what do you do about it?

• 53:10Speaker 04

  Oh, look, certainly, I've been a reporter for 20 years during some of the most contentious periods in our history, right? Do I ever get to the end of the day and think, oh, gosh, could I have phrased that better, or could I have done that? Yeah, of course, I wouldn't be a human being if I didn't think that there were some times when I might have been able to do it better. I think there's, I mean, there's one thing I think that people don't talk enough about, which is really important, is that, you know, I have always, pretty much always, maybe not 100%, but vast, vast majority of the time, I'll be surrounded by really brilliant colleagues. And my team during those kind of really intense periods, particularly around

• 53:54Speaker 04

  Brexit, but not just around Brexit, was so tight. And I think that I'm getting, I'm getting to the point, I promise, in a newsroom, you have a constant conversation, it's a constant, constant, constant, constant conversation about, oh, to be described this like this, and what about that, and what about that? So it's a sort of collective conversation. So although if you are the political adversary, this fairy on top of the Christmas tree, of course, it's, you know, my sentences and my phrases that are the ones that are out there and that are exposed. But you're kind of always being, uh, sense-checked and challenged and argued through, and are we articulate, where are we, how are we going to pitch this? Is it, is it, you know, are

• 54:36Speaker 04

  we in the right place? And so, look, of course, we don't get everything right. And of course, there've been moments when I thought, oh, God, or even just, oh, I stumbled over that word, and that's really annoying. Um, and I put my teeth back in.

• 54:49Gyles Brandreth?

  Yeah.

• 54:49Speaker 04

  Um, but it's like, you know, it's a constant challenge, and you have to just be having that conversation all the time, all the time, all the time, all the time. Are you kind of in the right place? But I think that it's been odd to me that there's a lot of high-profile people, and I don't judge them for this, but there are a lot of high-profile people who have sort of said that impartiality is basically impossible at the BBC, and they want, because you should be able to give your view, this, that, and the other. I see it completely the other way. As a journalist, if what you're interested in is facts and insight and helping people understand the world, impartiality is like a complete, it's like, it's like a liberation. It's an insurance policy, because all you're doing is following the facts and trying to work out what's true and then explain it. That's all you're doing

• 55:33Speaker 04

  without fear or favour, whoever it is, whoever the politician is, whatever the subject is.

• 55:40Speaker 04

  And if you think about it the other way, you know, I've got friends who work for different publications and who have had stories that they want to pursue, and they've kind of been nudged away from that, or they know that they wouldn't get it into their paper or onto their website or whatever. So for, honestly, I'm, you know, glad to have the opportunity to say that. For me, impartiality is like a freedom ticket, because all I'm trying to do is find out what's true, get more facts, get more information, and then explain it to the public. So I don't think people's, oh, it's this repressive thing, and I'm so desperate to tell for the world. And I don't think that people were desperate

• 56:20Speaker 04

  to know what I think. I think, I hope that they're eager to know what I can share with them about the information that I have, right? Not what, does that, does that make sense?

• 56:30Gyles Brandreth?

  Does make sense, total sense.

• 56:31Speaker 04

  This difference between insight based on information and work, signing up my dad now, uh, and then just saying, oh, yeah, this is what I think.

• 56:42Gyles Brandreth?

  Yeah.

• 56:52Speaker 05

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• 59:03Speaker 02

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• 59:48Gyles Brandreth?

  I'm coming to my last three questions.

• 59:49Speaker 04

  Oh, no.

• 59:50Gyles Brandreth?

  It's very, no, no, no, no, they're all, they're all easy.

• 59:53Speaker 04

  Easy. Oh, good. Right.

• 59:55Gyles Brandreth?

  Well, I've, I've spent my life in two worlds because I have been a politician and also been a journalist.

• 59:59Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:00:00Gyles Brandreth?

  And I know that politicians are naturally mistrustful of journalists. Um, on the whole, with their individual exceptions, we don't like them or trust them. Is that true of journalists or politicians? Do you think? Obviously there'll be ones you like, but on the whole, are you a bit wary of them?

• 1:00:19Speaker 04

  I don't think I'd say wary. I think, look, everybody, transaction is the wrong word, but it's professional. Okay. And it's something I always say, because it's true, is I'm not friends with politicians. There are politicians who are very nice people who I get on with well. There are, the opposite is also true. But you, it's a professional thing. It's a professional arrangement, you know? They're certainly not trying to help me. Why would they? And I'm not trying to help them. I'm there for the public. I'm trying to hold them accountable. So it's a profession, you know, there's always going to be a sort of gladi- gladiatorial.

• 1:00:53Gyles Brandreth?

  Well, not always gladiatorial. What was the MP who was offering you a threesome?

• 1:00:57Speaker 04

  Oh, Lord. Well, that's, well, I'm not going to tell you.

• 1:00:59Gyles Brandreth?

  No, obviously you're not going to tell me. Uh, you don't need to tell me. I was once mistaken. Um, Esther Ransom had to call me one day to say, I'm sorry, people think it's you in the, the story about me and the affair with the MP. Cause he wore colorful clothes. They think it's you.

• 1:01:15Speaker 04

  Oh, dear. And who was it?

• 1:01:16Gyles Brandreth?

  It was Sir Nicholas Fairbairn.

• 1:01:18Speaker 04

  Oh, Nicky fit with the tartan trues.

• 1:01:20Gyles Brandreth?

  With the tartan trues.

• 1:01:21Speaker 04

  Gosh.

• 1:01:21Gyles Brandreth?

  Didn't always keep them on.

• 1:01:22Speaker 04

  Dear me. Well, that's a whole other podcast.

• 1:01:24Gyles Brandreth?

  But it is the tartan trues. But what is this story? Just unpick that for a moment.

• 1:01:29Speaker 04

  Okay. So, well, one, look, one of the things I'm trying to do in the book is explain how Westminster is a strange place and the lines between what's professional and what's personal for some people are often very blurred. And I'm explaining my position in that, in my view, it has to be different. You know, politicians and journalists are not close. And, and sometimes people look outside and think, oh, it's terrible. She's all friends with all of them. Well, no. Anyway, uh, there was a party conference. You know what they're like? There's a lot of long nights, uh, long hours. Perfectly normal for a journalist to have meetings with politicians in a hotel room, expecting that their staff would be there. Done it many times myself. You knock at the door, you go in, you would expect advisors might be a couple of advisors, perhaps a press secretary, someone like that around.

• 1:02:14Speaker 04

  Um, however, on that occasion, I knocked on the door. Said, uh, Minister answered the door with rather too many buttons undone on their shirt. Asked me in, I thought this is quite strange. Uh, their partner was there rather than their assistant or researcher or advisor or press secretary. I sat in a very hard chair for about 10 minutes and then I made my excuses and left because it did not feel like an encounter that they had imagined as a professional one. Now, I do not know if that was their intention.

• 1:02:46Gyles Brandreth?

  An impression was given.

• 1:02:47Speaker 04

  An impression was given and I left quite clear. I thought it was more sensible to leave, so I left.

• 1:02:52Gyles Brandreth?

  All right. Before I ask you my last three questions.

• 1:02:54Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:02:54Gyles Brandreth?

  Is there anything more you wanted to say?

• 1:02:55Speaker 04

  That's for the last three questions.

• 1:02:56Gyles Brandreth?

  No, no, the last three questions are these.

• 1:02:57Speaker 04

  Oh, okay.

• 1:02:57Gyles Brandreth?

  All right.

• 1:02:58Speaker 04

  All right.

• 1:02:58Gyles Brandreth?

  A moment of joy in your life, just a moment of joy comes into your head.

• 1:03:02Speaker 04

  Oh, uh, when I got married.

• 1:03:05Gyles Brandreth?

  Oh, believe it. That's nice. Well done. Was that a while ago?

• 1:03:10Speaker 04

  Uh, yeah, 2005.

• 1:03:11Gyles Brandreth?

  Good. I imagine it's going okay, otherwise it would dementia.

• 1:03:14Speaker 04

  No, that is what came into my head.

• 1:03:15Gyles Brandreth?

  Good. That's lovely. A moment of joy.

• 1:03:17Speaker 04

  Although actually my other half would always say if the, if your wedding day is the happiest day of your life, then why are you marrying that person if it's going to be downhill from there?

• 1:03:24Gyles Brandreth?

  No, because you want to sustain it. You want to maintain it. Oh, it's happened in my life and actually every day since.

• 1:03:29Speaker 04

  Every day since has been full of joy. Yes. What you say, what's the first thing that came into your head?

• 1:03:33Gyles Brandreth?

  That is the point.

• 1:03:34Speaker 04

  That's the first thing that comes into my head.

• 1:03:35Gyles Brandreth?

  So this is perhaps more tricky.

• 1:03:36Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:03:37Gyles Brandreth?

  A moment of sadness.

• 1:03:38Speaker 04

  Oh, uh, well, it's, it's not, uh, it's not tricky, but we, um, yeah. I mean, my, my father died three and a, three and a little bit years ago. And that's a, that was a hard, that's a hard thing. That's a hard thing.

• 1:03:53Gyles Brandreth?

  Yeah. It's so, so tough. All right. Um, and finally, what has life taught you, Laura?

• 1:04:05Speaker 04

  That it's there for the taking and you, and saying yes to things you thought you would never imagine doing is often a great choice.

• 1:04:15Gyles Brandreth?

  I'm so glad you said yes to coming on Rosebud.

• 1:04:17Speaker 04

  And, you know, and I swore I would never write a book and I did.

• 1:04:21Gyles Brandreth?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:22Speaker 04

  So I hope in a few weeks I'll still be happy that I made that decision.

• 1:04:26Gyles Brandreth?

  It, it's a fascinating book. Um, thank you. Congratulations. Well done. Laura Kuenssberg on Rosebud. You're brilliant.

• 1:04:34Speaker 04

  Thank you for having me.

• 1:04:40Gyles Brandreth?

  Oh, I really enjoyed my time with Laura Kuenssberg and I loved the moment when I, I felt, and I think she felt it too, that I, I caught the moment that her life was defined when she was there in Washington DC, working on that show as, as really as the runner and seeing the way politics was covered in America. And anyway, uh, it was a, for me, a really interesting and rather different episode of Rosebud. It's nice to vary it and she really is very distinguished. Laura Kuenssberg there. So I look forward to being on her program, Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg again. And, um, uh, I'm actually, I must listen to her podcast too. She's got one called Newscast. I do recommend her book. It's called Pay Attention and it's published by a publisher I know.

• 1:05:24Gyles Brandreth?

  And I will, I better come clean here. He is also, he's called James Gerbert. He also published a book of, that I wrote, which was a novel, a murder mystery called Jack the Ripper. The final solution. I actually solved it. Case closed. Jack the Ripper, case closed, published by Corsair. Might as well plug my book. That's where it is plugging hers. It's a murder mystery, but really is a murder mystery, but it's based in truth. Victorian murder mystery.

• 1:05:55Gyles Brandreth?

  There's a voice in the background saying, you're meant to be plugging her book. That's Harriet reminding me that I am indeed plugging Laura Kuenssberg's book, Pay Attention, published by Corsair, who incidentally also published my murder mystery, Jack the Ripper, case closed, available now in paperback. Okay. That's that. Well, it isn't quite that because I've got an email that I want to share with you before I go. It, um, it comes from Australia. It's wonderful. We have this international audience from Susan in Perth, Western Australia. Uh, she says, hello, Harriet and Giles. I hope this finds you both well. It does. My first memory is from when I was two or three. I was at a children's birthday party, my very first, and we were given pots and pans

• 1:06:39Gyles Brandreth?

  and wooden spoons. My memory is that we were marching around while the Beatles were singing Yellow Submarine. I think it must've been a version of musical statues because it's also my first memory of failure as I was yanked out of the parade for a reason I didn't understand. Another very early memory is my first day at infant school. So it'd have been three. The school was new and modern and had slopes instead of steps. The smell of school lunch and an enticing glimpse of the Wendy House area is strong and still appears in my dreams occasionally. Well, let me take the opportunity to thank you for inventing Rosebud. I hope you're very proud. It's marvelous.

• 1:07:24Gyles Brandreth?

  Lots of love, Susan in Perth, Western Australia. Well, I invented the idea, but I have to tell you, Harriet, my producer and friend, she thought of the name Rosebud. So it's a team effort and thank you for being part of the team. If you want to join our family, then you get ad free listening and extra episodes on a Sunday. To do that, you simply go to patreon.com, P A T R E O N.com forward slash Rosebud. You'll find us here though, every Friday and every Tuesday. We come to you with lots of love from the Grosvenor House Hotel in Park Lane in London. Thank you for your company. Cue the music.

• 1:08:52Speaker 06

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