It would have been 2018, I think, when I started to get messages that Huw Edwards wanted to meet me. He had started boxing, was starting to look a bit buff, and apparently was interested in contributing in some way to the magazine I was editing at the time, GQ. As well as being a features magazine that focussed on Hollywood and Westminster, we were, in many eyes, a barometer of style and fitness; lots of men convened with the brand because they wanted to know what clothes to wear, and how to keep their body in the right shape in order to show these clothes off to their best advantage.
Edwards was obviously proud of his new body, and seemed interested in getting it into GQ. As I remember, he was keen to write about his fitness regime, but seemed coy about posing topless. I said that if he was going to write about it, then he needed to show our readers how it had manifested itself. In one breath he was desperate to show off his body, but in the next seemed embarrassed by the very thought of it. There seemed to be an internal switch that he was flicking on and off, almost as if he were trying to break it.
There was a palpable sense of denial about his behaviour; he seemed conflicted in a fundamental way.
Because of the attention surrounding Edwards at the moment, there has understandably been a rush among journalists to turn any fleeting interaction into a fully blown psychological assassination. My own dealings with him only lasted a few months, and, wary of amplifying this to an unsavoury level, for a while I demurred. Thinking about it repeatedly however, I came to a different conclusion.
Having been formally introduced to Edwards by text we arranged to have lunch, in the elegant and rather clandestine dining room of The Beaumont Hotel near our old offices in Mayfair. I can’t remember who paid, although I’m fairly sure it was me. He was quite unlike I thought he’d be, and because of this I found him quite intriguing. The first thing I thought was, this is a man who defines himself as “talent” rather than a journalist. He was playful, but quite camp, and seemed quite a luvvie. He gossiped meaningfully, drank seriously, and swore like a squaddie.
Here was an obviously conflicted man who was very different in person than how he appeared on screen
Conversationally, the lunch was a game of two halves: on the one hand he consistently lambasted the BBC for not taking him seriously enough, was highly critical of various bold-faced colleagues he obviously despised… and on the other I spent my half of the chat attempting to get him to write about media and politics. Was I interested in his fitness regime? Well, sort of, but he obviously had an awful lot to get off his chest and I thought the very least he could do was to start to write about it in Britain’s (then) most successful men’s magazine.
In the end, Huw didn’t appear in GQ as we couldn’t agree on terms, although I thought about our lunch for months afterwards. Here was an obviously conflicted man who was very different in person than how he appeared on screen. He seemed completely tormented, a man who was not happy in his skin. I discussed this at length with an ex-BBC executive who had also found him odd. Edwards seemed to want to tell the world that he wasn’t as people thought he was, but then self-aware enough to know that his actual persona might not chime as well with people as the one they saw every night on TV.
Last year, when things got complicated for him, I was, again like many, careful not to rush to judgement, as the circumstances looked complex to say the least. Since then, obviously, I have had to change my mind, as my sympathy for the victims has superseded my pity for the fallen man. The story is sad, puzzling, and ultimately pathetic. Here is a man who was obviously hiding in plain sight. And Huw Edwards is guilty, as he says so himself.
