“But when you have a regime that’s apparently prepared to use chemical weapons on his own people, doesn’t that add an urgency to it? Isn’t that the need of the avoidance of extreme humanitarian distress?” Martha Kearney speaks to Shami Chakrabati about the bombing in Syria during a Monday morning of interviews while co-presenting her fourth edition of the Today programme (her first was 7 April.)
The way she delivered the word “apparently” encapsulated why she is the best general-purpose presenter the BBC has bar none. She put a faint breath of parenthesis around it, in a way that didn’t sound vetted by lawyers, but perfectly natural. While very characteristic (she is ever the sun rather than the wind, but can burst with an almost-annoyed “hang on!” when interrupting), this was someone instinctively a long way from being aware of their own brand. How freakish a breed the political interviewer generally is. Freakish because of their proximity to a delusion of mattering – a delusion that they “set the agenda”. One could always kind of forgive Jeremy Paxman because he’s just a peculiar, sui generis kind of guy. But Kearney has never been a stymied celebrity or comedian (see Nick Robinson or Eddie Mair) or a wannabe intellectual (see James Naughtie’s more recent interviews with authors. The crenellated frown in his voice, as though this were Gore Vidal talking to Abraham Lincoln.)
Even with the perfectly okay Laura Kuenssberg, you occasionally sense someone who hopes that Meryl Streep might play her in the biopic. Whereas Martha is simply exactly what she wants to be: a presenter of general affairs on radio and TV. In response, Chakrabati was more forthcoming, less thrusting and careerist. More got said. That old Today style of interview is dead. Super-confrontational, internally high-fiving, frankly impolite. It contributed nothing to British society. It made politicians more defensive and bland, entrenched in positions and sowing discord (and equally freakish). They became like footballers, poised to say less and less. The ego of the media has been a key player in the diminishment of British public discourse. But in Kearney the BBC has (for once) identified the right star.
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This article appears in the 18 Apr 2018 issue of the New Statesman, Enoch Powell’s revenge