Emily Maitlis Interview

Craig Oliver: We are at News Agents HQ. I've sat in one of these seats a few times, which has been very nice to do, but you've been asking me the questions. I'm just interested in starting on, what do you think when you're being asked the questions? Does that feel very different? Does that feel weird?
Emily: It is weird to be asked the questions, because I guess I sort of think, when I'm interviewing, I put in quite a lot of work. Generally, I don't do things off the cuff. I tend to actually think about what I want to ask? And so it's quite intimidating to think, Oh my God, if you've done that, then I'm in trouble. I think being an interviewee makes you quite vulnerable. And it's quite a useful reminder, actually, of that vulnerability.
Because sometimes we assume that the person opposite us is bulletproof, you know. Particularly if they're in a position of authority or government or political position, we kind of go, ‘Oh, well, they must know, they've got this coming to them.’ And actually, if you turn the tables, you go, that's complicated and it probably doesn't work into one, one phrase or one sentence.
Craig Oliver: It's so interesting that you say that because I was a journalist and then went into the political environment where people are very much expected to be accountable and answer and say things and give of themselves often when they're in interviews and seeing, preparing them for that quite often you saw that can be painful and giving of themselves and it sometimes struck me how little as a journalist and sometimes how other journalists didn't really get that you are putting this person in quite a difficult position and you're expecting a lot of them that you perhaps don't understand. You're maybe seeing them as a little bit of a commodity.
Emily: I think part of it is the sort of urgency of news that takes over. So if there's sort of 10 of you standing in a line outside Downing Street, you just want to hear your voice asked the question, or you just want to be the shout out that gets the response from the minister that's walking past, whatever.
And so that sense of urgency or exclusivity or being first takes over. And if you take all that out of it, most questions genuinely, generally are not easily answered. You know, we had Jess Phillips on the show today who just resigned her position to vote against her leader's vote, Keir Starmer. You kind of heard the pain in her voice. You know, it was a really interesting thing for us to hear. She knows that it was what she had to do, but it also might have weakened the Labour Party. It might have created problems for Keir Starmer. She had to do what she felt was right for her constituents. And sometimes I think we are quite reductive/ We say, yes, but why did you do it?
Craig Oliver: Yeah, we all know that people, particularly politicians evade answers quite often. But also it is a trick of a, you know, a journalist to go, ‘yes or no?’, and you, you appear to be somebody who's, you know, not being responsive. If you say, hang on, I don't want to answer that ‘yes or no’.
Emily: I think the ‘yes or no’, I mean, the one thing I've learned from moving out of a sort of fixed template television show like Newsnight to the sort of world of the podcast is that if you take away. The bounds of time, the timekeeping, everything changes.
Craig Oliver: And who, who'd have thought that? Because actually beforehand, you know, all the training is like, what's the line you're going for, what's the angle? But there is this just profound thirst, I think, by, you know, you look at the figures that you're getting and loads of other people are getting as well, just to have something more expansive, a bit more discursive, a bit more…
Emily: It changes your whole tone and it does that because I don't think I realized, you know, when I was on Newsnight, I now understand that if, if a minister is talking to you, if you go in too early, then you get done for interrupting.
Oh my god, it's so annoying, don't they always, you know, she interrupted, blah blah blah. If you go in too late, you've sort of missed it. And everyone's like, oh, why didn't she pull him up on that? Why wasn't she holding him to account? And so timing is absolutely critical. I don't know how often, in journalism courses or in broadcasting courses, they tell you about the difficulty of timing, so much sort of is pinned on that.
And when you hear a journalist say yes or no, normally it means they've got a producer or an editor in their ear saying, wind up, wind up, come on, we've got to move on to the weather, we've got to go to the next thing. And so they're saying yes or no because they're in a sense of pressure.
Craig Oliver: Totally that, but I also think that it's very easy to come to an interview with an agenda, isn't it? That the person maybe reacts against. So one of the things when I was preparing people to be interviewed was the saying that, and just is part of the mantra now, which is you don't have to accept the premise of the question because actually often the question is loaded in such a way that to answer it and accept it, puts you in a certain box. And that actually, you know, there are tricks, aren't there, in order to put people in that sort of space?
Emily: Do you know, I'm going to push back on that because I feel, you don't accept the premise of the question…I've just heard Craig Oliver in many politicians mouths now saying, ‘Well, actually, I mean, I don't accept the premise of the question. The question you should be asking me is this’.
And if you're in my position, you go, actually, I think I'll choose my own questions. So I think it works both ways. I mean, I understand that ministers don't necessarily want to address that question, and they might call it the premise of the question, but fundamentally, they might just not be answering the question.
Craig Oliver: Yeah, I think that's true. Look, let's rewind back. I wanted to go back to your childhood, and I know that's a bit weird for you just doing that Colt, but You weren't privately educated, your father was a professor of chemistry and your mother was a psychotherapist. Did you stick out at school?
Emily: I think I was quite gangly. I was probably quite awkward. I was very, very energetic. So, I mean, my sisters would say I was kind of cartwheeled permanently around the house. I had lots and lots of energy and I was mad on gymnastics and dance and I sort of cartwheeled and, and, you know, hand springs around the house to the point where objects did break, did shatter.
So I suppose from that perspective, I, I sort of stood out from my sisters a bit because they were, they were sort of like, why can't you just sit down and shut up? At school, I don't think I did particularly well .
Craig Oliver: I'm interested particularly your mom being a psychotherapist.
Emily: She wasn't at the time It wasn't at the time. When my mom hit her 60s….so actually, you know much later in life and she became a psychotherapist because, honestly, she was losing a lot of friends and she wanted to know how to deal with their partners and how to say the right things in grief and not be a person of cliche to those in need. And I think that was one of the reasons, I mean not the only reason, but it was one of the reasons that she sort of picked up this brand new career in her 60s which arguably is a sort of great time to become a psychotherapist because you've, you've kind of done a lot of your life already.
You've learned a lot, you know, going to the whole sort of premise of this…and so, when we were growing up, she did a lot of work, but it wasn't sort of a one, regular career. So she worked with the British Council, she taught modern languages, she took herself off and did an Italian degree when we were really little. So she was kind of, sort of constantly busy, but always around, if that makes sense.
Craig Oliver: Yeah. Oh, well, that's, that's interesting. Yeah. And, and I wanted to talk a bit about the Jewishness thing, um, because I actually hadn't really thought about it until like a few weeks ago when there was a load of stuff going on and you actually talked about it on the podcast. Was that a big deal when you were growing up or was it not?
Emily: My father, I think, never really liked organized religion. He was very strictly brought up by his father and so completely rebelled against it. And would never really want to set foot in a synagogue. Until very, very late in his life when he sort of came around to it and actually decided he rather liked finding solace and friendship in the Jewish community.
My sisters point blank refused to go to Sunday school and so I was made to go to Sunday school because my mum sort of felt that somebody had to. So I went to not only Sunday school but Wednesday school and Monday school. We did, I did sort of three lots of classes and I had a Bar Mitzvah and I learned how to make challah and I learned how to read Hebrew and, you know, Bible studies and all that sort of stuff.
And so I feel like I was slightly the representative Jew in the family. I know that's not entirely fair but it was, we were always culturally Jewish, but never religious, you know, sort of did a mishmash of Hanukkah and not quite Christmas, not quite Hanukkah.
Craig Oliver: We interviewed David Baddiel in the last series, and it was really interesting talking to him because he was talking about, you know, obviously he'd written the book, Jews Don't Count, and he was talking about being a huge part of his identity, but very, very clear that he wasn't particularly interested in the politics of the Middle East because of that. Is that, is that, did you feel it was an identity thing, or was it?
Emily: I read David had said that and I found it very liberating, actually, when he said, why are people asking me how I feel, you know, about Israel? I don't vote in Israel. I'm not part of, you know, the electorate in Israel. I don't have strong feelings about sort of Netanyahu or the coalition, whatever.
And I sort of found it quite liberating to hear him say that. And then more recently, I wondered if it was still true for him. And whether there is something slightly atavistic about what goes on there in that there is something that kind of goes back to your forebears. It's almost like part of a muscle memory that it doesn't feel logical, it doesn't feel rational, but when I hear Hebrew, I think of prayers and Friday night services and I think of the language of my grandpa and I think of my cousins and people in Israel.
So I guess even though I can logically say, you know, I have nothing to do with Israel's electorate. I'm not a part. I'm not a voter. I'm not a part of the democracy. I do not, you know, have any sway or any fondness for Netanyahu and his government. If you ask me whether I sort of felt on a cellular level a slight connection to Israel? Of course I do. You know, to take you back, when I was 18, 19, I sort of worked for Tikkun Olam which was like a sort of a magazine, which is organizing a peace conference. So I sort of think that I would have been one of those kids in the festival.
You know, I went to I went to be part of this conference, we went to the West Bank, we went to Gaza, we stayed in the really, you know, super orthodox Jewish quarter because they gave lodging to, you know, free of charge to kind of passing young people, you know, sort of 18 to a room and one bathroom. And that was, that was me trying to sort of understand, I guess, the, the politics of what we all hoped was a two state solution. This was early 90s. So it was when it was Clinton Arafat and it was before the murder of Yitzhak Rabin.
Craig Oliver: Because one of your relatives, I think, fled Europe during the 30s. Is that right? Yeah. I mean, was that something that you were brought up with that story or was it not spoken about?
Emily: Not much, actually. I mean, it was quite hard to get that stuff out of my dad. But he, he left, you know, he, he was born. On the 15th of January, 33, which was, I think it was two weeks before Hitler came to power?
Craig Oliver: Yeah, certainly 33 was the year.
Emily: Right, but it was January, and he was born in Berlin. And so I do have that sort of sliding doors moment when I think if my father hadn't left with his parents, probably wouldn't have been born.
I think for a lot of Holocaust survivors or, or escapers, um, from Germany in the 30s, that was something that was very hard to talk about. And I also think, I mean it's interesting, my grandmother called my father Peter Michael. Such Anglo Saxon names, such English names. It was all about protecting your identity, sort of. You have a brand new start in, in, in London, you know, it, it won't be…
Craig Oliver: There's definitely something about that generation though, isn't there, about thinking, actually keeping it buttoned down. Is there anything in that, or do you think that that's, um, just bad psychology?
Emily: No, I, understand that totally. I understand that very well. And I think things that once seemed to be historic anomalies Actually, probably aren't. I mean, there's one thing I've learned in the last 20 years or so, it's that you want to sort of put things back into their past or into their time. Oh, you know, populism, or, you know, belongs in the 1930s or whatever. It has reemerged in our lifetime. And I, and I now don't have that sense that things couldn't happen again.
Craig Oliver: Exactly. That's, that's really interesting and it was early on in your career, you went to Asia. Yeah and I’m interested in why you did that, but you also said something I thought was really interesting. You talked about owing the East. What did you mean by that?
Emily: Um, okay. So the move to Hong Kong, to Asia was really random. I graduated in a recession, didn't know what I wanted to do, um, I knew that I didn't want to sort of sit around here filling out forms and sort of begging for jobs and begging for interviews when I didn't have a clear idea of what that was. And I just picked up an advert which said, you know, we'll give you a free flight to Hong Kong and accommodation, come and sort of, you know, I think I was tutoring modern languages when I first went out, and so I went out there and It blew my mind.
I was so naive, you know, I don't think I'd really studied at school. I always regret that I didn't do more history actually, when I was at school, but I don't think I really understood colonialism. I didn't understand the opium wars. I didn't understand the relationship between China and Britain and everything that went on. And so I got to Hong Kong and I think my jaw just dropped, you know? And it was in the years before the handover, it was at the same time as Chris Pattem who went out as the last governor of Hong Kong. And I suddenly realized what an intensely interesting political place it was, and it opened my mind and my eyes, you know, and that was all we talked about. We talked about the handover. We talked about China. We talked about communism. We talked about what would happen to the sort of cultural way of life and the rule of law in Hong Kong after the Chinese takeover. And I suppose I say I owe that to the East because I feel like I came of age there. I sort of discovered And I suppose myself in a way I probably hadn't really at university.
Craig Oliver: What's interesting is that Hong Kong's obviously a fantastically energised place and an amazingly busy, lots going on as you say, and an amazing history. The other thing that as I've sort of got older and looked at the East and thought about it more is I've realised the extent to which they're much more group orientated rather than the individual and you, when you go you get much more of a sense of, like in the West we are the individual is paramount and we, you know, celebrate the self and like the rights, whereas out there it's much more group orientated. And there's plus and minus to that, but I think that's quite interesting, isn't it?
Emily: It's really, it's really interesting, Craig. I mean, I'm wondering whether you sort of came across that phrase, Asian values, which is the sort of Singaporean model. And it was, it was quite difficult as a journalist to work with that, because you'd be asking about, for example, the importance of establishing a human rights commission.
And they'd kind of go, you don't understand Asian values and part of you would kind of, it's sort of taken down that street and you go, ‘Oh, Oh, what do you mean?’ You know, is it about sort of teamwork rather than the individual? And the other half would go, ‘Oh, hang on a sec. You just don't really like human rights.’
So I was, I slightly held back on that idea of the team versus the individual. Great when it comes to, you know, family, elder families looking after, you know, your relatives. Great when it comes to a sort of sense of community cohesion, but it made me nervous, that idea because it made me think that they were quite often some regimes trying to suppress the individual.
And there were the voices of, you know, the dissidents of Tiananmen Square that had happened just a couple of years before I arrived. And there were the voices of anyone who spoke out in China. And, and I ended up thinking quite often this whole idea of like, you don't understand how we do things here was a very good way of shutting down journalists.
Craig Oliver: I'm interested in talking to you a bit about what drew you to journalism. I remember a guy said to me, ‘Look, the, the pay's not gonna, you're never gonna be super rich, but you will, if you're successful, have a front row seat at history’. And that was, at that point I thought, I'm in. I mean, and what was it that drew you to journalism?
Emily: It was being in Hong Kong just before 1997. I think, frankly, it was, it was all the conversations that I suddenly realized were so dynamic. It was about how the world is changing before our eyes and the front row seat is something that I think about the whole time. I remember going down to Grant Park the night that Obama was elected in 2008 in Chicago.
And it was kind of a crazy thing to do because I'd just come off air at, I think, 10 o'clock and I had to be back on air because of the time difference at sort of 4am the next morning and so everything in your head would be like, Oh, I think you need to get, you know, five hours sleep at least to get up.
Then I thought, well, I can't be in Chicago on the night that he's about to speak and miss it. And so I, you know, went down and it was sort of one in the morning and what did I get from it? I got the sense of being on that front row, right? And it stuck with you as well. Of course it has. I mean, the next day I was probably a terrible broadcaster.
I remember the cameraman who'd been up all night sort of falling asleep between each of our hits, you know, waking up just on the hour to do my hit and then sort of, you know, stop. We were absolutely exhausted live and continuous broadcasting sort of makes your brain mush. But could I have gone there and not been there, not been present?
Of course you couldn't. And since that, I mean, partly why I wrote the book, you know, Airhead was I suddenly realized, if I don't write these down now, I will forget this stuff. I will forget the kind of moments that I've had that you want to really keep with you forever.
Craig Oliver: And you're known, I think, as being a presenter and an interviewer. How long did it take you to get to that? Because you must have been doing a lot of sort of basic jobs beforehand.
Emily: I mean, when you say how long did it take you to get to that, I think you don't ever get to become the interviewer that you want to become. Right? You constantly think…
Craig Oliver: I think that’s interesting, and let's develop that point. I think what it is, is there's a lot of people in journalism who think, I want to be the person sitting there asking the questions and I want to interview the famous person and I want to be the presenter. And it's like, it's a competitive thing, right? It's not easy to get to. I'm just interested in that process of getting there.
Emily: So, technically I must have started in my late 20s, 28, and I got my first job on Newsnight, which was when it kind of started changing for me, when I was 35, 36. So I mean, I suppose relatively quickly, part of that was, I think, again, helped by Hong Kong because I was allowed to make all my mistakes in a place that didn't feel very public. Clearly, it was public, but it wasn't public in having excoriating reviews or things written about you when you were just starting out. And I think that was quite important to me.
Craig Oliver And were you pushy?
Emily: I must have been. Yeah, I must have been. I mean.
Craig Oliver: I don't think it's really a bad thing.
Emily: I'm trying to think how to answer that. I guess I knew, okay, this is what I'm going to say. I tended not to say who are my role models, you know. Oh, they're brilliant. Oh, they're brilliant. Oh my God, how can I do that? I tend to look at people who I thought were doing a really crap job that I wanted to do.
And thought, oh my God, they're crap . I could do that so much better. And so it's, it's weirdly, it's the opposite of pushy. It's not that you're kind of going, I'm going to get in there and, and be that next person or be the next, you know, Kate 80, whatever. It was kind of like, why are you doing that? You are, you are uninspiring. That's not a very good interview and….
Craig Oliver: I know a lot of very successful journalists and you are definitely one of them and one thing that's in common with a lot of them is, absolutely charming company, really enjoyable. But when they go into the mode of, I'm going to get this story, I'm going to get this interview, there's a drive and determination and a focus that just really takes over.
Emily: Are you asking that?
Craig Oliver: I'm making a statement that you're allowed to comment on.
Emily: Yes, I mean, look, I think You know, I wasn't a reporter actually for very long. So, if I'm being honest about that, I didn't, I didn't bring back breaking news stories. But what I did do was cultivate or practice an art in trying to work out how to structure an interview so I got the best response.
And that's partly to do with your listening skills, and it's partly to do with your kind of emotional bravery. Like, am I going to ask this question? This feels really, really wrong, but am I going to ask it? Sometimes it is wrong, and sometimes you get away with it. So it's sort of finding that pitch as well.
Craig Oliver: Is there an example of when it's been wrong?
Emily: Um, yeah. I mean, you know, a lot of times I sort of A lot of times it has gone wrong. I mean, a classic example was when I remember doing an interview with Peter Mandelson, where I said, um, Well, everybody knows that Tony Blair wants to be the next president of the EU.
And he just stopped me and went, Oh, really, Emily? Do they? Are you very good friends with Tony Blair? Really? Because I consider myself quite a close friend and I haven't had that conversation with him recently. And so I just thought, you've got to be really careful. That was the, that was one of the earliest sort of reminders for me. You've got to be very careful in your language.
Craig Oliver: And what did you feel like at that moment? Did you sort of crumble?
Emily: Crushed. Absolutely crushed, you know. But I've done a lot of that. I mean, I remember desperately trying to find my way through. I mean, here we are again, but doing, sort of trying to be even handed about an Israeli and a Palestinian interview on the same night, on news night.
And just walking away, sobbing, and thinking, it had all gone terribly wrong, and it was my son's birthday, and why on earth had I been working anyway that night? And I sort of got a call from the rabbi's wife going, are you okay? And I thought, Oh, Jesus, that really means I've screwed things up.
Craig Oliver: You know, you're in trouble when people send you the text or ask you, are you okay?
Emily: Yeah. I mean, some of that's a little bit malevolent, I think, but, but, you know, there have definitely been places. And I suppose that's the thing that Newsnight was a very public place to make mistakes.
Craig Oliver: Let's move on to some of the big interviews you've done. And I recently re-listened to Airhead, which is your book, and it is a great book, and it's a brilliant audiobook.
It's a great book as well, but it's brilliant as an audiobook if people want to try it. And a few things I just wanted to pick up in that. You said quite early on in that, when you worry about your own publicity, just remember others are more worried about themselves. I thought that was really insightful.
Emily: That was Mark Austin, I have to say. He told me that when you go into a room, a party, everyone is constantly thinking. ‘Oh my god. You know, uh, will people have heard the interview that I did that didn't work? Or will people have read the thing that appeared on page six of the times?’ But nobody ever really thinks about anyone else's bad publicity, or that you carry your own stuff with you?
Craig Oliver: Yeah, and it, it's so interesting is as my day job by in, I sort of advise quite a lot of people and it's amazing that something that is. pretty much buried in journalistic terms that says something slightly snarky about them. They think the world is paying the same level of attention to that as they are.
Emily: Nobody else has got your Google Alert on.
Craig Oliver: Yeah, they've just forgotten it and like moved on and it is amazing how even quite short periods of time pass and actually people forget.
Emily: I'm not being funny Craig, but quite often we're trying to book politicians for the show. And we sort of shout out names and then somebody goes, Oh wait a sec, weren't they kind of done for rape? You know, and she, oh wait a sec, haven't they been, like, haven't they lost the whip through sort of like handiness and and general sort of sexual abuse? And I think, my god, if we're forgetting things like that, from our front row position of booking these people on a daily basis, then you kind of go, really? You know, are you remembering that my poppy dropped off one day and that I was sort of called, you know, unpatriotic by the mail? Like, you know, we've got to get over ourselves.
Craig Oliver: Exactly. And you've interviewed some of the most famous people of our times, including Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, Russell Brand, Simon Cowell, Emma Thompson, Gordon Ramsay, Prince Andrew. What I was struck by listening to you recount those interviews was that you were obviously interviewing them at a very specific point in time, but actually a few years later, hearing them, you’re filling in the gaps and hearing the interview with the knowledge you have now - I was just interested in you reflecting on that .
Emily: One of the things I do in the book and it was really important for me that it wasn't written as I went along, it wasn't a diary, it was written with hindsight. And written with just enough hindsight to know that actually, in five years time, you might be rewriting the story all over again. So I remember writing the chapter on Steve Bannon, who'd been like, the architect of Donald Trump's success in the 2016 election. And thinking, I don't know whether you're brilliant, I don't know whether you're a fraud, I don't know, I think, I think he'd just been convicted when it was published, you know, but wasn't actually imprisoned. And I don't know whether you're actually part of the next chapter…and now I sort of think all that is true, You know, Steve Bannon is kind of is working through the populist governments of Europe now and so you have to sort of hold those things in your head that you might write something in a snapshot moment that you don't fully understand until you step back from it.
Craig Oliver: So the three that stood out for me were Trump, Russell Brand and Bill Clinton. And what was interesting was that in all of the interviews you were doing and also writing and talking about how you were preparing for them, they were who they are now, if that makes sense, they were actually hiding in plain sight. So a bit of a cliche now, but they were there. And actually, when you with hindsight, look at them, you go, Trump, you, it was before he was President, before he was running for President, you showed absolutely everything about, you know, his not telling the truth, exaggerating, bullying, brand, like some of the stuff that he said about sexual stuff just felt deeply inappropriate, but at the time you kind of give him a break. Clinton, pre-Me Too, pretty much, really, you would probably would have interviewed him slightly differently.
Emily: I would. Um, I mean, look, that's such a big area, but yeah, I mean, I feel really relieved that I put, I include this conversation I've had with Donald Trump, which is where he lies about the size of his ballroom.
And it's about how awkward it is. I know, no, it's no euphemism. He literally lied about having the biggest ballroom in….
Craig Oliver: And this was a beauty pageant that he was running and you were invited to talk to him?
Emily: Um, no, this was the very first interview I did, which was in Trump Towers.
Craig Oliver: Oh, right, that was the second one.
Emily:Yeah, I mean, I did a few interviews with him, all for the same documentary, but the first one was right in the heart of New York. It was in Trump Towers. He was talking about the size of his ballroom in, I can't remember what it was, the Waldorf or something. And he'd made this claim about it being the biggest ballroom. And I'd gone off and checked with my producer and said, ‘Oh, I'm not sure that's right. It's wrong, isn't it?’ And we had this whole conversation about whether we were going to pull him up on that and sort of hold him accountable. And then I think the producer was like, we don't really care about the ballroom, do we? We don't really care about the size of it. We don't want to lose the next interview or sort of, you know, piss them off or anything.
And yet here we are, you know, however many years later, watching the New York court case, which is all about exaggerating the size of your assets. This is the thing that could bring Trump and his family down. There's a 250 million court case, which is literally about lying about the inflationary sort of language that he use about the values of his assets. And so part of me kind of goes, ‘Oh, would that have made any difference?’ If I'd said, I think you're lying about the ballroom.
Craig Oliver: And just sticking with Trump, like you were in the States last week, and I was listening to some of the podcasts and you were talking to the people who are persuaded by Trump and, and what was so interesting was they kind of know all this stuff, but they also seem incredibly reasonable, decent people who wanted to be hospitable and polite and thoughtful to you and yet to us, we're sort of sitting there going, Hmm. Are you kidding? How are you taken in by this?
Emily: Yeah, I think there's a massive gulf between how the UK sees Trump and how America has moved on from 2020 election results, the riots at the Capitol on January the 6th. I mean, I think maybe this is too much of a generalization, but I think a lot of Brits are stuck on that, that day, that weekend after the riots at the Capitol and the refusal by many legislatures to certify Joe Biden as the U.S President. I mean, it breaks every constitutional and democratic norm that we know. So we're stuck in a place sort of going, ‘You're kidding. You're not going back for more. You are joking.’
You know, you're about to, to revote in a guy who doesn't sort of, you know, acknowledge the democratic norms. And yet when you're on the ground, you see something totally different. The last people that we talked to before leaving were in the airport. They were young, college educated, with great jobs, with, um, real charm, and they were all Trump fans. And I suddenly thought, oh, that whole narrative of the left behind, or the economically disadvantaged, or the blue collar steelworkers, all the kind of groups of people that we talked about in the 2016 U.S. election, that's completely changed.
Craig Oliver: It's so interesting, isn't it, because The gap between now and that when you did those interviews for that documentary, it does feel like the sort of the boiling the frog kind of thing, like the heat goes up and by increments, you end up in a different place. And I thought that, you know, huge amounts of stuff about Russell Brand, you know, there's no court case against him, but you know, there's a lot of people who've come forward and that kind of thing.
It was so interesting you looking at him because you could see that he was a very, very capable adept. Manipulative person, but he also charmed you?
Emily: Completely and I think it'd be very easy wouldn't it to look back and say ‘Ha Ha, I knew all along that he was really, you know, an alleged sex offender. I knew all along that he was a liar’... but the point about all these interviews, is you're in the middle of them, you know, you're taken in, you're wowed, you're, you're listening, you're trying to understand what this person is about.
And so the interview that I did with Russell Brand, and I write about it in the book as, as one of, it was a really kind of odd and interesting and engaging clash for me because I don't think I knew about the sexual abuse. I didn't know about the sexual abuse, but I definitely knew that he'd been a womanizer. And so what was my response to him? Well..
Craig Oliver: I think he'd actually said he had sexual addiction, hadn't he?
Emily: He had, exactly. So he had a sex addiction. So I went in that interview and I kind of right, slightly as if I'm looking at it on my shoulder going, yeah, he's quite attractive, you know, he, he is charming. He's charismatic. And I think if you don't do that, then somehow you're not really being fair to a lot of the women who got swept up by him. Because you have to acknowledge that sometimes these things are complicated, you know, and that he was somebody who clearly was incredibly manipulative to the women that he was with.
Yeah. And I suppose if, you know, it's much more, it'd be quite easy for me to go, I never felt for it. I saw he was a dastardly type all along. But actually the honest truth is, of course he was.
Craig Oliver:And looking back now, do you see the clues in the answers and the questions and all that sort of stuff?
Emily: Yeah, I mean, I see something incredibly narcissistic and I think most of the time, like, narcissism should ring massive, massive alarm bells, right? If you look at, through Airhead, what so many of those people had in common was just pure undiluted narcissism.

Emily Maitlis Interview

Craig Oliver: Do you remember when I was on the stage with you towards the end of the referendum campaign? And the Brexit campaign was coming to a head and it was like, I think it was the final debate. And we were standing on a stage and there were thousands of seats about to be filled by people. And you were asking me about how it was going, to which the answer was pretty much not well.
Emily Maitlis: You knew then?
Craig Oliver: We knew that it wasn't going well, I thought we might squeak over the line, but actually that David Cameron would have to resign fairly soon afterwards because he had done so much damage to himself in the period the Conservative Party would never have accepted him, continuing going forward.
But I remember saying to you, and I think Michelle Hussain was there too, saying, look, can't you see that actually what's going on here is there's a whole load of people making a whole load of claims that just simply aren't true, um, the media is going along with this, they're putting it on their bulletins at the top. They're allowing Nigel Farage to run riot with a racist poster where he's colored the picture from white to brown with the faces on it and they're just allowing that because it's a great story that Nigel Farage is releasing a poster. Isn't that great? Let's give him as much attention as we possibly can.
Emily Maitlis: You coming up to me then, and I felt it as a telling off actually, and I wanted to sort of push back. And I sort of, I remember thinking at the time, ‘Oh my God, like Craig has properly turned into a spin doctor’, like back in your box, right? Don't start telling journalists how they should or shouldn't do their job when you're actually working for the prime minister.
And I remember feeling that very, very sort of sharply and thinking, I've got to be at one removed from that. And I would actually say that. I don't think the poster was ever shown on the BBC without that context around whether or not it was true and what it reminded people of.
Craig Oliver: There was endless acres of coverage.
Emily Maitlis: There was a lot of coverage. But I think you, from that conversation, inspired one of the things that I came to, sort of both before that, earlier and later, which was this horrible phrase, this false equivalence. And I think what I remember you telling me there that really stayed with me was that, you can't put two people on to say different things and assume that's balance if one of them is demonstrably true and factually provable, and the other is not.
And it was the first time somebody had said that out loud to me. And actually, that became a sort of centerpiece for what I talked about in the McTaggart last year, which was the lecture that I gave in Edinburgh last year, which was, we have to be so careful, not that we don't give opposing viewpoints, I think it's really important in any kind of broadcasting that you bring opposing viewpoints and bring different points of view, but that you are very careful to explain to your viewers how different one was versus the other or how factual one is compared to the opinion of another. And I suppose that was, it was a real, I didn't realize it was a turning point for me then, as I say, I was, I was quite cross, but I do actually think of that as being a really important intervention in, and I hope, I'm going to say I hope that we would do things very differently now. I'm not convinced we would.
Craig Oliver: And what was interesting was that I was endlessly felt like I was sort of shouting into a vacuum about it. And when I spoke to the BBC, they said, well, hang on a minute, look, the Leave campaign has been chosen to be the representation of that viewpoint. So when they release a story, it is our duty to put it at the top of the news.
And I was like, well, If today they're saying that the governor of the Bank of England is involved in an international conspiracy to falsify information in order to win for the Remain side, you're saying that's legitimate?
Emily Maitlis: Look, it's very complicated, isn't it? It's like when Lee Anderson says, for example, ‘Oh, let's ignore the rule of law and put the planes in the air anyway, even though the Supreme Court have declared the government's Rwanda policy unlawful,’ …do we treat that as a, as a, as a valid? For implementing the Rwanda policy or do we step back and go, here's a guy who literally doesn't understand the rule of law or care about it. And I suppose it's sort of, it's that whole thing. I mean, James O'Brien, you know, talks about interviewing Pascal Lamy from the World Trade Organization, who had every single fact at his fingertips about how world trade works, and Andrea Leadsom, who didn't.
One came from one side of the campaign and one came from the other side of the campaign. I think that that was a constant refrain of the Brexit referendum, wasn't it? That we were trying to find balance of opinion, which was not necessarily balance of fact. And the truth is that unless you are Pascal Lamy, unless you are a World Trade Organization expert, you're not necessarily going to have all that stuff at your fingertips. It was a real challenge I think for a lot of journalists
Craig Oliver:. And I suppose the flip side of that arguing against myself is like, look, there's a whole load of people, 52 percent of the population, who felt very, very differently and wanted to hear their voice and people arguing their cause.
Emily Maitlis: And didn't care about Pascal Lamy in the World Trade Organization and saw Andrea Leadsom sitting there and thought, you know, finally, here's my girl.
Craig Oliver: Another thing that's sort of related to this, but, um, I may not, you may not remember, but I remember talking to you just before you interviewed Prince Andre and you said to me, the thing that's really stuck to me was, what I'm really hoping is when I do this interview, it will encourage lots of other people to come forward and talk because it will show they can.
I'm just interested in that because it was one of the most disastrous interviews for a public figure ever. You know, it was just, it's used as a case study, as in what a mess, how not to do an interview, all that kind of thing. I'm just interested in your thoughts on that, because I think that what you were trying to do was laudable in the sense of, let's have an open, honest discussion and see where we are, but actually he just went out there and blew himself up.
Emily Maitlis: It's quite hard for a Royal, I would say that, because there isn't a lot of right reply. And so I think the one chance that he was given, which was this hour that had been okayed by the Queen, was his chance to kind of, you know, this is my, this is my moment, this is my deep breath out and I'm going to say everything that happened. And I'm not sure that he heard that interview in the same way that those of us in the room heard that interview. For him he thought that the alibis were self explanatory, that he'd sort of, you know, obviously convinced us because he couldn't sweat or because he hadn't been at the club, or he had been at Pizza Express or whatever. I think he thought things sounded very obvious.
Craig Oliver: You must have been sitting there thinking, this guy's killing himself. This guy's blowing himself up here. Or not.
Emily Maitlis: You don't allow yourself to think anything in the middle of an interview except, have I forgotten anything? Have I screwed up? Have I got my dates wrong? Did I get my names wrong? You are so paranoid about letting your own sort of research down that you don't…
Craig Oliver: Even when somebody's saying to you that can't be true because I have a physical condition, which means I can't sweat, which means you'd be dead? Are you not thinking, this is crazy…
Emily Maitlis: That was really complicated. It was, it was very complicated that because he wanted to insert that afterwards.
Craig Oliver: So what, was it recorded afterwards?
Emily Maitlis: I came back to him and I said, Is there anything that you haven't had a chance to say? And he said, ‘Oh, actually I didn't give you my alibi?’ And he then told us about the Pizza Express thing.
Craig Oliver: Just say what the Pizza Express thing was?
Emily Maitlis: He said, ‘I haven't told you about my alibi’. And we said, ‘Oh, but you know, you've answered all the questions and explained that you'd never met Virginia Dufresne.’ He said, ‘Yes, but the reason I couldn't have been there was because I was at my daughter's friend's birthday party. I was sitting in the car, you know, taking my daughter to Pizza Express and Woking’.
And we let him record that again, but it was complicated because afterwards, journalistically, I thought If we don't include it, we haven't included something that was really important for the interviewee to make known. And if we do include it, it sounds ridiculous. And so, I mean, as sort of journalistic ethics go, it was a really, really and we had to get this show off out and ready and prepped
Craig Oliver: He's asking for it to be it.
Emily Maitlis: Yeah, and it's a very, you know, it's something that I sort of, I want to throw at the journalism schools around the country, like, what would you do? Would you include it? Because, because he'd asked for it to be in, but does he get the final say? Would you not include it? Because it, clearly it was going to make him sound kind of ridiculous. And so we, we did have a sort of moral battle on our hands for that one. And in the end, we decided that actually, if we told the palace it would be part of the interview, we had to include it.
Because the most important thing for us was transparency. And for them to be absolutely, I mean, particularly in the light of the whole, you know, Diana interview fiasco, we thought we have got to be transparent. We have got to take them through every step of our working. And if we've said, is there anything you want included? And they'd said that, then we had to sort of make that part of it.
Craig Oliver: And in the communications PR kind of world, as I say, a lot of people point to that kind of interview and scare people by saying, look, this is why you shouldn't talk.What would you say to that?
Emily Maitlis: I hope we didn't make a rod for our own back on that one, because it's very easy for politicians, people in very senior positions in government to say, Oh, well, I'm not going to go with her. I'm not going to do that. Or, you know, I'm not, I'm not going to, ‘I don't want the Prince Andrew treatment’, you know. In which case, that was a really dumb thing, you know, for us to do.
Craig Oliver: No, but you were perfectly reasonable, and I think that he's only got himself to blame. But I suppose what people would say is just, look, look, just don't do it. It's, you know, it's…
Emily Maitlis: I, I think that's a shame, because I think
Craig OliverIt is a shame, yeah.
Emily Maitlis: I mean, the one thing that we really need, actually, in, in public life is a sense of openness and discourse and transparency and accountability, right? And I think, what I would say, is that he wasn't always aware, my sense was, of how things sounded. So, I would definitely say, if you're going to do an interview, practice it out loud with somebody.
Craig Oliver: And somebody who's going to actually tell you.
Emily MaitlisYeah, like they did with Prime Minister's. You know, you must have done PMQs with David Cameron. You know, try that joke out. If you can't get it, if it doesn't float, if it doesn't make anyone here laugh, don't use it.
Craig Oliver: You know, one of my catchphrases that I became known for was don't say that and it's just amazing how often you hear something and you go, don't say that, really don't say that.
Emily Maitlis: Don't say that, yeah. I mean, I'd say, you know, Craig, arguably your job has been to make my job harder. Um, everyone wants somebody as candid and as open as Prince Andrew, right? Everyone actually wants somebody who thinks that they are sitting there and telling you their truth for an hour without any kind of guile. It's sort of, you know, kind of what journalism is made for. And so I guess, you know, when you go in and you say, I'm telling ministers to say, Oh, that's, uh, disagree with the premise of the question. Yeah, I don't know. Maybe, maybe you're helping them or maybe you're covering up a bit of the truth.
Craig Oliver: And that's, look, and don't take this the wrong way, but that's a very journalistic way of looking at it. The way that I ended up looking at it was when you were in number 10, you don't realize there's an awful lot of them and there's not very many of you. And quite often, if you make one false move, you know, people will feast on it for days and you'll be reminded of it forever. So, when you see it in those terms, you start understanding why people are a bit more protective. I do think a lot of politicians take it way too far, and you listen to them and go for God's sake, just answer
Emily Maitlis: Don’t the same thing five times. Yeah. Yeah. I'm
Craig Oliver: Moving on to something else. I was slightly wary of asking this question because I think it might be misunderstood as I first say it. But I was struck, re-listening to your book, how many times interviews were about or pivoted on sex or sexual politics and that when you know…there was Brand, there's even Piers Morgan, Clinton, Harvey Weinstein's assistant. Lots and lots of the interviews actually had at their core a sense that there's an issue around this or something that actually with hindsight you've looked back and gone, ell, that's feels like the key thing. Do you know what I mean? Am I…?
Emily Maitlis: I think partly it was when it was written, um, because a lot of the interviews were around the whole Me Too time. And that was a time that we were really getting amazing interviews, actually, on Newsnight about that time. I mean, I went off and did, you know, the Chippendales in Vegas to ask them about whether they felt demeaned, uh, for their, sort of, you know, work being poured by women, uh, audiences. And I did, I never did Harvey Weinstein, but I did Harvey Weinstein's lawyer
Craig Oliver: His assistant.
Emily Maitlis: And I did his assistant exactly. And I talked to Emma Thompson about that. And I obviously talked to Russell Brand and the Clinton thing. I mean, look, let's not confuse things. Sex is about power. Right? That's what we're really talking about here.
We're talking about abuse of power, right? And so much goes back to that. So when you say, ‘Oh, God, a lot of sex in that book’, whatever, not that you did say that, but I'm saying, It's not really about sex. It's about trying to understand the relationship between, you know, exactly that.
Craig Oliver: And I thought that it felt to me there's a lot of sexual politics in there. Even to the extent of you sitting, thinking, I've got an interview with Bill Clinton and I don't know if I can talk to him about Monica Lewinsky because he might blow up at me. I actually think now you would think I couldn't do an interview with him without mentioning it.
Emily Maitlis: A hundred percent. And I should have done in that one. Quite frankly, I should have done. You know, I look back and I, cause I, I'm, I'm not a brave person physically. I'm, I'm really pathetic, but generally in an interview, I don't pull my punches. And so that was an example of where I was actually embedded. I mean, sorry, forgive the verb, but, you know, with the Clinton campaign, we were in the middle of a, of a sort of goat farm in Lucknow in Uttar Pradesh in India. So I didn't have a lot of autonomy to make the interview about Monica Lewinsky.
Craig Oliver: And what? You feared, what, that they were actually literally going to physically take the tape and say you can't run this.
Emily Maitlis: They did say that. They said, ‘the President's had a funny turn’. so if there's anything that happens on the tape we'll be taking that. And I heard in that phrase, ‘funny turn’, a whole host of things. You know, the Americans are very good at euphemism.
Craig Oliver: Was this funny turn, like, if I'm worried that you're going to talk to me about something I don't want to talk about?
Emily Maitlis :They didn't say that out loud.
Craig Oliver: But you think that was the…
Emily Maitlis: Yes, I think they said, they said, oh, you know, the President's not very well. Um, he had a very bad night. Uh, if it was anyone else, you know, if it wasn't you, if it wasn't the BBC, I'd have pulled this interview straight away, but I'm very cognizant that you've come, you know, 3, 000 miles, blah, blah, blah, blah.
But If anything happens, we're going to pull the tape. And it's surprising how little autonomy you have in that situation. You can't sort of have a hissy fit when you're standing on a goat farm in Uttar Pradesh, you know, surrounded by the President’s security people. And so I put that in the book as an example of every journalist who's in the position of kind of watching these, ‘God damn it, I ordered the cold red’, you know, every, every journalist wants to have that moment where they think they've got through because Hollywood will tell you, you just got to ask it anyway. Sometimes you can't. Sometimes you physically can't, and sometimes you come away slightly crushed and feeling pathetic and weak because you didn't get to ask the question you wanted to, and that really hurts. And actually, it's better if journalists starting out know about those moments of disappointment as opposed to kind of going, everything ends in a Prince Andrew moment. You know?
Craig Oliver: Definitely. And you say at the beginning of the book, Airhead, that TV simplifies.
Emily Maitlis: Yeah.
Craig Oliver:And I think that was so true. That was my experience working in television. Even the full length of the 10 o'clock news is not even the front page of the Times in terms of word count. And so inevitably, you get drawn to the extreme. You get drawn to the binary, black and white, up or down, left or right. And it perhaps, I think, has that allowed to catalyze some of the worst excesses of populism and that kind of thing? Has it been an unwitting fool in that kind of side of things? Or do you think that's too extreme?
Emily Maitlis: Are there limitations to television? Yes, of course there are. Do we tend to reduce things to a single snapshot or a phrase? You know, a lot of journalism is guilty of that. Is populism about more than that? I think it is. I think it's about bad actors.
Craig Oliver: No, no, but I'm just interested if it's contributed to it
Emily Maitlis: I think, and by populism, I don't mean popular policies or popular politicians, I mean people who are actively trying to subvert often democratic norms or guardrails, institutional guardrails of a country to get in power and to maintain power. I mean, that's what I'm talking about when I put populism out there. I think populism is fiendishly clever. at getting people to a place where things can be reduced to much more simple phrases, three word phrases or simple ideas, and I don't know that that's necessarily about television.
Craig Oliver: You also quote Michelle Obama, um, talking about dealing with being in the gutter of populism, and she said, ‘When they go low, we go high.’ And then you also say, I want that to be true. I want that to be true, but I'm not really sure that it is. Can you reflect a bit on that?
Emily Maitlis: I keep coming back to that. I think this is a, I mean, I remember her saying it. I remember watching her say it. Um, it was just before it was during the democratic convention, Philadelphia and she coined this fantastic phrase. When they go low, we go high. Meaning, you know, when people act without dignity or without decency, we show them how it's done. And of course. You know, you can hear the kind of all right, but then I sort of start thinking about and I was like, Well, that's a lovely, lovely, warm, cuddly thought. I wonder if it's true. You know, I wonder, actually, if the people who are not at the extremes have to just play a bit harder, have to fight a bit harder.
Craig Oliver: It's a poem by William Butler Yeats, which is often quoted, which is the second coming. And in it, he says…
Emily Maitlis: The things fall apart that seem to kind of hold.
Craig Oliver That's the famous quote from it, but he also says, The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. And that rings true as well, doesn't it? Like, the passionate intensity.
Emily Maitlis: I think it's about muscularity. You know, very few people have the sort of muscular turn of phrase. to actually say, I think you'll find that's bullshit, right? And actually, maybe more people should say that because, just because you aren't an extremist, just because you don't like to deal in sort of conspiracy or batshit theoretical, doesn't mean that you have to be sort of mealy mouth with your sense of expression or terribly gentle about whether you ever call something out or criticize something and I think, I think maybe, yeah, we could do with a few more people who sort of work in truth, who, who speak a bit more bluntly.
Craig Oliver: I think it's often, you're arguing for moderation, you're arguing for balance, you're arguing for let's have a sensible grown up conversation. And actually that's quite a hard thing to argue when everybody's screaming and shouting. It's quite boring.
Emily Maitlis: You know, who are you going to go to, you know, listen to, listen to the Trump rally or listen to the Biden rally? Right? That's the problem we have. I mean, going back to your point about television and single moments and populism. Of course, you know, that was the mistake many of us made in 2016. All the noise came from the Trump campaign. So who do you want to follow? Who do you want to listen to? Who do you want to be wrangling about?
You know, it wasn't Hillary Clinton then because she sounded actually quite dull, you know, on the stump. It was fine. It was great. It was quite dull.
Craig Oliver: I want to move on to something that's really personal about the stalking. And I don't, I really don't want to relive it and I don't think it's appropriate and all of that kind of thing. But I just wanted to talk about some of the things that you learned from that because I think they're really interesting. And you talk about, um, having someone obsess about you for decades must, you know, is a terrible cross to bear. A desperate, abusive form of behavior that takes over when the aggressor has nothing left.
But the most interesting thing that I thought was that when you were describing it was, he is also a victim in this. He's mentally unwell. He's wasted his life on this. And I'm sure that would never have been his attention if he'd been of sound mind. And what I really appreciated about that was that you had had something truly terrible happening to you for a very, very, very long period of time. But you had the capacity to sort of step out of yourself and say, yes, I can see he's a victim too.
Emily Maitlis: Look, I think of this person as having kind of lost his whole life over this, quite frankly. So of course I feel, I feel empathetic to that. I mean, I think the trouble with stalking is that in our heads it sounds sort of celebrity related or glamorous or somehow, you know to do sort of dark streets and high heels and most stalking is nothing to do with that. It's just to do with with an obsessional illness in the head of the person, and actually we're getting much better at recognizing mental health and all its myriad forms now.
And I think we've got to find a different word for stalking, which is much more to do with, yeah, I mean some, you know, his brain wasn't working properly.
Craig Oliver: And what is that? Is that like just a loop that just goes round and round in his head that he can't break out of, do you think? Is that what it is?
Emily Maitlis: You don't know, I guess.I don't know. I mean, I know that you don't just need a prison system. You need a psychiatric system. And at the moment, we're really, really hard pushed, you know, to find enough mental health for, you know, not least all the really many, many thousands of kids in this country now who are. Suffering and having a really hard time with their own mental health that I feel, you know, very strongly about.
Craig Oliver: And you've done that on the News Agents podcast and you took some time to say that there are a young generation is really suffering and it's got particular mental health problems. I mean, obviously you find it upsetting the kind of traditional older person, pull yourself together, be resilient, you're a bunch of snowflakes type thing.
But what would you say to those people who say that? You know, we had it tough too. Why aren't you pulling yourself together? What is it specifically about now, and I agree with you, that young people have that?
Emily Maitlis: I don't know. I mean, that's what I find most difficult. You know, if you ask ten experts, one would say it's a Covid thing, one would say it's a social media thing, one would say it's a high pressure thing, one would say it was a snowflake thing. I don't know. You know, I wish that we could sort of point to something in the water, which would just explain this. So I wish we could find the link like the one between tar and cigarettes and cancer to kind of go, ‘Oh, that's it’. Fantastic. I don't think we know. That's what worries me the mos,t because I think I look at such different kids from different backgrounds, different sexes, different levels of addiction, social media or otherwise. And I think. I don't know. I don't know, really.
Craig Oliver: You've been incredibly generous with your time. We're coming to the end now. The one question we always ask people at the end is if there was one piece of wisdom that you could pass on, what would it be? What would yours be?
Emily Maitlis: I have raised my boys on three nuggets of wisdom. Never go to a party on a boat. There is no escape. When they start playing Oops upside your head, it's time to leave a wedding. And if a man of a certain age quotes poetry at you and asks who it is, it's always Rudyard Kipling.
Craig Oliver: Why is that?
Emily Maitlis:I don't know. Try me out. Honestly, it's always Rudyard Kipling. And if they find another line and ask again, it's still Richard Kipling.
Craig Oliver: And you are, you're raising, the early bit of that, you're talking about your kids getting, being in parties and that kind of thing. Is that, be careful, watch out, there's risk out there…
Emily Maitlis: Oh no, it's just that you get trapped on boats, you know. Yeah, but like….Everyone understands this, right? Your producer Paul is nodding along. I, I, I grew up, I sort of came of social age in Hong Kong where everyone had junk trips, which is a wonderful thing for about the first hour of the night. And then it gets cold and dark and people drink too much and they kind of throw up and they get letchy and I was just like, Jesus, never go to party on a boat. It's very important to me. And maybe that's something much more profound. Escape routes are really important to me. Yes. You know, I, I, maybe it's a PTSD thing, but I kind of, you know, even if I come into a carol concert, I'm trying to work out where the exits are, you know, just in case something happens.
Craig Oliver: I'm going to give you an escape route now and say thank you very much.
That was brilliant.
Emily Maitlis: I didn't mean that, but thank you.