She shamed the Prime Minister by waving a £20 note in front of him on TV but political interviewer Kathryn Samson has revealed she almost backed out of the stunt.
STV’s Westminster correspondent said her plan to shock Boris Johnson over his £20-a-week Universal Credit cut could have backfired but she went for it anyway.
Kathryn, 37, said: “You sometimes have to be fearless when you are interviewing people and that interview was one of those occasions.
“I knew I wanted to ask about Universal Credit and about what was going on at the Scotland Office.
“My friend said, ‘What do you think £20 means to Boris Johnson?’
“I thought if I got a £20 note, maybe I could do something with that – and then, could I actually pull it off?
“So I hid the £20 under my notepad and decided just to see how I felt about doing it on the day.”
Stirling-born Kathryn had to summon all her bravery to go ahead with her plan, which she hoped would not only be visually powerful but catch Johnson off guard.
She said: “Everyone was going to be asking about Universal Credit that day. I was trying to get a more creative response – not just stock answers, something a bit different.
“After the interview, he looked slightly shell-shocked.”
Kathryn asked the PM how many £20 notes would buy a peerage and what the money meant to him – suggesting perhaps a cocktail at the Tory party conference or a taxi ride?
She said for many families the £20 extra cash was the difference between being able to heat their home or not.
The interview received more than half a million tweets on Twitter alone and snippets were shown on Good Morning Britain.
Now Kathryn has been named as the Royal Television Society’s Nations and Regions Presenter of the Year and has received praise from BBC political editor Laura Kuenssberg and Channel 4 News presenter Cathy Newman.
Kathryn said: “One of the things that was said when I received the award was that I put the human interest into politics.
“Cathy Newman was presenting my award and Laura Kuenssberg gave me a hug when I came off the stage.
"These women inspired me to do what I do and I hope I can inspire others.”
The interview took place at the Conservative Party conference in October last year when Kathryn was invited for what would be her third one-to-one interview with the PM.
At the time, an uplift of Universal Credit that had been introduced to help low-income families at the start of the pandemic was coming to an end.
Unelected Tory donor Malcolm Offord, now Lord Offord of Garvel, had also just been made a peer and minister in the Scotland Office.
Kathryn said: “With an interview like that, you’ve only got one shot. You are given five minutes and, if you go over that time, someone is tapping you on the shoulder, pulling you out.
“A classic technique of politicians is they will try to talk you out of time – talk for a long time in their first answer and, by the time you get to the fourth minute, you haven’t asked this or this. So you have to meticulously plan.”
Kathryn’s interview led to her receiving praise from across the world.
The award she received was based on her past year of work, which included the first broadcast interview with SNP MP Amy Callaghan as she fought her way back to health after a stroke aged just 28.
She was also praised for her coverage of last year’s Holyrood elections.
Her decision to become a journalist was shaped by her childhood memory of the TV news coverage of the Dunblane school shootings in 1996, in which 16 P1 children and a teacher were killed.
Kathryn said: “I remember watching Lorraine Kelly reporting from Dunblane. I would have been about 11 and I remember she had a way of communicating where, even as a young child, it hit home and stuck in my mind.
“It was my first experience of TV news coverage and, specifically, the people I thought were doing it well. I remember Eamonn Holmes as well.
“It made me start to think about what I wanted to do as a career.”
Kathryn went to Stirling High School before studying English and history at Glasgow University, then broadcast journalism at Cardiff University.
Her first job was a producer, working behind the scenes with the news team at BBC Scotland.
She moved to ITV as a news reporter, working for Tyne Tees during the run-up to the 2014 referendum on
Scottish independence.
She joined STV as Westminster correspondent in 2019.
She said: “In the space of a few months, I had watched Theresa May resign in tears, the leadership election was held, then we had Boris Johnson.
“It was a real baptism of fire but, if you can get through that, it builds your confidence about doing the job.”
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