For a moment after Mishal Husain’s Today programme interview with the home secretary, James Cleverly, on Tuesday morning there was a stunned silence in the editing gallery outside the studio.
“It felt quite surreal. I wasn’t really expecting the word ‘shit’ to be said so many times,” says Owenna Griffiths, the Today programme’s editor. “Often I’ll pick up with the presenter immediately to discuss whether it went well or badly, but Mishal and I both sat there in silence for about a minute because it had taken such an unexpected turn.”
The interview attracted plenty of attention. “BBC Today presenter turns the airwaves blue,” the Times noted, while Metro declared: “BBC presenter swears 7 times in 54 seconds during live broadcast.”
In the 10-and-a-half years since Husain took a job at the Today programme, the first non-white woman to join the male-dominated team, she has quietly earned a reputation as one of the country’s most formidable political interviewers. Fellow broadcasters admire her precision – and politicians admit that the prospect of facing her questions makes them uneasy.
This week’s preoccupation with the swearing misses the most impressive section of the interview: her devastating unpicking of the government’s triumphant new year claim to have met its pledge to clear the asylum backlog. With characteristic calm, Husain revealed that when the government trumpeted its success in processing 92,000 legacy asylum claims (asylum claims lodged before June 2022) this meant something quite different from actually resolving those claims.
Cleverly started out scrupulously polite until irritation kicked in. When Husain remarked that an average of 500 people arrived by small boat every week last year, he said her calculations were wrong and accused her of “applying retrospective maths”.
When she moved on to question why he had found himself repeatedly in trouble for ill-judged comments – his weird joke about spiking his wife’s drinks with a date rape drug, reports he had described the government’s Rwanda policy as “batshit”, and a possible description of Stockton on Tees as a “shithole” – Cleverly spent some time petulantly conceding that he had called an MP “shit” in parliament but denying that he had insulted an entire constituency.
Husain said: “Other people said they heard you saying it.”
“They couldn’t have. I only said one thing. That’s not how science works,” Cleverly said, with a perplexing flash of mansplaining.
James O’Brien from the rival station LBC tweeted: “Just let Mishal Husain do *all* the interviews.”
Her colleague Nick Robinson says senior politicians are trained to “fill the time with obfuscation”, and to get listeners on their side by suggesting to the audience that the presenter is “not being fair, not letting them have their say, interrupting them”.
But, he says, Husain’s “cool, calm, precise style” does not permit that trick. “With her, someone in power is held to account in a way that is courteous and persistent. It’s about the wielding of the scalpel not the bloodshed.”
Sajid Javid, who has been interviewed by her several times in different cabinet roles and admits experiencing pre-interview nerves, empathised with Cleverly.
He says: “It’s always better to be interviewed by someone who doesn’t know what they’re talking about. The harder interviews are always those with people who’re very smart, who’ve done their homework, are well-read. Mishal is 100% in that category. She’s bloody good at her job.”
A Labour adviser says experienced politicians appreciate her ego-free, policy-led approach, with “no silliness, no random interruption for the sake of it”. They say: “If you’re not on your game, it’s awful, but for legitimate reasons. But step up and be on it, and they can be valuable interviews for both sides.”
Jon Sopel, who hosts The News Agents podcast, is a former colleague and friend of Husain’s who often meets her for walks with his dog on Hampstead Heath. He says: “A number of male presenters, potentially myself included at times, might go in and try and wing it. She’s incredibly hard working. Her lack of flashiness, lack of performance is great.”
Husain cycles to work through the deserted streets of north London at 3.30am, bringing a packed breakfast of overnight oats. The job involves intense discipline, overshadowing normal family routines. She tries not to chat to her husband if he comes home from work any later than about 7pm on the nights before a shift.
She is emerging from the most complex years of juggling full-time work and parenting three sons, with one starting university, and her twin boys sitting A-levels. She survived, she wrote in her recent book, The Skills – How to Win at Work, a guide for women on developing their careers, because she “married a decent human being”. Her husband, Meekal Hashmi, is a lawyer “who pulls his weight at home”.
Born in Northampton to a journalist mother and doctor father who had emigrated from Pakistan, Husain moved to the United Arab Emirates when she was two, when her father got work there.
She returned to England for boarding school and later studied law at Cambridge University before becoming a BBC World anchor. She is finishing a new book about her family in India and Pakistan, tracing their story from empire to independence.
The Today programme has changed dramatically during her time. Before she started it was rare for the agenda-setting 8.10am interview to be done by a woman, and an estimated 84% of reporters and guests on the show were men.
In 2010 the programme’s then editor said it was hard to find women to join the team, noting: “It’s an incredibly difficult place to work. We are not in the position yet when we have looked around and seen women we want to bring in now.”
Her former colleague John Humphrys once asked her if she had been hired on television for her good looks.
Now such attitudes would be unthinkable, in some part due to her flawless record, but Husain is still confronted with a subtler sexism.
She was recently described as “fragrant” in a Daily Mail column, and is often characterised as having a big-sisterly, head-girlish or teacherly – rather than simply professional – tone.
One male minister, hoping to compliment her style, said: “She has a certain feline quality of questioning, which can be beguiling.”
One colleague says they wondered if Cleverly’s responses this week to Husain betrayed a dislike of being taken to task by a woman, and questioned whether the home secretary would have told a male interviewer to “do better research” or attempted to instruct a man “how science works”.
“There’s still an underlying issue around women asking men hard questions, there’s often a perception that you are upbraiding them,” the colleague says. Friends say she rolls her eyes at these irritations but mentors younger female colleagues.
Husain was called in to work when the queen was dying and announced her death on Radio 4. She was presenting on the morning of 7 October as news of the Hamas attack on Israel broke.
Andrea Catherwood, presenter of Radio 4’s Feedback, says: “There are very few presenters who don’t get caught up with the adrenalin of the moment, who don’t get a little excited. She doesn’t do that; there’s no showbusiness side to her.”
Covering the current Israel-Gaza conflict has proved challenging. In October the former editor of the Sun Kelvin MacKenzie criticised her “hostile” interview with a spokesperson for Benjamin Netanyahu, saying: “Suspect it’s difficult for Ms Husain [to be] impartial when you are a Muslim and in your household you view it as your ‘people’ being attacked. So why does the BBC put forward Ms Husain for these interviews?”
Nick Robinson says he is aware that she has faced some difficult online trolling. “I suspect she’s had a lot of grief, but being the person she is, she never mentions it,” he says.
Will Husain’s political interviews play an agenda-setting role in the election? The Today programme lost 800,000 listeners in the past year, its worst performance since 2007.
Giles Kenningham, the former No 10 head of press who runs the media consultancy firm Trafalgar Strategy, questions whether politicians will always feel obliged to subject themselves to the grilling. He says: “They’re spoilt for choice; they’ve got their own platforms – Youtube, TikTok. Will the Today programme shape the agenda as much as it has in the past? The landscape has changed.”
In The Skills, Husain advocates taking a five-year-plan approach to life, compiling lists of roles, titles and salaries you want to reach. Already one of the BBC highest earners (£315,000 – £319,999), she turned 50 last year, her younger children will soon leave home, and friends say she is wondering what to take on next.
BBC insiders expect her to play an important election role, but her life plan is likely to include bigger goals.
Additional reporting by Kiran Stacey
