For many listeners to Radio 4, the broadcaster and journalist Edward Stourton, who has died aged 68 of prostate cancer, epitomised all that they valued most about the BBC. His voice was authoritative, unflappable and unmistakably posh, even stately; his questioning in interviews courteous but incisive; and his range of knowledge and insight unimpeachable.
These were all reasons why when Stourton – always known as Ed – was unexpectedly effectively sacked from presenting the Today programme in 2008 that there was such a backlash from newspapers, especially of the right, and the programme’s devoted followers. This was caused not least by the corporation’s brusque and clumsy handling of the ending of his contract, about which he was informed while away from the office by a Daily Mail journalist ringing up to ask him whether it was true.
It was the perception that his dismissal was because of his somewhat patrician manner, rather borne out by a programme editor’s assertion that “he does not make your pulse race”, that caused the uproar. Many listeners did not want their pulses set racing more than they already were by the morning’s news, and the network’s hierarchy were taken aback when he refused to shake hands with the manager who belatedly delivered the bad news to him in person. He might be “Posh Ed” to some, but his gentility had its limits.
It was not the first time Stourton had been moved – a decade earlier he had been shifted from the lunchtime television news to Today – but ultimately the furore gave him a fresh scope to freelance: presenting other programmes for the BBC and writing a series of books, several on his other presiding interest, religion, particularly Catholicism, his own faith.
He told the Daily Telegraph in 2023: “It never really occurred to me that I might have to apologise for who I am or make myself different in some way.”
Stourton’s background was unequivocally privileged. He was born in Lagos, Nigeria, the eldest of four children of Nigel Stourton, an executive with British American Tobacco and a member of a family whose barony dated back to the middle ages, and his wife, Jenny (nee Abbott), and had a peripatetic childhood following his father’s postings to Switzerland and Malta.
He was then educated at Catholic boarding schools, including the Benedictine foundation Ampleforth, whose headmaster Basil Hume later became the cardinal archbishop of Westminster. Stourton became head boy and played rugby for the school team. In later life he was haunted by revelations of child abuse at the school, of which he had no knowledge at the time.
Proceeding to Trinity College, Cambridge, he studied English, became president of the union debating society, edited a student newspaper called Rampage, and became lifelong friends with a coterie of figures including Charles Moore, later editor of the Daily Telegraph, the future magazine executive Nicholas Coleridge, and the Tory MPs Oliver Letwin and Andrew Mitchell. His first wife, Margaret McEwen, who he married in 1980, was the daughter of a baronet.
On graduation he was initially turned down by the BBC, whose interviewer, the future executive John Birt, told him that “frankly, it would be a waste of the postage stamp” to tell him he had failed. Stourton went instead to the rival ITN as a news trainee. An early assignment as a producer was to help organise coverage of the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer.
His ascent was rapid: he was recruited as a founder member of the Channel 4 news team in 1982 and became its first Washington correspondent in 1986 at the age of 27, covering the final years of the Reagan presidency. The first switch between channels followed when he was made BBC TV’s Paris correspondent – he spoke fluent French from his Swiss childhood and was an expert skier – then back to ITN as diplomatic editor for three years (1990-93) before returning to the BBC as a presenter of the One O’clock television news.
His unflappability as a broadcaster was not in doubt: Anne Perkins, a colleague at Channel 4, recalls him reporting in pouring rain and filling time on air while endlessly waiting for former hostages to emerge from an RAF flight bringing them back to Britain.
Reporting on the Bosnian war he was nearly killed by a sniper, whose shot passed between him and his cameraman through the window of a car in which they were travelling. As a broadcaster he was able to convey complex issues concisely and coherently and could be sent anywhere in the knowledge that he would deliver the story precisely. “Appearing on television should be like having sex: you should do it 2.5 times a week,” he jocularly remarked. He witnessed the red flag being lowered on Moscow’s Red Square, marking the end of the Soviet Union, in 1991 and the release of Nelson Mandela from prison in South Africa in 1990.
Back in London he was shifted to become one of the presenters of Today in 1999 with an initial contract for 50 shows a year, latterly reaching more than 110. He was genial, but, as he said, “you don’t spend 10 years on the Today programme without a measure of monsterishness”. One of his editors, Rod Liddle, wrote that, on air, “he was possessed of a courtly and disarming interviewing manner from which occasionally a cunning stiletto would emerge”. He did not react when a chippy John Prescott tried to distract him by calling him Eddie.
His style though did not suit a more demotic trend at the BBC. His former editor at ITN, Stewart Purvis, told me: “Ed had a strong natural authority of a sort that previous generations such as Sandy Gall all had, but his poshness became a disadvantage.”
Radio was evidently his milieu, though he continued to make television documentaries. His time as a reporter on the BBC Two foreign affairs series Correspondent came to an end when he fell in love with the show’s producer Fiona Murch, leading to divorce from his first wife and marriage to Murch in 2002.
He was saddened but philosophical that his remarriage meant he was no longer allowed to receive communion at mass. He remained a Catholic, though a non-practising one: “I cannot quite shake off the idea that life is a journey with a moral destination … My attachment to Catholicism owes much more to a sense that it is a good guide to this life than to any conviction that it is a passport to the next,” he wrote in his memoir Confessions (2023).
There were documentary series for radio and television including Absolute Truth (1998) for BBC Two on the Catholic church, and regular appearances as presenter of Sunday, the Radio 4 religious news programme, until very recently. He also wrote books, some linked to television series: In the Footsteps of St Paul in 2004, a biography of Pope John Paul II (2006) and others including It’s a PC World (2008) about political correctness, in which he disclosed that the queen mother had told him that the EU was run by “huns, wops and dagos” – ghastly old bigot, he added.
Stourton was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2014 and spoke regularly about the illness. Fiona survives him, along with the three children from his first marriage, Ivo, Eleanor and Tom, and a stepdaughter, Rosie.
• Edward John Ivo Stourton, broadcaster, born 24 November 1957; died 18 July 2026
