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    Ha! Puff piece in the Times Archived Message

    Posted by Mary on August 20, 2020, 11:52 am, in reply to "Back to Stepford?....nm"

    Copied out - one of my two free to read links/week. There are five large photos within the piece.

    'How political editor Laura Kuenssberg broke the mould to become the BBC’s Brexit guru

    Female, 42, strong Scottish accent, didn’t go to Oxbridge – Laura Kuenssberg claims ten years ago she wouldn’t have landed the number one political job on TV. But for the past three years she’s been the reluctant breakout star of Brexit. Now, she gives her first interview to Janice Turner

    Laura Kuenssberg, 42 Photo
    March 30 2019,

    Laura Kuenssberg tells me she didn’t sleep well last night. Which isn’t surprising, given we meet between the Speaker’s no third meaningful vote bombshell and Theresa May’s extension-seeking trip to Brussels. But Kuenssberg was not kept awake between 2am and 4am by Brexit. “It was because I was going to talk to you.” She emits a loud, nervous laugh. “I know it sounds ridiculous. But I don’t do this stuff.”

    She really doesn’t. There are fat piles of cuttings on other prominent BBC women such as Emily Maitlis or Kirsty Wark, and on her predecessor as BBC political editor, Nick Robinson, but Kuenssberg, 42, has hitherto turned down every interview and is submitting to this one only to promote the Brexit documentary she’s worked on for six months. “This will make me sound like a Guide,” she says, as she stonewalls yet another mild question, “but it’s about the story, not about me.”

    I’m reminded somewhat of Theresa May, whom Kuenssberg herself finds oblique. “She is different from many politicians in the highest echelons, in that she does not seek the company of hacks.” Likewise, when I ask Kuenssberg if she hangs out with politicians at weekends, she cries, “God, no! No. Absolutely not. There’s nothing wrong with doing that, but it’s not my life.”

    Both women maintain a solid division between public and private. But while with Theresa May you suspect there really isn’t much to behold behind the political kabuki, with Kuenssberg you know there’s plenty – she just will not reveal it. BBC colleagues describe her as “cool” and “a bit unknowable”. Whereas the Westminster journalist she’s closest to raves about her “quick, waspish sense of humour”, adding, “She’s not pompous and up herself like the TV men who do these jobs. But she’s very ‘church and state’ – her social circle is not other lobby hacks. She has a life outside SW1. Her biggest strength is she’s normal.” He adds, almost embarrassed by his own gush, “Listen, I am happy to bitch about practically anyone else in Westminster, but I think Laura is solid gold.”

    Interviewing Boris Johnson, London, May 2015 Photo

    In person, Kuenssberg is slighter, softer, finer-boned than she appears behind those big bright overcoats huddled in the rain on College Green. She jokes she’d better not eat breakfast in the body-hugging Roland Mouret dress she wears for our photoshoot, then almost spills coffee down it. “I was worried that was going to happen!” She cheerily flashes a leg for the photographer, but is no preening show pony: in her Brexit documentary, we see her bouncing around barefoot outside Chequers last summer for the cabinet summit, only pulling on her jacket when the camera rolls. No wardrobe department helps BBC journalists to look appropriate on camera when they address the nation; they must figure it out themselves. “It’s the most first world of all problems,” says Kuenssberg. “But you need coats. Lots of coats. Katya Adler bought one but the colour wasn’t right for her, so she passed it on to me.”

    It is this pair of women who have been explaining Brexit for the past three years, seemingly omnipresent from Radio 4’s Today programme to Newsnight. Although actually Kuenssberg officially works Monday to Thursday, “unless there’s a really big story”, says Katy Searle, head of BBC Westminster. “I try to protect Laura at weekends. I say, ‘I need to rest the racehorse.’”

    On working days Kuenssberg, who lately has not got to bed until 1am (“I sleep well, just not enough”), wakes before 7am. She prepares at home for her Today slot, “texting people, hoping they will text you back”, in a quiet spare room wearing “a variety of early morning costumes”. If the programme has a major political interview, she may go into the studio to deliver her snap analysis. Sometimes the politician is still sitting beside her, grimacing. “That bit is like Strictly. Quite nerve-racking. Some of the politicians will start chipping in. Or try to put you off. I mean ... I hope it’s a useful function because often, if they’re talking in jargon or gobbledegook, this job is like being a translator.”

    “‘I try to protect her,’ says her boss. ‘I need to rest the racehorse’

    Afterwards she will head into the House of Commons for a couple of hours “to speak to as many people as I can”. The temptation in modern political journalism is “to sit at your screen refreshing Twitter. But it’s not the optimum way of doing the job.” Prior to the Brexit madness, she’d have lunch with politicians, but disliked being spotted by “Kremlinologists” who’d theorise about what stories she was cooking up. So now she mainly meets MPs in their offices. A lobby journalist praises her diligence: “Some people ring up three or four sources for a story. But Laura will call 20 politicians. In a world where most people are wrong most of the time, she is almost always right.”

    Throughout our interview, Kuenssberg’s phone pings relentlessly with gossip from Westminster’s myriad WhatsApp groups. Just walking up from the photography studio, she says, she received a text from a cabinet minister “with a mind-blowing quote”. The Brexit story is a perpetual fireworks display. Yet when I put to Kuenssberg the question she is asked all day long – what is going to happen? – she replies simply: “I don’t know, and the thing about this era as a journalist is that it’s OK to say you don’t know.” Where would she bet Britain will be in a year’s time? “I know it sounds lame, but I wouldn’t bet. Not more than a fiver on anything. Because the fascinating thing about this moment is even the people who work closely with the PM don’t know which way she’ll choose.”

    Talking to Theresa May following the prime minister’s meeting with Donald Tusk in Brussels on February 7 Photo

    Laura Kuenssberg comes from fascinating, eminent and polyglot stock. As a young man, her German paternal grandfather, Ekkehard von Kuenssberg, a fine skier, helped Jews escape the Nazis over the Austrian mountains, before being sent, with his siblings, to the safety of England to study. Later, as a doctor, he was at the centre of the NHS’s birth, founding the Royal College of General Practitioners. His son, Nick, Laura’s father, a businessman who speaks four languages, worked for a textile company which became part of Coats Viyella. The family lived in Peru and then Italy, where Laura, their youngest child, was born, returning to Glasgow when she was two. Her maternal grandfather was a Scottish high court judge and his brother was the last British governor-general of Nigeria. Her mother worked in children’s services, receiving a CBE; her sister is a diplomat, until last year high commissioner to Mozambique; her brother is a senior civil servant. Naturally, I am bursting to ask about growing up among these extraordinary people, but Kuenssberg’s shutters slam down.

    What kind of household was it? “Well … I suppose there were always newspapers in the house and the radio on. But I didn’t come from a capital ‘P’ political background in any shape or form.” What were her childhood passions? She sighs, then says eventually, “Well, my friends have always been important to me. I don’t socialise with politicians but I’m a very sociable person. I loved watching telly. And I did a lot of music. I am not the kind of person at Westminster [about whom] you’d go: ‘Ah, yes, they were running in every school election, then going off to the Oxford Union.’ The world I’m in now is absolutely not where I thought I would end up.”

    “Needing security was not what I’d imagined when I started this job
    Kuenssberg wears her outsider status proudly. After attending a private girls’ school, she studied history at Edinburgh University rather than Oxbridge. So not only does her Scottish accent render her déclassé (to English ears at least), but she isn’t surrounded, unlike other journalists, by college contemporaries now “on the neighbouring greasy pole” of politics. “If I’d arrived in Westminster and known 50 people who were already MPs, I’d have a very different outlook.” She does not revel in that rich, gossipy party circuit where politics and media intersect, but rather comes across as an old-school Reithian: “I very, very much like to think I’m there on behalf of the audience.”

    Does she think the BBC will emerge from Brexit with its reputation enhanced or diminished? She says the criticism it receives from both sides “suggests that what we’re doing is pretty much in the right place most of the time”. She largely conceals her views on politicians, except to say that Theresa May is “enigmatic, fascinating to cover”, but she doesn’t pity her since “politicians put themselves forward for these positions”, and that Boris Johnson’s driving personality trait is “he just wants to be loved”. But she does not share the public disgust for MPs over Brexit: “I genuinely believe that the vast majority of politicians are trying to do what they think is the right thing. So many of them, at the moment, are in real agony.”

    Kuenssberg’s own politics are, as one Westminster insider puts it, “inscrutable. I used to think she was probably Labour, but she may be a pro-opportunity Tory like Justine Greening.” She claps with pleasure when I recount this and adds proudly that a prominent referendum campaigner emailed her after the result to say, “‘I’d just like to put on record I have absolutely no idea what side you’re on.’ And I was delighted. Because if we don’t have that at the BBC, what do we have? It’s why we exist. It’s the point.”

    Kuenssberg waiting outside No 10 for a statement by Theresa May, June 2017 Photo

    Kuenssberg’s colleagues remark on her lack of ego – “She’s keen to make interviews a success, rather than showing off,” says one. But then she never sought to be in front of the camera, aspiring to be an editor or produce documentaries. She is most animated and eloquent not about political machinations but the medium itself. “There’s an absolute magic, an alchemy about television that even the most fabulous writers can’t evoke. A pause, a sigh, a look, a change of the light, wind that goes through the tree at a perfect time in a shot with a picture of Theresa May standing on her own, fiddling with her cuffs.”

    It was suggested first that she should train as a journalist, so she took a post-grad course at Georgetown University in Washington DC and in 2000 became a BBC trainee. After covering health and social policy for Daily Politics and This Week, her boss wanted to put journalists in Westminster who were outside the usual wonk bubble. Kuenssberg was a natural choice: she describes entering parliament as “like arriving in another country”. And after soaring up the BBC ranks, in 2015 she became its first female political editor: “I think if you had said ten years ago that someone in my job would be in their early forties, Scottish and a woman, they’d have been rather surprised.” Not that it has made her grand. A BBC colleague notes drily that she handles “Nick Robinson still behaving like he’s the political No 1” by cheerily ignoring it.

    The most stressful aspect, she says, is having to deliver to camera a snap summary live at a general election or big vote: “It’s not hard to do, but it’s hard to do well.” She doesn’t write down lines, “because then you come across as if you’re trying to remember. You can tell someone who has memorised something – they blink all the time.” Although presenters are told to watch their own performances to improve she rarely does – “I hate it!”

    “To unwind she reads ‘joyous trash’ and enjoys Saturday Kitchen and MasterChef

    Yet her deep-felt aversion to “becoming the story” hasn’t stemmed accusations of bias. After she was listed as an “invited” speaker for a think- tank fringe meeting at the Tory conference in 2017, a far-left website, The Canary, launched an online petition to have her sacked. Pointing out she had not accepted the invitation did not reduce the misogyny and vitriol. At the 2017 Labour Party conference, the BBC hired her a bodyguard. In a highly flammable political climate, often encountering angry protesters on College Green, does she ever feel frightened? “No, but there are times when the atmosphere is very ugly. And I did have to have security for a while. And that was obviously not something I would have chosen or ever imagined when I started this job.”

    The normal, rumbustious British politics of tough parliamentary debate and “things getting a bit fruity at an association meeting or in the lobby” has, she says, given way to “identity politics, where a lot of people feel extremely strongly. And there is an ugly underbelly to politics at the moment.” But she stresses the upside, that the age of apathy, talked about five years ago, is over. Her weekly Brexit podcast has had nearly three million downloads. No longer is she covering incremental changes in departmental budgets. “Now politics is all about people, how they feel, what’s in their gut. People are searching for answers and are really engaged.”

    Kuenssberg was an early, passionate champion of social media as a way to broaden public engagement, arguing to the BBC board of directors in 2008 that journalists should be allowed to be on Twitter. Does she feel, now her Twitter feed brims with vicious, sometimes obscene messages, that she opened a Pandora’s box? “I’m disappointed that alongside opening up the conversation, it has provided a megaphone for, you know …” She shrugs. Does she read the comments? “I stopped long ago. It’s like a bully will go and pull someone’s pigtails in order to make them cry and then be satisfied with that. I don’t have a thick skin, just other priorities.”

    As with other female presenters, Kuenssberg’s looks are under constant scrutiny. Last year this spilt over into a bizarre fight in a Spanish bar between two British doctors, one who argued she had a “lop-sided face”, shouldn’t be on TV and needed a bag over her head. The other man punched him in the face. The incident reached the papers, via a hearing before the Medical Practitioners’ Tribunal. “Drunk blokes in bars do stupid things,” she says, shrugging. “I think I laughed at it. To be honest, I didn’t really pay that much attention.”

    Rather she prefers to think about the lovely emails she gets from teenage girls inspired by seeing her on TV. She believes public life is going through a revolution “where women have come into roles like mine, which for so long were the preserve of men. I mean, it’s still relatively recent. So people either consciously or unconsciously grapple with that change. You’ve got me, Katya Adler, Lyse Doucet, Emily [Maitlis] and Fiona Bruce on Question Time, Mishal [Husain]. Our overall boss, Charlotte Moore [the BBC director of content], is a woman. You couldn’t possibly look at that and think, ‘Oh, yes, women aren’t prospering.’ ”

    With the BBC’s Europe editor, Katya Adler Photo

    Over and over, perhaps as a defensive mantra, Kuenssberg repeats, “I don’t want to be a player. I love my job and it’s really important, but it’s my job. It’s not my whole life.” But what is her life outside Westminster? Because she is a naturally private person, but also I suspect to avoid giving potential enemies ammunition, this is not up for discussion, beyond basic facts. We know Kuenssberg earns between £220,000 and £229,999 a year, that her husband, James Kelly, is a management consultant and they live in east London. How does she protect her downtime – and her sanity – from the 24/7 news machine?

    “I put my phone down ... Often on the kitchen island.” Do you switch it off? “No. But I try very hard to protect my weekends, and not to be staring at social media all the time. I’m a firm believer that the hours that I have to work are enough. You have to have some space for yourself.”

    To unwind she reads “joyous trash”, books she downloads and forgets the moment she’s finished. She loved Liane Moriarty’s Big Little Lies. “When I fall asleep either I have a book on my face or I’m holding my iPad. Which is a great look!” And practically by applying thumbscrews I extract that she enjoys US political TV such as The West Wing, Madam Secretary and Designated Survivor, and cooking shows Saturday Kitchen and MasterChef. Is she a good cook? “You’d have to ask people who come to dinner.” Does she have as many cookbooks as Theresa May? “I knew you were going to ask me that! I’m not answering.” Why not? “It’s naff.”

    Oh Laura, I say, millions of people see you every single day – you’re a fixture, more famous than most of the cabinet. Would it kill you to reveal more about yourself? But rather admirably, in this celebrity-obsessed world, she won’t. Instead she picks up her pinging phone to cross the river for prime minister’s questions and another hard shift at the Brexit mine.

    The Brexit Storm: Laura Kuenssberg’s Inside Story is on BBC Two at 9pm on Monday

    Shoot credits
    Styling Prue White. Hair Peter Burkill at S Management using Aveda UK and GHD. Make-up Julia Wren at Carol Hayes Management using Nars. Laura wears, from left, jumper, £269.45, arelastudio.com, skirt, £380, Alexa Chung (selfridges.co.uk), shoes, £475, jimmychoo.com, and earrings, £115, The Hoop Station (georgianascott.co.uk); dress, £1,395, Roland Mouret (selfridges.co.uk), shoes, £475, malonesouliers.com, and earrings, £125, The Hoop Station (georgianascott.co.uk). Stool, loaf.com

    Note the clothing prices. BBC funded?

    https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/how-political-editor-laura-kuenssberg-broke-the-mould-to-become-the-bbcs-brexit-guru-0lp9qhl2f#
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