Stephen Sackur makes no bones about it: he is not going willingly. “I don’t want to leave the BBC, because I still think I’ve got a lot to offer,” the HARDtalk presenter tells me. “And I don’t want the programme to be closed, but that argument has been definitively lost. I’m thinking hard about other things I’m going to do. I’m fine. I’m feeling quite positive.” Maybe. But I think he’s also feeling hurt, betrayed and, though he denies it, a little angry. “It’s definitely a strange period,” he says. We’re talking in February, a month before the show finishes and he’s sent packing by the Beeb.
Sackur, 61, is a BBC lifer. He started out as a trainee in 1986, was made a foreign correspondent in 1990, and went on to some of the biggest gigs in journalism – Europe, Washington, the Middle East. For the past 19 years, he’s hosted HARDtalk, the interview show that holds global power to account. The BBC has always lauded it as a flagship programme – thrice weekly, regularly watched in more than 200 countries by up to 70 million people (and, he reckons, with the podcast and World Service radio versions that figure could rise to 170 million). Which is why he got such a shock when he was told in October that it was being pulled.
As you might expect, Sackur has not taken the end of the show lying down. After the announcement, he put out a message on X, explaining why it was sad for him personally but more importantly a depressing day for the BBC.
He made his point in a series of uncompromising posts. “At a time when disinformation and media manipulation are poisoning public discourse HARDtalk is unique: a long-form interview show with only one mission – to hold to account those who all too often avoid accountability in their own countries,” he wrote. “Anyone who has seen our interviews with Hugo Chávez, Sergey Lavrov, Meles Zenawi, Lula, Nancy Pelosi, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Emmanuel Macron, Imran Khan, Olusegun Obasanjo and countless others over the years will know HARDtalk was never just another news show. A brilliant team of producers and researchers is being disbanded … My commitment to rigorous exploration of world affairs won’t change. I hope the BBC’s doesn’t either.” Hardly a humble assessment of HARDTalk or his own career, but a fair one.
We’re in Sackur’s lovely kitchen – stylish, hi-tech, posh coffee machine on the countertop, gorgeous contemporary art on the walls. He asks where I’d like to sit. The sofa looks good, I say. But he’s already moving towards the table, turning the kitchen into an improvised HARDtalk studio. He sits one side, I’m opposite – the format he’s used to. It’s astonishing how many world leaders have subjected themselves to his interrogations, wrongly assuming they can best him in debate.
He is a tall, thin man, straight as an ironing board, with strong arms and a military bearing – undoubtedly officer class. Sackur’s style of interviewing is forensic and barristerial. Rather than getting interviewees to open up, it’s more about putting the case for the prosecution, and watching them squirm or try to worm their way out of it. And he can gets great lines from guests. In 2009, Boris Johnson, then mayor of London, told him that the £250,000 a year he received for writing a weekly newspaper column was “chicken feed” – a quote that has stuck.
Sackur tells me he’s not taking voluntary redundancy, which he has been offered, because there is nothing voluntary about it. If the BBC is giving him the old heave-ho, it can at least do it honestly. You’re forcing them to make you redundant? “Yes. I suppose it’s a little bit of obstinacy and just saying: ‘OK, well, you think very hard. You’ve got a journalist here who’s got a lot of experience, who probably has a longer track record of covering international affairs than almost anybody in the BBC.’ I have pretty good contacts, know a lot of people in a lot of places. If they decide that’s not what they want and need, that’s fine, but I’d like them to be clear about that.”
Although the HARDtalk budget had been cut in recent years, there was no suggestion that it would be axed. He says he only had one proper conversation with the director-general, Tim Davie, in five years, and that went positively. “I rang him up when he got the job and I said: ‘I just want to say hi and well done.’ And he said: ‘It’s great to talk to you. I appreciate how important HARDtalk is, particularly in terms of our international offer and profile. I look forward to coming down and seeing the team,’ which he never did. He invited me to a gathering of journalists from different parts of the BBC, but otherwise I’ve never spoken or heard from him again. And, since the closure announcement, I’ve not heard a word.”
A few weeks after the decision was taken, Sackur says, he was invited to a meeting with BBC’s head of news, Deborah Turness. “It didn’t yield a change of mind or any hint that there would be a change of mind.” So what was the point of it? “That’s a very good question. I think she felt embarrassed that she had never met me. Because, if you remember, after the announcement was made, there was a massive response in this country and around the world. A lot of very senior journalists expressed their surprise and disquiet about it. And quite a few other people as well. And it did have a bit of an impact.”
One of his recent interviewees was the former Washington Post editor Marty Baron. Sackur took a scalpel to him in typical fashion, suggesting that old-fashioned, top-down mainstream media has had its day, and that Baron, 70, was just another white, middle-aged privileged man the world had tired of hearing from. The same could be said of you, couldn’t it, I say. He nods. “Yes, I could have been talking to myself.”
Well, you’re slightly posher than Baron, I say. He laughs. “So I’m even more of a problem! Yes, I’m part of the same sort of media elite, and I am white and getting on a bit and all of this applies to me, and HARDtalk might well be better refreshing itself with a new presenter who carries a bit less of that baggage for sure.” But, he says, even if the Beeb thought he should be put out to grass, the show shouldn’t have been. “Take me off HARDtalk? I totally get it. Every old horse at some point has to be taken off to the glue factory. But don’t kill off the programme.”
Actually, he says, he has thought for some time he should move on and try something new. The trouble is he enjoyed the show so much. “What’s not to like about travelling the world talking to interesting people? A lot of journalists I respect greatly say to me: ‘You have the best job in journalism.’ In terms of an ability to engage with what’s interesting in this world of ours, there’s no job like it.”
It’s lunchtime, and Sackur suggests a visit to his local. “We’re just off to the pub,” he shouts up to his partner, Ana, whom he has been with for five years. He was married for more than 20 years and has three adult children. As we stroll down the south London street, he talks about his own childhood. Sackur grew up in a middle-class family in Spilsby, Lincolnshire. His father, he says, was hard to pigeonhole – a Cambridge University graduate with a degree in agriculture who became a Guardian-reading farmer and stood twice, unsuccessfully, to become a Labour MP in Tory heartlands. His mother came from farming stock. Sackur was a bright boy gifted with a ruthlessly logical mind and an ability to out-argue others. He also went to Cambridge, where he studied history. Desperate to escape the isolated rural environment he grew up in, he realised that journalism was the perfect way to do it.
We order Guinness and chips at the bar, and head off to a booth. I ask him whether he’s a nightmare over the dinner table, always arguing his case, always having to win. “I think I was a bit of a nightmare as a kid because I was argumentative and wouldn’t let it drop. Sometimes I didn’t see that the best thing to do was to back down.”
What has he learned from interviewing so many significant figures? “I’ve learned a lot about the ego. Human beings are hugely flawed and are desperate to cover up their flaws.” Has it made him look at his own flaws? “Very much so.” What are his main ones? “Selfishness, self-absorption, being preoccupied with my place in things rather than …” He comes to a stop. Did this affect his relationship with his family? “Yeah, that’s where I would go, but I don’t want to talk about personal stuff that is difficult. I think I’m a more rounded human being than I was years ago, for sure.”
How has he changed? “I’m more tolerant. I was something of a control freak: I would expect and look for a neatness – a literal neatness and a sort of figurative neatness – in life. And I’d try to impose it when, as I can see much more clearly now, life isn’t neat and to be rounded up and squared off all tidy. In the past, it would leave me grumpy and intolerant in a way that was completely counterproductive. Now I’m better able to live with the rough edges.”
He admits he finds it tough talking about personal things – partly because he’s private and partly because it inevitably involves other people he has no right to talk about. “Some of it is too painful, and painful not just to me, but painful to other people that I really don’t want to hurt.”
So we retreat to safer ground. I ask about his most memorable guests on HARDtalk. There are so many, he says – Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, who treated Sackur with contempt before warming to him; Russian dissident Alexei Navalny, the most courageous man he’s met; the tortured Allen Ault, who had been in charge of executions in Georgia; Bill Clinton, whose magnetism made Tony Blair look “second division” on the charisma front; the brutal Ethiopian dictator Meles Zenawi. It was only when he returned to Ethiopia, he says, that he realised the impact of his interview with Zenawi. “I’d meet people on the street and they’d be quoting from it like it was verses from Shakespeare.” The thing is, he says, they’d never heard Zenawi held to account before.
Does he think BBC bigwigs are aware of the significance of HARDtalk? “No. I don’t think at the very senior levels of the BBC there is an awareness of just how big a show HARDtalk is around the world.” Perhaps people like Turness are too removed from the journalism to make important decisions about it? “I’ll tell you what I think. I think it is deeply regrettable that people like Deborah Turness do not spend more time making a point of hanging out with people like me. I think that would be incredibly beneficial for them, given their importance as layers-down of the sort of strategic direction of BBC News and current affairs. Again, I don’t want to sound in any way egomaniacal, but I do have a lot of experience and you would think that that experience would be useful to take advice from, to tap into as a resource for those people who are defining strategic priorities.”
Sackur is alarmed at the way news priorities have changed at the BBC. “Programmes like HARDtalk, Panorama and Newsnight have long had a huge amount of autonomy. Increasingly there is a desire at the top of the BBC to centralise and control and that doesn’t fit easily with these programmes. You can see it in the way Newsnight and Panorama have changed and been resourced. In previous rounds of reform and cuts, we’ve had our staff reduced, our money reduced, and now we’re disappearing altogether.” He’s worried that with the focus on live news, journalism is being reduced to “churnalism” at the expense of more studied, groundbreaking work.
Presumably, the BBC won’t even save much money by axing HARDtalk, I say. After all, it’s hardly expensive telly. “Don’t even get me started on the money!” Too late. “I think the total sum of money BBC News declared that it had to save in that round of cuts was £24m. HARDtalk represents around 5% of that £24m – £1.2m a year. In total.” The team is tiny, he says – only eight staff. “I can’t prove this scientifically, but I’m pretty sure that HARDtalk is the cheapest content per minute of broadcasting the BBC does. We represent about four middle to senior management salaries.”
Does he think it’s a snub to highbrow journalism? “No. They know what they want and we don’t fit it. But I’ve got too much love for the BBC and I’ve got too many colleagues at the BBC who are still doing fantastic work to think that they don’t want serious journalism.”
He stops, and says it’s important to get this right. “I’m not leaving, raging with bitterness and resentment and the feeling that the BBC is slashing, burning and ruining the sort of journalism that I believe in. That would be simple. It’s more subtle and more complex than that.”
***
We catch up a few weeks later in mid-March. Sackur has just received his redundancy letter and been served three months’ notice. He is devastated for his “small but perfectly formed team”, and now there is no attempt to disguise his anger. “I feel really, really cross at incredibly dumb decisions made by management that I fear is not doing the right thing for the BBC. I have not been impressed with their ability to deal with this in a compassionate, human way.”
He tells me that one of his final interviews was with Christine Lagarde, president of the European Central Bank (ECB). “It made plenty of headlines worldwide on Trump and tariffs,” he says. “Like so many recent guests, she told me she was completely baffled by the closure of HARDtalk. ‘Why would they do it at a time like this?’ she said. As a sort of consolation she gave me a jar of ECB honey – apparently they have a hive in the bank’s garden.”
On the positive side, he feels energised and liberated by his new freedom. He talks about his plans for the future. He has just signed a deal to write a book about journalist heroes who have risked everything to make a difference. “I’m not a brave person, and part of the reason for writing this book is that, over the years, I’ve been so blown away by journalists whose work is truly brave in a way that mine never was and never will be.” Having it out verbally in a studio doesn’t compare with risking your life taking on the corrupt and powerful, he says.
As for his journalism, he’s by no means finished with that. He’d love to do a revamped version of HARDtalk. “As I said at the beginning, if you need people who are steeped in international affairs, who’ve met and reported on so many of the people and places that matter …” In other words, Stephen Sackur is open to offers.
