Emma Barnett: The rise of the feminist champion set to breathe new life into Woman’s Hour

She can be seen and heard across the BBC and fans of her unique interviewing style include Jeremy Paxman. Sean O'Grady takes a look at Emma Barnett’s career so far as she continues her remarkable trajectory

In an age of identity politics, Barnett is a good fit for modern journalism (Rex)

In her feminist-themed Tedx talk a few years ago, titled “The secrets that snails can teach women about success”, Emma Barnett showed why she is such an apt and indeed inevitable choice to be a new presenter of Radio 4’s long-running Woman’s Hour. Whenever she got her hands on another gig, she told her audience, her friends would obviously be awestruck and impressed. “Wow, great, that’s amazing,” they’d tell Emma, often adding “you’re so ambitious!” Barnett points out that the “so ambitious” bit was never added when her boyfriend, now husband, enjoyed some similar success in the corporate world. “Ambition”, so our culture dictates, is something remarkable in a woman, and her sharp observation, though purely anecdotal, is a sharp illustration of this. (What women have to learn from snails, by the way, is that snails have poor eyesight and so have grown those long stalks in order to compensate for it. Women need to similarly adapt to perceive the hidden, silent, pernicious barriers that still pervade society and blight their lives without them even realising it. I think I’ve got that right.)

A fair point, in any case, characteristically well made in Barnett’s talk with charm, wit and a fine sense of comic timing, but it’s fair to say that ambition must have something to do with the present ubiquity of this modern media personality. Nothing wrong with that, I, a cis male, hasten to add.  

She is fashionable these days, but Barnett’s rise and rise has been phenomenal, and all the more impressive against a background of what you might call unremitting  “hard rains” for journalists. In 2007 Barnett was an intern at The Sunday Times, her placement part of the postgrad journalism course at Cardiff. Today, at 35, she is ubiquitous. She has her own show on BBC Radio 5 Live, is a regular presenter on Newsnight, writes an agony column in The Sunday Times (“Tough Love”), and can pop up almost anywhere. She’s interviewed most of the leading politicians of our times (though not, I think, Boris Johnson), is an eloquent speaker and elegant writer, and always entertaining. She has a knack for the epigram – “a woman who is honest about her flow is not a woman to be messed with”. Along the way she’s been the first digital editor of The Telegraph (“the go-to site for young women in Britain”) and The Telegraph women’s editor; there have been podcasts, Media Week, her book Period, lectures, Have I Got News For You, Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall as guest editor on her BBC Radio 5 Live show, and some outspoken contributions on Sky News’ now defunct The Pledge. It was there in fact that she made television history by declaring that she was having her period on air, as it were – “I’m menstruating right now and it really hurts”. Even Jo Brand never managed to do that. Barnett describes how her stunned fellow panellists didn’t know what to do, and that Nick Ferrari looked like he’d vomited in his mouth at the revelation.  

Your can appreciate a certain plain honesty there, but also a gift for stealing the scene and generating a little publicity. There is little doubt about the personal driving passion she feels about the issue, painful in more ways than one. She had an undiagnosed case of endometriosis for years before a friend who was a gynaecologist noticed she wasn’t sitting straight, which Barnett put down to routine period trouble. When the discovery of illness was made, the endometriosis has almost advanced to her ovaries. Her resentment later became very apparent when she was invited to address the annual dinnner of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, a brave choice for the overwhelmingly male gathering. Grateful as she was to them professionally, she didn’t pass up the opportunity to criticise their bedside manner, having been told for too long that she’d have to put up with her monthly agonies. She declares herself “at war” with her period. Now, it should be added, she has a son at the toddler stage.  

Barnett’s personal mission to normalise menstruation and for “period pride” is admirable and speaks to a certain restlessness about what she sees wrong with the world. In an age of identity politics, Barnett is a good fit for modern journalism. She sees herself as using her profile to move feminism on to its next wave. She tells a story, for example, about Rosie Boycott, pioneering editor of Spare Rib (and a past editor of The Independent on Sunday). Boycott told Barnett that, despite its radicalism, Spare Rib’s team never covered periods once because they were too squeamish to, while it did feature abortion in every issue. In her book and public speaking Barnett likes to talk with understandable indignation about the history of menstruation, and the strange ways women used to have to cope with it, literally bleeding on the street; “Imagine walking to work and this big juicy clot falls out of the person in front of you.” As she says, if men had periods then menstruation leave would have been hard-baked into HR policies long ago, and there’d be free tampons in every toilet.  

There’s no doubt though that even if she’d never been a feminist or a bit of a campaigner, or even all that ambitious, Barnett would have been an exceptionally successful  journalist. Her work, particularly her interviews, speaks for itself. She says she prepares for interviews meticulously, anticipating likely responses and doing her homework (“I like facts”). She treats them more as conversations, actually listening to what her subject says, engaging with them rather than interrupting in a rush to get to the next possible headline. She brings to her interrogations the sometimes exasperated air of the everyman/everywoman in the street. (No wonder she is said to be Jeremy Paxman’s favourite interviewer.) A typical Barnett reaction would be something like, “Hang on, did you just say...?”, or, “But you did say that, didn’t you?” For some reason she has a particular ability to make Matt Hancock squirm, as well he might frankly when she updated him on his chances of becoming Tory leader in 2016 – 3 per cent.  

When she spent 20 minutes talking to Theresa May after her disastrous 2017 election and the devastating moments after May realised that she’d lost her majority, Barnett got the balance between intrusion and discovery right, and the usually buttoned-up May spoke about “a little tear” and a hug from her husband. When Barnett met Jeremy Corbyn she hardly needed to be tough on him, because a simple question about how much free childcare would cost was met with an embarrassed evasion and shuffling around. For the benefit of her radio listeners Barnett gave them a running commentary: “You’re logging into your iPad, you’ve had a phone call while you’re in here and you still don’t know how much it’s going to cost.” It was a bit harsh, but at least it proved that Barnett is no woke lefty stooge; the story dominated the news, greatly to Labour’s embarrassment.  

Barnett is quick on her feet and refuses to be patronised. Digby (Lord) Jones, for example, once loftily implied she didn’t know much compared to him about Brexit and business because he was chairman of six companies; she reminded him that she could still recognise a fact when she saw it. A memorable encounter with Katie Hopkins had Barnett reassuring the professional controversialist that “you are human after all”, and never just taking the easy line of insulting her. Her opener with Hopkins was superb: “Was this always a plan to become a professional figure of hate?” Most recently, Barnett expressed mild incredulity when Tory Bernard Jenkins said, in terms, that it is OK for the UK to break a treaty because Brexit is a one-off, like leaving an empire.

She does treat her guests with courtesy, and keeps the interruptions and the grandstanding to a minimum. Unlike most of her peers she is not and never has been a Westminster correspondent, which might be why she has a greater detachment, with neither any particular affection nor grudge felt towards the politicians. Because she troubles to engage with her interlocutors, her audience engages with her interviews. She is combative but sometimes you (the audience and the politician) cannot see or feel the knife going in. Sincere or not, it works, and she makes it all look deceptively easy.

In a world of identity politics and with antisemitism revived, Barnett’s own Jewish heritage also crops up. She was brought up in an orthodox Jewish family, an only child by the way, but is not especially observant. She calls herself “Jew-ish” and “I identify as British Jewish”. On The Pledge she raised antisemitism, and spoke of experiencing “dinner party antisemitism” herself, jokes about being tight with money, being held responsible for whatever Netanyahu’s doing and being told “Jews think differently, don’t they?” She’s said that Wiley’s antisemitic tweets “burned her”, and she is rightly disturbed about the recrudescence of ancient tropes and slurs, especially on the left.  

Her family background is also brought up for a different, more extraordinary reason, than that of her private education at Manchester High School for Girls. (Which, by the way, did her no harm and Barnett reportedly won one of the highest marks in the country at her Religious Education A-level. The Barnett family led a very comfortable lifestyle. Hers was a “cosseted” childhood, so much so she says she didn’t know how to operate the toaster before she was 15.  

However, such domestic ease was funded for a time through immoral earnings and prostitution. In the early 2000s, Emma’s father, Ian Barnett, was a surveyor who, for whatever reason, found himself running a chain of brothels across the northwest, with names such as Dolly Mixtures, Foreign Touch and Angels. Behind the glam titles was the usual tawdry business, including one woman illegally trafficked from Lithuania. There was recording equipment and police discovered some 3,000 sex videos. Photographs of some of the girls had been taken in the Barnett home, in the piano room, and Emma’s mother Michele, a teaching assistant, was found to have been laundering some of the proceeds, which were substantial, perhaps £5m. The Barnetts had a Rolls-Royce and a Jaguar with personalised plates, and continued to lead an outwardly conventional life. One judge, however, called Ian Barnett an “evil, immoral man” and he was sentenced to 3 years 8 months in jail. There are references in the court reporting to emails between Emma and Ian containing the phrase “your whores”. Ian and Michele are now estranged.  

Barnett has written about this, stressing that she was a child at the time, and at Nottingham University when she found out (aged around 19). She stated, four years ago: “It’s fair to say that I’m still traumatised by what happened and have become an old soul before my time ... This wasn’t my mess and I had a choice – either let it break me into tiny ashamed pieces, or use my anger to fuel my passion for life, love and my work.” Nowadays she doesn’t think it a fair line of questioning about her work, and of course no one should be blamed for the sins of their parents. She told The Times a few weeks ago: “It was a very painful chapter of my life, and I wrote about it. I wanted to say what I wanted to say and move on ... I wrote it to talk about how it affected me, I didn’t write it to tell someone else’s story because that’s not my story to tell. There are also rights to an element of privacy, and in the period in question I was a child. I am in the public eye now but I don’t think this is a line of questioning that’s necessary, fair or right.”

Yet it will not go away. The worry – I hope not a patronising one – is that the BBC and the kind of feminist values Barnett espouses are so central to our culture wars and so under attack that she cannot fail but to become at some point a target of hate, or even more of one than she currently is. Even now the online trolls in the comments sections use the immoral earnings to dismiss her credibility, and that won’t cease, even if she says more about what her earlier life was like.  

In her defence though, Barnett has a determination, as she put it in that Tedx talk, not to be bullied, and she credited herself with this quote lit up on a big slide: “‘Too many women lose custody of their ambition’ (– Emma Barnett in the bath)”.  

There’s certainly no fear of Barnett doing that. I noted in that talk that she introduced herself as “a broadcaster, journalist and whatever comes next”. I wonder what that might be, and whether she might one day be the politician answering the questions rather than asking them. She’d be good at that too.