Stephen Sackur makes no bones about it: he’s not going willingly. “I don’t need to go away the BBC, as a result of I nonetheless assume I’ve bought loads to supply,” the HARDtalk presenter tells me. “And I don’t need the programme to be closed, however that argument has been definitively misplaced. I’m considering arduous about different issues I’m going to do. I’m superb. I’m feeling fairly constructive.” Possibly. However I believe he’s additionally feeling damage, betrayed and, although he denies it, a bit of offended. “It’s undoubtedly a wierd interval,” he says. We’re speaking in February, a month earlier than the present finishes and he’s despatched packing by the Beeb.
Sackur, 61, is a BBC lifer. He began out as a trainee in 1986, was made a overseas correspondent in 1990, and went on to among the largest gigs in journalism – Europe, Washington, the Center East. For the previous 19 years, he’s hosted HARDtalk, the interview present that holds international energy to account. The BBC has all the time lauded it as a flagship programme – thrice weekly, repeatedly watched in additional than 200 nations by as much as 70 million individuals (and, he reckons, with the podcast and World Service radio variations that determine may rise to 170 million). Which is why he bought such a shock when he was informed in October that it was being pulled.
As you would possibly anticipate, Sackur has not taken the tip of the present mendacity down. After the announcement, he put out a message on X, explaining why it was unhappy for him personally however extra importantly a miserable day for the BBC.
He made his level in a sequence of uncompromising posts. “At a time when disinformation and media manipulation are poisoning public discourse HARDtalk is exclusive: a long-form interview present with just one mission – to carry to account those that all too typically keep away from accountability in their very own nations,” he wrote. “Anybody who has seen our interviews with Hugo Chávez, Sergey Lavrov, Meles Zenawi, Lula, Nancy Pelosi, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Emmanuel Macron, Imran Khan, Olusegun Obasanjo and numerous others through the years will know HARDtalk was by no means simply one other information present. A superb workforce of producers and researchers is being disbanded … My dedication to rigorous exploration of world affairs gained’t change. I hope the BBC’s doesn’t both.” Hardly a humble evaluation of HARDTalk or his personal profession, however a good one.
We’re in Sackur’s beautiful kitchen – fashionable, hi-tech, posh espresso machine on the countertop, beautiful modern artwork on the partitions. He asks the place I’d like to take a seat. The couch appears to be like good, I say. However he’s already shifting in the direction of the desk, turning the kitchen into an improvised HARDtalk studio. He sits one facet, I’m reverse – the format he’s used to. It’s astonishing what number of world leaders have subjected themselves to his interrogations, wrongly assuming they will finest him in debate.
He’s a tall, skinny man, straight as an ironing board, with robust arms and a army bearing – undoubtedly officer class. Sackur’s fashion of interviewing is forensic and barristerial. Somewhat than getting interviewees to open up, it’s extra about placing the case for the prosecution, and watching them squirm or attempt to worm their means out of it. And he can will get nice strains from company. In 2009, Boris Johnson, then mayor of London, informed him that the £250,000 a yr he obtained for writing a weekly newspaper column was “hen feed” – a quote that has caught.
Sackur tells me he’s not taking voluntary redundancy, which he has been provided, as a result of there’s nothing voluntary about it. If the BBC is giving him the previous heave-ho, it could actually at the very least do it actually. You’re forcing them to make you redundant? “Sure. I suppose it’s a bit of little bit of obstinacy and simply saying: ‘OK, nicely, you assume very arduous. You’ve bought a journalist right here who’s bought a whole lot of expertise, who most likely has an extended monitor report of protecting worldwide affairs than virtually anyone within the BBC.’ I’ve fairly good contacts, know lots of people in a whole lot of locations. In the event that they determine that’s not what they need and want, that’s superb, however I’d like them to be clear about that.”
Though the HARDtalk funds had been lower in recent times, there was no suggestion that it will be axed. He says he solely had one correct dialog with the director-general, Tim Davie, in 5 years, and that went positively. “I rang him up when he bought the job and I mentioned: ‘I simply need to say hello and nicely accomplished.’ And he mentioned: ‘It’s nice to speak to you. I recognize how essential HARDtalk is, significantly by way of our worldwide supply and profile. I sit up for coming down and seeing the workforce,’ which he by no means did. He invited me to a gathering of journalists from totally different components of the BBC, however in any other case I’ve by no means spoken or heard from him once more. And, because the closure announcement, I’ve not heard a phrase.”
A couple of weeks after the choice was taken, Sackur says, he was invited to a gathering with BBC’s head of stories, Deborah Turness. “It didn’t yield a change of thoughts or any trace that there could be a change of thoughts.” So what was the purpose of it? “That’s an excellent query. I believe she felt embarrassed that she had by no means met me. As a result of, in the event you bear in mind, after the announcement was made, there was a large response on this nation and around the globe. Lots of very senior journalists expressed their shock and disquiet about it. And fairly a number of different individuals as nicely. And it did have a little bit of an influence.”
One in every of his current interviewees was the previous Washington Publish editor Marty Baron. Sackur took a scalpel to him in typical style, suggesting that old school, top-down mainstream media has had its day, and that Baron, 70, was simply one other white, middle-aged privileged man the world had uninterested in listening to from. The identical could possibly be mentioned of you, couldn’t it, I say. He nods. “Sure, I may have been speaking to myself.”
Nicely, you’re barely posher than Baron, I say. He laughs. “So I’m much more of an issue! Sure, I’m a part of the identical form of media elite, and I’m white and getting on a bit and all of this is applicable to me, and HARDtalk would possibly nicely be higher refreshing itself with a brand new presenter who carries a bit much less of that baggage for certain.” However, he says, even when the Beeb thought he ought to be put out to grass, the present shouldn’t have been. “Take me off HARDtalk? I completely get it. Each previous horse sooner or later needs to be taken off to the glue manufacturing facility. However don’t kill off the programme.”
Really, he says, he has thought for a while he ought to transfer on and take a look at one thing new. The difficulty is he loved the present a lot. “What’s to not like about travelling the world speaking to fascinating individuals? Lots of journalists I respect vastly say to me: ‘You may have the very best job in journalism.’ When it comes to a capability to interact with what’s fascinating on this world of ours, there’s no job prefer it.”
It’s lunchtime, and Sackur suggests a go to to his native. “We’re simply off to the pub,” he shouts as much as his associate, Ana, whom he has been with for 5 years. He was married for greater than 20 years and has three grownup kids. As we stroll down the south London avenue, he talks about his personal childhood. Sackur grew up in a middle-class household in Spilsby, Lincolnshire. His father, he says, was arduous to pigeonhole – a Cambridge College graduate with a level in agriculture who grew to become a Guardian-reading farmer and stood twice, unsuccessfully, to grow to be a Labour MP in Tory heartlands. His mom got here from farming inventory. Sackur was a vivid boy gifted with a ruthlessly logical thoughts and a capability to out-argue others. He additionally went to Cambridge, the place he studied historical past. Determined to flee the remoted rural setting he grew up in, he realised that journalism was the proper method to do it.
We order Guinness and chips on the bar, and head off to a sales space. I ask him whether or not he’s a nightmare over the dinner desk, all the time arguing his case, all the time having to win. “I believe I used to be a little bit of a nightmare as a child as a result of I used to be argumentative and wouldn’t let it drop. Typically I didn’t see that the very best factor to do was to again down.”
What has he discovered from interviewing so many important figures? “I’ve discovered loads concerning the ego. Human beings are massively flawed and are determined to cowl up their flaws.” Has it made him take a look at his personal flaws? “Very a lot so.” What are his predominant ones? “Selfishness, self-absorption, being preoccupied with my place in issues fairly than …” He involves a cease. Did this have an effect on his relationship together with his household? “Yeah, that’s the place I’d go, however I don’t need to speak about private stuff that’s troublesome. I believe I’m a extra rounded human being than I used to be years in the past, for certain.”
How has he modified? “I’m extra tolerant. I used to be one thing of a management freak: I’d anticipate and search for a neatness – a literal neatness and a form of figurative neatness – in life. And I’d attempt to impose it when, as I can see far more clearly now, life isn’t neat and to be rounded up and squared off all tidy. Up to now, it will go away me grumpy and illiberal in a means that was utterly counterproductive. Now I’m higher in a position to dwell with the tough edges.”
He admits he finds it powerful speaking about private issues – partly as a result of he’s personal and partly as a result of it inevitably includes different individuals he has no proper to speak about. “A few of it’s too painful, and painful not simply to me, however painful to different folks that I actually don’t need to damage.”
So we retreat to safer floor. I ask about his most memorable company on HARDtalk. There are such a lot of, he says – Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, who handled Sackur with contempt earlier than warming to him; Russian dissident Alexei Navalny, probably the most brave man he’s met; the tortured Allen Ault, who had been answerable for executions in Georgia; Invoice Clinton, whose magnetism made Tony Blair look “second division” on the charisma entrance; the brutal Ethiopian dictator Meles Zenawi. It was solely when he returned to Ethiopia, he says, that he realised the influence of his interview with Zenawi. “I’d meet individuals on the road they usually’d be quoting from it prefer it was verses from Shakespeare.” The factor is, he says, they’d by no means heard Zenawi held to account earlier than.
Does he assume BBC bigwigs are conscious of the importance of HARDtalk? “No. I don’t assume on the very senior ranges of the BBC there’s an consciousness of simply how large a present HARDtalk is around the globe.” Maybe individuals like Turness are too faraway from the journalism to make essential choices about it? “I’ll inform you what I believe. I believe it’s deeply regrettable that individuals like Deborah Turness don’t spend extra time making a degree of hanging out with individuals like me. I believe that will be extremely helpful for them, given their significance as layers-down of the form of strategic path of BBC Information and present affairs. Once more, I don’t need to sound in any means egomaniacal, however I do have a whole lot of expertise and you’ll assume that that have could be helpful to take recommendation from, to faucet into as a useful resource for these people who find themselves defining strategic priorities.”
Sackur is alarmed on the means information priorities have modified on the BBC. “Programmes like HARDtalk, Panorama and Newsnight have lengthy had an enormous quantity of autonomy. More and more there’s a want on the prime of the BBC to centralise and management and that doesn’t match simply with these programmes. You’ll be able to see it in the best way Newsnight and Panorama have modified and been resourced. In earlier rounds of reform and cuts, we’ve had our employees diminished, our cash diminished, and now we’re disappearing altogether.” He’s anxious that with the deal with dwell information, journalism is being diminished to “churnalism” on the expense of extra studied, groundbreaking work.
Presumably, the BBC gained’t even save a lot cash by axing HARDtalk, I say. In any case, it’s hardly costly telly. “Don’t even get me began on the cash!” Too late. “I believe the whole sum of cash BBC Information declared that it needed to save in that spherical of cuts was £24m. HARDtalk represents round 5% of that £24m – £1.2m a yr. In whole.” The workforce is tiny, he says – solely eight employees. “I can’t show this scientifically, however I’m fairly certain that HARDtalk is the most affordable content material per minute of broadcasting the BBC does. We symbolize about 4 center to senior administration salaries.”
Does he assume it’s a snub to intellectual journalism? “No. They know what they need and we don’t match it. However I’ve bought an excessive amount of love for the BBC and I’ve bought too many colleagues on the BBC who’re nonetheless doing unbelievable work to assume that they don’t need critical journalism.”
He stops, and says it’s essential to get this proper. “I’m not leaving, raging with bitterness and resentment and the sensation that the BBC is slashing, burning and ruining the form of journalism that I imagine in. That might be easy. It’s extra delicate and extra advanced than that.”
We catch up a number of weeks later in mid-March. Sackur has simply obtained his redundancy letter and been served three months’ discover. He’s devastated for his “small however completely fashioned workforce”, and now there isn’t any try to disguise his anger. “I really feel actually, actually cross at extremely dumb choices made by administration that I worry isn’t doing the suitable factor for the BBC. I’ve not been impressed with their potential to take care of this in a compassionate, human means.”
He tells me that one in every of his closing interviews was with Christine Lagarde, president of the European Central Financial institution (ECB). “It made loads of headlines worldwide on Trump and tariffs,” he says. “Like so many current company, she informed me she was utterly baffled by the closure of HARDtalk. ‘Why would they do it at a time like this?’ she mentioned. As a form of comfort she gave me a jar of ECB honey – apparently they’ve a hive within the financial institution’s backyard.”
On the constructive facet, he feels energised and liberated by his new freedom. He talks about his plans for the longer term. He has simply signed a deal to write down a e-book about journalist heroes who’ve risked every thing to make a distinction. “I’m not a courageous individual, and a part of the explanation for scripting this e-book is that, through the years, I’ve been so blown away by journalists whose work is really courageous in a means that mine by no means was and by no means might be.” Having it out verbally in a studio doesn’t evaluate with risking your life taking over the corrupt and highly effective, he says.
As for his journalism, he’s in no way completed with that. He’d like to do a revamped model of HARDtalk. “As I mentioned originally, in the event you want people who find themselves steeped in worldwide affairs, who’ve met and reported on so lots of the individuals and locations that matter …” In different phrases, Stephen Sackur is open to provides.
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