Abstract
John Humphrys may not have set out to become the “stroppiest Welshman on the airwaves”, but his intrinsic distrust of authority was set from an early age. Brought up in a poor part of Cardiff, the son of a french polisher, he helped his father out by delivering flyers to the posher addresses. They refused to use the servants’ entrance. Father and son shared a distrust of authority and a hatred of snobs. As he notes: “Dad would have had an easier life had he been a bit less stroppy” (that word again).
Humphrys left school at 15 – “by then the various chips on my shoulder had been welded into place” – and got a job at the Penarth Times. He learned much of his journalism, as did many in those days, by collecting the names of mourners at funerals and doing “death knocks”.
Today it’s almost impossible to imagine a school-leaver with a handful of GCSEs making it into the current media world of graduates and media studies courses (in one of several side-swipes, Humphrys says he would abolish those too) let alone that person rising to the very top. Journalism has lost something because of that. Diversity means more than ethnicity or gender.
He rose rapidly through the Merthyr Express to the Western Mail to join the new local commercial TV station TWW. There, a routine PA report and a shrewd hunch led him to head out one morning to find out exactly what had happened at a small mining village called Aberfan. The horrific scene he encountered that day haunts him still. He returns to it several times.
Re-reading his Aberfan pieces and many of the other pieces of reporting reprinted here, we are reminded what a superb reporter and correspondent Humphrys was and is. It is easy to forget that he is one of the best on-site broadcast journalists of this or many other generations. He paints word-pictures like few others.
The book, part memoir, part manifesto, is in three parts: early life and career, life on the Today programme, and a final part on some of the wider political issues facing the BBC now and in the future. The second and third parts couldn’t have been written while still at the BBC and of course are all the more interesting because of that.
As a studio interviewer, Humphrys was, at his best, relentless and forensic. The destruction of Harriet Harman on air sticks in the mind. He describes several of his most memorable interviews, most but not all with politicians, but also digs deeper into the nature and purpose of such interviews. In one passage he analyses how in one interview such a master of the political interview as Tony Blair managed to counter and deflect all of John’s probing.
There is full and frank analysis of the many rows that started in that Today studio. There’s a detailed account of the two-way on Iraq with Andrew Gilligan and the ensuing chaos that led to the tragic suicide of Dr David Kelly. Re-reading that account afresh is to be reminded of the belief that several of us had at the time that the BBC should first have taken a deep breath and forensically examined what Gilligan had got right (most of it) and what he had got wrong (one small part). It would then have been in a much better position to defend its reporting from the constant bullying of Alastair Campbell and might even have avoided the subsequent establishment stitch-up of the Hutton Report.
Another interview led to the sacking of another of his bosses, George Entwistle. Humphrys reveals that after they left the studio, the BBC PR man railed at the iniquity of such an interview. To which the doomed Entwistle replied, to his enduring credit, “he was only doing his job”.
In an interesting and thoughtful section, he looks at the wider political context within which the BBC has to operate and the way it has to balance being accountable to the public’s elected representatives while staying editorially independent of them.
On Brexit, he confounds those critics who have accused him of being a closet Brexiteer by revealing that he voted Remain. He is also critical of the BBC’s referendum coverage for creating a false equivalence on things like the balance of economists’ forecasts: “I’m not sure the BBC was clear enough, often enough where the weight of the argument lay.”
This is a book written in quite a hurry. Some sections, some of the rows at the BBC could have done with more judicious editing but writing at speed also means that Humphrys hasn’t had the time to temper his criticisms. He obviously enjoys being off the leash. It makes for a more revealing read.
Humphrys is clearly one to carry grudges, ancient and modern. A hospital doctor from his childhood who told his parents he should wash more is not forgotten or forgiven. Neither is his former colleague Eddie Mair, who read out on-air the now notorious Humphrys-Jon Sopel exchange about the equal pay battle waged by their colleague Carrie Gracie. He is also sharply critical of the decision to allow Gracie to co-present the programme with him on the day that the story broke. Few bosses come out of this book well.
Through most of the book there is little apology for his robust political interviews but then right towards the very end, he does go in for a little cautionary soul-searching about whether broadcasters have got the balance right: “…Today presenters and their stablemates do have questions to ask of themselves. Does an interview always have to be so combative? Does there have to be a winner or loser? Does it have to be a zero-sum game?…If we interviewers succeed – albeit unintentionally – in convincing the listener that all politicians are liars, the real loser is our system of representative democracy that has served our nation for so well for so long.” It’s as close as we get to a mea culpa.
What comes out of this interesting book is a picture of a talented, stroppy journalist, yes, but also of a man much more thoughtful, complex and considered than his Guardian/Twitter critics would allow. I doubt we shall see his like on-air again. More’s the pity.
