The former Newsnight host on why she left the BBC, her new podcast, The News Agents — and what happened in the aftermath of that extraordinary interview at the palace.
You seek her here, you seek her there, for 20 years at the BBC Emily Maitlis was everywhere. There she was at Broadcasting House getting stuck in the lift with Alan Partridge, or beside the Palace of Westminster eye-rolling an irritating MP on Newsnight. Or maybe she was standing in the pouring rain outside the White House. She's interviewed President Trump and his hairspray, and Bill Clinton with the Kama Sutra.
When Maitlis first joined the Newsnight team in 2006, one headline suggested, "This autocutie heads the pack when it comes to brains and booty". No one would dare say that now. After two decades of interviewing presidents and prime ministers, arrests in Cuba and Cambodia and myriad election nights, she insisted on equal pay with her male contemporaries, then wrote a bestseller, Airhead, which covered everything from shootings to sexism while also launching the Americast podcast with the BBC's Jon Sopel, the modern-day Letter from America.
In lockdown, she took on Dominic Cummings after his Durham trip to Barnard Castle, dividing opinion as she stared at the camera and said Cummings had "broken the rules. The country can see that and it's shocked the government cannot."
Finally, there was the interview of the decade as she interrogated the Duke of York at Buckingham Palace about "straightforward shooting weekends", no sweating and children's parties at Pizza Express during his Jeffrey Epstein years. By this time last year, Maitlis only had to raise an eyebrow to camera or take her dog on a train and she was trending on Twitter.
Then suddenly she disappeared. There were occasional sightings of her with her whippet running through the park, legs tanned, sunglasses on, but no one knew what she would do next. This Sheffield girl didn't seem the kind of person to retire to the country and tend to her lavender bushes or to have meekly accepted chastisement from the BBC who regularly feared she transgressed their rules on impartiality, or to have bolted with one of the Chippendales she once interviewed, when she wrote, "I am watching a man simulate masturbation in the shower. All I can see is taut buttocks and toned thighs."
Now Maitlis is back – with her "mate Sopes", who also quit the BBC – with a podcast called The News Agents. Within a day of launching, it had gone to No 1 in the podcast charts, just before she gave the keynote James MacTaggart Memorial Lecture at the Edinburgh Television Festival, challenging the media industry to up its game in this era of fake news and populist politics.
I arrive at her house with a large bag of pic'n'mix at 5pm on a Sunday, slightly too early for a martini. Maitlis, 51, is wearing denim shorts, mules and a white vest. Her house is all beiges, taupes and greys, nothing floral: "I hate pattern," she says. Everything matches her whippet Moody, named of course after the credit rating agency. Even her toenails are mink. "Do not discuss my mantelpiece," she tells me, quickly scanning the room which is covered in photos of her husband Mark and their two sons, Milo and Max. The interviewer is a nervous interviewee.
I first met Maitlis when our six-year-old sons were shimmying across the stage as mermaids in a school play, and we started running together in the park, pulling apart the day's stories while working out how to make our children's tailfins. Known for her punctuality but not her patience, it must have been difficult to keep quiet as the world imploded around her. She once admitted to me she wanted to hurl a bowl of risotto across the room at a girls' lunch when she had stayed in Britain for President Obama's inauguration.
"The weird thing is that I've never worked harder than this gap year," she says, curling up on the sofa. "I've gone from being a journalist to putting together a media start-up: it's been really challenging and stretching, working out formats, cover designs, logos, music and who our audience is. The world has been burning but I don't feel like I have been on holiday; I feel like we had this slightly off-the-wall dream and now we've got to pull it off."
The idea for a daily podcast, she says, came to her while walking around her local park with her Americast podcast editor, Dino Sofos, another BBC alumnus, on December 23 last year. "It was the [time of the] Omicron variant and we were terrified of giving it to our families at Christmas, so we didn't hug or touch but walked round the park like spies," she says. "We were all missing Americast and I asked him whether he thought it was feasible to do a five-days-a-week news podcast."
Surely quitting Newsnight and the BBC must have taken more than a walk in the park for Maitlis? "On a practical level, there were projects I couldn't just do. I kept having to say, 'I'll ask, but it's probably a no.' " Then she stops and considers her answer. "I also didn't want to stay if it meant being less good at my job. I've always felt strongly that we have a real responsibility in those big positions of broadcasting to tackle our subjects robustly without fear of offending or upsetting those in power. It's important to me to be able to do that properly, rather than self-censor all the time, and I increasingly found I couldn't."
Had the BBC become too scared of holding politicians to account in case it jeopardised its licence fee? "The last thing I want to do is join the army of BBC critics, because I have had the most phenomenal two decades there. Inevitably, the BBC is the lightning rod for anything that any government in power doesn't like, but I think the attacks have intensified too far – we have a government that no longer sees the point of public-sector broadcasting. We need to fight back against this intentional trashing of one of our great institutions. The BBC management thinks, 'Blimey, we've got to be really careful of what we say or they'll take away our funding.' But I'd argue the opposite, that if we're not doing our job properly, holding the government to account, we don't deserve to ask the public to give us money."
Maitlis has spent hours pondering how the media needs to change. "I think politics has altered fundamentally and journalism and broadcasting in particular have not yet caught up. We haven't realised that when people say fake news they are trying to disorientate you and demean your work, so they can then ignore any scrutiny you put them under. It's a game that the politicians are playing that the BBC, in particular, doesn't understand."
Normally unshockable, she was horrified, she says, to hear Liz Truss, then the Tory leadership candidate, now the new Prime Minister, casually suggest on GB News that their journalists weren't like the BBC, because at least they got their facts right. "I understand that is populist rhetoric and that is how you get your round of applause from the audience. It effectively isolates journalists from the conversation, belittling them, while trying to speak directly to the people, but I think it has a really deleterious impact on this country. The trashing of constitutional norms and vilification and intimidation of journalists is unhealthy for our democracy."
Even Dominic Cummings, she says, understood the need to stand up to power. "Funnily, while the BBC was berating me, he was the one ringing to say, 'I'm sorry you are getting this shit. I get why you stuck to your guns.' It was a wry moment."
It wasn't the only time Maitlis was told to be more "balanced" in her pieces to camera. She bridles. "Balance is a word we always used at the BBC but balance is complicated. If it takes me five minutes to find 10 economists who all think Brexit is a terrible idea, but five hours to find an economist who says it will be absolutely brilliant, then having one on each side isn't balanced. If we don't show our workings to the audience and tell them how difficult it was to get an alternative view, we are not being honest."
This, she suggests, is one way The News Agents will differ from other media outlets. "We will take the cellophane off and tell you how we cover stories – say it took us six hours to find an expert who agreed with this new policy. We will lose the trust of the people we are talking to if we are not being honest and analytical. We shouldn't be copying and pasting what we are told to say by the government: we need to push back," she says.
In last week's MacTaggart lecture – her first public speech since leaving the BBC – she accused the corporation of caving in to government pressure, with an "active agent of the Conservative Party on its board". She was referring to Sir Robbie Gibb, the former No 10 communications director who, she said, "now sits acting as the arbiter of BBC impartiality".
Surely Global, their new boss, will have some say in the tone of coverage and content. "I think they will be very editorially hands-off. They have all persuasions on their radio shows and podcasts. In pilots and focus groups, people liked the directness of our chat. I'm not highly opinionated but I want to get to the bottom of things. We want to be extremely unextreme but informative. We're not campaigners but nor should we be complacent, complicit onlookers."
Timing will be crucial: the podcast goes out late afternoon and they may miss breaking stories. "Do you remember the day when we had the by-election results from Tiverton in the morning and Roe v Wade in the afternoon and your news brain exploded? On a day like that, we might do two podcasts. If we've just done a podcast and the FBI go in to search Trump's house, we may need to get back to the studio."
The studio is in Leicester Square. "It's very different from the BBC – noisier, faster, dim sum for lunch – but I've already found my bike route. Everyone at Global goes to the Odeon in the square for the ratings announcements, like a company results day. It's terrifying."
Maitlis says she won't miss the constant media scrutiny caused by working for the BBC. "Even if I didn't feature in a story, I somehow became the poster girl for everything good and bad about the BBC. My face illustrated every piece, it became relentless. Global, I hope, will be demanding in other ways, like where are your audience or advertisers."
They spent hours working out a title before Sopel's wife hit on The News Agents. "It immediately felt right. For an American audience it sounds James Bond intrepid; for a British audience, it sounds fags, mags and a Twix. The aim eventually is that it feels like a brand rather than a programme: you can see us on TikTok; we can give you the podcast for a walk with the dog; or you can watch clips from interviews on YouTube. There will also be a live show element if we go on the road. You may even get a T-shirt."
It's still, she recognises, a huge leap. "I felt a tiny bit grubby the day I said I was leaving the BBC as it was my home, there were people I adored and I couldn't tell them all before the news broke. The director-general, Tim Davie, said, 'Let's go for a drink sometime.' He didn't say, 'Why don't you do this for the BBC?' I'm sure he was delighted to see the back of us. I hope no bridges are burnt."
It's less nerve-racking because she's reprising her duet with Sopel, which had a huge fanbase during Americast. "Sopes seems to think I'm Margot off The Good Life – of course, I'm more Barbara. We're definitely not Richard and Judy or Ant and Dec. But the joy of a double act is you can tell a story together, explore issues and joke around. When you are on your own, it can sound like a dry monologue.
"It's not like a marriage, but we've known each other long enough that we don't have to pander to each other. We can tease each other; we're almost unoffendable."
They endlessly text each other at 3am with new ideas. "It's better than going on late-night buying sprees on Net-a-Porter. My husband doesn't mind at all. I think he feels it's sharing the labour. I'm quite exhausting to have in the house as I live off adrenaline."
Maitlis now feels it's serendipitous that she hasn't been flying around the world this year. "If there had been one year I needed to be here in this country, it was 2022. My eldest was doing A-levels, so I was lucky being able to be so present for him. Mark and I also both lost our fathers this year, and I think that the three amazing weeks I spent every day at his side in hospital before he died were meant."
Her father, Peter Maitlis, was a professor of chemistry at the University of Sheffield and fled Nazi Germany with his Jewish family when he was three. "Before he died, I told my father – who spent my childhood shushing us when the pips came on for the news – that I was leaving the BBC to start a podcast. I think for him the BBC was the pinnacle, as a child of refugees, but he knew that I'm a risk-taker and I can't stay still. I hope this would have made him proud."
Maitlis didn't even tell her parents about the Prince Andrew interview until it aired. "Almost no one knew except the Queen." She is surprisingly positive and polite about Prince Andrew, having eviscerated him in their interview. "I felt he'd behaved rather well. He had given us this hour in the palace and was willing to talk about stuff. Most politicians now won't even talk about their own policies. So at least he had guts."
The prince bizarrely seemed to enjoy the interview, she says. "He spent a long time afterwards chatting to us and allowing us to take shots going along the corridors. He even gave me this guided tour, saying, 'Her Majesty is just up these stairs. When you next come back I'll have to show you more. And do you know what's behind that door?' "
When she discreetly asked some of the prince's acquaintances what he thought before the programme was aired, they said he'd been very pleased with it. "He went to one of his 'straightforward shooting weekends' and told everyone there he was happy. The palace told us it was 'firm but fair'. I don't think they realised how the public or press would react. They certainly weren't expecting the furore."
Astonishingly, the palace didn't complain. "A good friend of Prince Charles said, 'Don't worry, you won't be put in the Tower.' I think they may have thought I had done what had to be done. I don't feel guilty that he resigned from his royal roles four days later."
There are now two dramas being produced about the fateful interview. So there will be two actresses needed to play Maitlis. Industry rumours are that one may be Rosamund Pike. Maitlis won't say. "But Mark thinks it's his choice – he is very keen to be the casting director."
'Broadcasting royalty'
The interview means she is now referred to as "broadcasting royalty" by some papers, up there with David Frost, Jon Snow, her former co-presenter on Newsnight Jeremy Paxman and the Dimblebys, but as a child she swore she would never be a journalist. "I thought it sounded terrible, going on all these wild goose chases in the rain in a mac. I barely noticed when the Berlin Wall came down in my teens," she says. She was more fixated on her hairdressing apprenticeship at Ross & Foster, the smartest salon in Sheffield, where she learnt to wash and perm. Luckily, her parents finally nudged her towards Cambridge, where she read English. Her obvious lack of skill with scissors was clear in lockdown when she massacred her husband's hair.
After university – "Which was full of people playing hockey and watching Neighbours" – she had no idea what she wanted to do, so applied to become a librarian, but failed spectacularly. So she went to Hong Kong on a whim. "I went for six weeks and got swept up in the politics, partying and travel and stayed six years. Totalitarianism and democracy were fighting it out on a tiny, overcrowded island, there was this massive clock ticking over us and I was hooked. I failed to get a job in PR because I couldn't speak Mandarin but then I discovered radio and I loved reporting from the centre of a story."
Maitlis and Sopel want to travel around the world for the podcast. "That was massive for me at Newsnight and one of the things that concerned me last year was when we were told the travel budget for international news would be cut by 40 per cent."
Early in her career, her clothes and cleavage were more scrutinised than her output, then she was asked how she coped with two small children while she jetted around the globe – "Always be at home for birthdays." Now she's rarely asked about her clothes or motherhood. "It's such a relief. Having children must have informed what I did. It definitely made me more emotional, and I have a thing about covering any more school shootings – even the idea of them makes me cry," she says, welling up. "But I am so happy not to be defending what I am wearing or being asked whether I feel guilty as a mother if I work. I've left that behind."
She's recently said she identified with Amy, the bubbly youngest child in Little Women, rather than the tomboy writer, Jo. "I'm very much the youngest of three daughters. It's the easiest place to be, only put in charge of making the cocktails and being funny. I had less pressure, more relaxed parents. Moods, our dog, gets away with murder. I'm more relaxed now about parenting too. Everyone muddles through – there were moments when I'd be halfway across the world and missing a school assembly, but I think they've forgiven me."
Now they're teenagers, she also feels she can take more gambles. "When I reached 50 during the pandemic and the children were older, I went, 'Right, what am I going to do next? I can put the first 30 years of my career in a fantastic box and start something new.' "
Stalker locked up
Unlike many highly successful people, she isn't driven to prove herself by a traumatic childhood experience, bullying, illness or death. "I had a lovely childhood in Sheffield. I went to a great state school. My mother taught me several languages for fun." She now speaks five, is learning Greek and German, and has three passports, having been born in Canada and been granted German citizenship. So what drives her? "I'm restless. I am fearful of being bored. The worst thing I could do would be to switch off my brain. Even now, getting into gardening, I want to know all the types of lavender I can have. And I've always been driven. I still feel I have lots left to do, more languages to learn, places to visit or live."
She proposed to her Catholic husband in Mauritius during the Millennium celebrations, and although her dog eats ham, they still observe Jewish festivals and attend shul on Yom Kippur as well as celebrating Christmas. Does she feel being a child of a Jewish refugee gave her a heightened awareness that life can go wrong? "I think that's really important. I am very superstitious about things. I don't believe people who say that's history, nothing like that can happen again. I never thought we'd see the January 6 attempted coup in America in my lifetime or another huge European war. That's why we need to be vigilant."
There is, perhaps, another reason for her grabbing life by the throat. Her time at university wasn't all dreaming spires and punting: in the first few weeks she met another undergraduate who has stalked her ever since, sending her letters, ringing incessantly and demanding to see her. His infatuation with her spiralled out of control as he broke restraint orders, and he's now in jail. Does she still think about him? "There are headlines about him every few months and I see them and try to ignore them. I know some people have been braver talking out about it, but I'm very nervous of exacerbating the situation and I can't bear being thought of as a victim. That's something I am determined I will never be."
She feels irrationally responsible that someone is locked up because of their fixation with her. "But I see it as a mental health issue. The problem about using the word 'stalker' is it glamorises it. It sounds like something that only happens to female celebrities, actors or TV presenters – but I know young men and women who have had far worse experiences."
She won't compromise her life because of him. "At first, I felt my whole family suffered because of him but you can't let it influence your life. You have to go for it."
There are other worries, she admits. "I'm a big middle-of-the-night worrier. I do worry about the world, my family, my friends and my job. If I get rid of one worry, the others just move up the list. Even if I did nothing, I'd be worrying about what to have for supper."
She has tried therapy. "I was slightly too impatient for it, if I am honest. My mother's a brilliant psychotherapist and a big believer, but I prefer to talk things through with friends. I've always been a very positive person. I feel that if I think of every possible disastrous outcome and I'm well prepared and have done all my research, then I can be optimistic. So I always take an extra pair of tights travelling, safety pins and dental floss with a needle threaded through it in case my bag breaks. That's my mentality: worry about everything in advance, then whatever happens, happens."
• The News Agents podcast is available now on Global Player
Written by: Alice Thomson
© The Times of London