In the space of two hours, journalist Yalda Hakim covers a world’s worth of territory: wars in Ukraine, Darfur, Iraq and Afghanistan; Islamic State, the Taliban, the situation in Israel-Gaza. Until recently, Hakim was the BBC news channel’s chief presenter. This month, Sky launches a nightly international news show – she’s the face. “The BBC is traditional,” she says of the move, “as establishment as it gets for decisions, process and bureaucracy. I stayed for 11 years. I loved my time there. But I believe in reinvention.” Weeks before we meet, she’d been in Jerusalem – her first gig on new turf. Hakim finished up at the Beeb on 6 October, the day before violence flared in the region. Flying into the action felt far more comfortable than being off air, blissed-out at a private member’s club country house as she was when the story was breaking. “It was such grim news, of course,” she says, “but it felt so strange to not be working on it. I didn’t know what to do with myself.”
It’s no surprise that Hakim is an authoritative voice on global affairs. At 40, she’s part of a new generation of broadcasting big hitters. What’s striking, however, are the stories she opts to tell during our lunch: the names she recalls; the details remembered. Each anecdote centres on the so-called ordinary people she’s met during nearly 20 years in the field. There’s the heroic paragliding divorcee in Mosul, murdered by Islamic State for resisting their rise. An afternoon standing graveside with a grieving woman in Kurdish-controlled Syria, who sang for her lost child. How on one trip, five months after her own son was born, she left bags of her freshly pumped breast milk with a fleeing young mother.
