In the same week that Britain’s first female chancellor arrived at HM Treasury to a round of applause, Kirsty Wark left the BBC’s Newsnight after more than 30 years as one of its presenters, her departure marked by tributes from Tony Blair, Gordon Brown – and Jan Ravens, whose famous impersonation of Wark (“more on that story later”) turns her Scottish consonants into a kind of verbal pibroch.
Doubtless the chancellor is too busy with her red boxes for TV just now, but as Wark did her best to maintain an expression of delighted scepticism during the politicians’ encomia, I looked on and wondered if Rachel Reeves’ career would have been possible, or even half so easy, had Wark not spent the last three decades asking difficult men – and rather fewer difficult women – awkward questions. As soaring role models go, she has been the best: a smiling assassin in stripes and excellent earrings whose Instagram account reveals – here’s the real miracle – a hinterland as wide as the Firth of Clyde (she reads, she cooks, she darns socks).
