Meet Honest John

He's been dubbed the radio Rottweiler, the scourge of government ministers - a man who won't take no for an answer. But that's not the whole John Humphrys.

2 October 2000

2 October 2000

He's a doting father, he cares about what we eat (and he's even worried about sandwich toasters). First off, I must say that although John Humphrys and I go way back - well, I once glimpsed him on the Circle Line - I was mightily offended by his book, Devil's Advocate. Indeed, it even begins with the line: "The trouble with journalism is that so few of us who have spent a lifetime at it can claim any lasting achievement." He then goes on to add that it's not like we're engineers, who at least "have their bridges". Well, honestly! What utter tripe! I am minded to scold John, and do. What were you thinking of? No lasting achievement? You do know, don't you John, that it was me who interviewed Norma Major and discovered that she kept grated cheese in an old ice-cream container in her freezer?

"Did she? Why?"

"Because then, any time she needed some grated cheese, she could just grab a handful, without having to get out the cheese, get out the grater..."

"And then wash it up?"

"Exactly! Now, that kind of information is worth six (suspension) bridges and an (award-winning) viaduct, don't you think?"

"I am subdued," he admits.

Honestly, he's pathetically easy to browbeat, when it comes down to it. John Humphrys? A Rottweiler? I've had more scares from my goldfish, Tinky Blinky, especially when she went backpacking in Peru and didn't phone home for weeks. That was frightening, I can tell you.

Actually, John Humphrys and I do go back a bit. Well, to several years ago, when I interviewed him for another newspaper. I think, actually, he's the only person who has ever agreed to be interviewed by me twice, which is rather odd, as my personal hygiene is tiptop and I'm known to be very attractive company, so long as the lights are well dimmed and I don't take the paper bag off. I'd heard that he had hated the resulting piece. He says: "Well, I just thought you were taking the piss." He adds: "And you caught me off guard, because your first question was: 'Do you think you are handsome?' And I couldn't think what to say. So I just gulped and said: 'I've never really thought about it.' I wish I'd thought of something wittier."

Like?

"I've got the perfect face for radio."

I laugh appreciatively and say, "Well, that was worth the seven-year wait." I think he knows I'm on the level with him today.

I meet John at The Brackenbury, the same west London restaurant we met at last time. John lives nearby, although now it is with his partner, the News 24 presenter Valerie Sanderson, and their four-month-old son, Owen. John has two grown-up children from a former marriage. He says he was a pretty rubbish father when they were small: he was a BBC TV foreign correspondent, often absent. This time, though, he seems to have taken to fatherhood rather spectacularly. It is: "Owen's just gone on to solids and tasted pear for the first time today. You should have seen his face."

And: "He's got such an intelligent smile. I'm sure every parent says that, but Owen really has."

And: "I can't wait to read Wind in the Willows to him. I've a different voice for every character... Toad is awfully posh and Ratty is a cockney spiv and Badger has..." John? "...a broad Yorkshire accent and..." John? "...I'm sure we'll get onto Winnie-the-Pooh. I love Winnie-the-Pooh. Owen already has an Eeyore..." JOHN, SHALL WE ORDER? "...with a tail that comes off!"

We study the menu. I say I'm thinking of having the gravadlax. John, who is totally potty about organic, natural foods - and has been ever since he once owned a Welsh dairy farm, and "saw what animals get injected with" - says hang on, it might not be wild salmon. He'll ask the waitress. "Is it farmed or wild?" he asks. "Farmed," replies the waitress. "Don't order it," instructs John.

I am disappointed. I say, couldn't I have riled salmon instead? You could rile it for me, couldn't you, John? I mean, that's what you are known for, isn't it? It's what you do on Today most mornings. And if you can rile Harriet Harman (and effectively finish her off) and Lord Robertson (the Nato secretary-general who complained to the BBC about your "unwelcome noises") and Ken Clarke (whom you interrupted 32 times) and New Labour (which once satisfyingly and famously whimpered: "What are we to do about the Humphrys problem?"), then you can surely rile a bit of fish for me.

"I suppose I could shout, 'How dare you, you ignorant salmon' at it," he concedes obligingly. But he doesn't. Instead, he asks if I know how to tell wild from farmed salmon. I do not, I admit. "OK, if there are strips of fat in it, it's not wild. Wild salmon is all muscle. Farmed salmon just floats about all day in its own diarrhoea." I say that, on second thoughts, I think I'll have the goat's cheese salad.

I tell him I enjoyed his book, which I did - it's engagingly written - although it is quite odd. I'm not sure what the point of it is, frankly. It is part- autobiography and part-essay on what he thinks is wrong with modern society, which is almost everything: the victim culture, the compensation culture, the counselling culture that encourages people to think of themselves as traumatised, the corruption of news, Kirsty Young walking around a studio ("Whatever next? Trevor McDonald sliding down a fireman's pole?"), the emasculation of politics, the commercial canker that has turned us all into mad consumers...

Good God, John, is there anything you like about modern life? How about John Frieda's Frizz-Ease? I mean, I'd be lost without it. He says, grudgingly, that he supposes e-mail is quite useful. "I get thousands of letters and most are 11 pages long written by old ladies with very small handwriting. Now, I can deal with 100 e-mails in the same time." And haven't you ever been seduced by consumerism, been seduced into buying something that turns out to be utterly useless? "I don't think so." A sandwich-toaster? Everyone has a sandwich-toaster they don't use, don't they?

"Actually, I did find one at the back of a kitchen cupboard recently. But they're not a total waste, are they? For the first week of having one, you do at least make thousands of toasted cheese-and-onion sandwiches."

Waste. That's his other obsession. I'd even read that, to conserve electricity, he turns his fridge off in the winter. Not true, surely.

Well, yes, he says. Or at least it was until he and Valerie recently moved. "I hate refrigerated food and, in the last house, I had a proper larder outside. You could keep cheese in it for weeks and weeks. I so dislike fridges. If you put left-over chicken in, it tastes of nothing the next day." So it's to do with taste rather than waste? "I do also have a thing about wasting energy. I will measure out a cup of water before boiling it because what is the point of boiling more than you need? It's just a silly thing to do." I ask him if this is to do with money as well - that is, not spending it. "Oh yes," he says. "Surely everyone who has been poor worries about being poor again. Money is security. Money is knowing if it all finished tomorrow, I wouldn't have to end up in some dingy place.

"And I don't want to be a burden on the kids. Owen is only four months old and he does something new everyday. Literally. Today, he turned completely with both his hands on his side of the pram..." No, he says, he's not going to be doing Hello! with him. Or OK!. "One of them approached me, can't remember which, but I declined. Someone bought us a Christian Dior teddy, though. What do you do with a Christian Dior teddy?"

I think, possibly, this business with money - apparently, when he started reading the news for the BBC they had to buy him a suit, because his only one was 15 years old - goes back to his father. As, perhaps, do most things with John. Born one of five into a poor Cardiff family, John's mother worked as a home hairdresser while his father, George, was a French-polisher. George was brilliant at what he did. He could transform a piece of furniture from something lacklustre into something of extraordinary beauty.

But there wasn't a roaring trade in French-polishing in Cardiff at that time and so George was often miserably out of work. More, at such times, John and his siblings would be sent round the streets posting flyers - "Get Your French Polishing Done By George Humphrys" - through the letter-boxes of houses in the more affluent areas. I think John might have found this quite humiliating. Certainly, his father did. Indeed, even when he got work in the richer households "he was treated as a workman who should use the tradesman's entrance which, in fact, he never did. He refused."

I wonder if, in a way, John has made a career out of humiliating those who might once have humiliated him and his father. You know, the upper, ruling classes. The kind who come onto Today. He says perhaps, yes. "I do think that it's easier to become the sort of interviewer I am if you've sensed injustice as a kid. I am chippy. I do have a chip on my shoulder."

He thinks he's unlikely ever to be knighted. "And anyway, what a load of nonsense. You have to be dubious of the whole system and if you are invited in you have to say 'no'. Aren't journalists meant to be outsiders?"

What about Sir Robin Day? "He wasn't an outsider. He went to the right universities. He tried to become an MP." I say I interviewed him not long before his death. "Did he pinch your bottom?" asks John. No, I say, he showed me a video of his guest appearance on The Des O'Connor Show. Should he have pinched my bottom? "Well, he was fond of the ladies." I say I'm miffed, now, that I got Des, and not a pinch on the bottom. "If it's any consolation," says John, "he liked stupid women with big hair." I think I'll have to jack in Frizz- Ease for volumising spray.

I wonder if he ever gets bored doing what he does. Aren't all politicians more or less interchangeable these days? Absolutely not, he insists. "Take, for example, Ken Clarke and Gordon Brown, who are about as far apart as you can get. Clarke is a showman. He's got a bloody good brain, but he also wants to entertain. Brown... well, I'm convinced he bores 99 per cent of any audience. I once interviewed him for 38 minutes for On The Record and he gave the same answer to every question. And he doesn't care that everyone finds him so boring. They are enormously different."

Interestingly, when the Tories were in power, they thought John anti-Tory. And now Labour thinks he's against them. Probably, what Humphrys is against is anyone in power.

Anyway, he went to Cardiff High School - a selective job - which he hated. It was snobby, he says, and he just wasn't clubbable. Or sporty. He left at 15, for the Penarth Times, then it was the Western Daily Mail before arriving at the BBC, first as foreign correspondent, then as presenter of The Nine O'clock News. He goes on a lot, in his book, about the forward march of entertainment values at the expense of news values, a rot which, he says, set in during the mid-Eighties and which he can actually pinpoint to the moment when, as a newsreader, he was told that Julia Somerville would be joining him as lead presenter.

He threatened to resign but then remembered his mortgage and didn't. "It was the first time in my long career that I had been made so aware of the steely grip of the ratings- chasers on the windpipe."

I think it dented his vanity, too. Is he vain? Why did he write Devil's Advocate? "I always said I wouldn't do a book. But then I met this agent who was very persuasive. He said things like, 'It's important for you to say these things, John'."

I ask if he'll ever retire. He says he keeps setting dates, but then they pass. He insists he wouldn't miss any of it, could happily become an organic farmer in Wales, but I'm not so sure. Anyway, he has to go now. He has to be up at 3.50am. No, Owen doesn't muck things up. Owen, he says, "is perfect. Wrapped in a towel, he is human perfection. And he sleeps right though. Down at 7pm, doesn't wake until 7am."

Now, I think that's worth several bridges and a motorway flyover at least, don't you?

'Devil's Advocate', now out in paperback, is published by Random House at £7.99