Who is the world’s most famous news and current affairs interviewer? Christiane Amanpour? Katie Couric? Anderson Cooper? Piers Morgan? Let me suggest another contender for the title: Stephen Sackur, the gangly, deep-voiced host of the BBC’s television and radio programme HARDtalk, which the BBC announced it was axing this week.
He is hardly a household name in Britain, where HARDtalk is screened only in the small hours of the morning, but he certainly is across the rest of the planet. “If you went abroad with Stephen he’d be stopped everywhere,” said Carey Clark, a former HARDtalk editor. “It didn’t matter where you went, he’d be mobbed.”
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