Airhead Read online

  Emily Maitlis

  * * *

  AIRHEAD

  The Imperfect Art of Making News

  Contents

  Introduction: The 2 a.m. Call

  Donald Trump and Miss USA

  How I Got into Television by Not Speaking Chinese

  Simon Cowell: The Vampire Hour

  Two Days with President Clinton

  The Umbrella Movement, Hong Kong

  Jon Stewart: The End of His Daily Show

  The Migrant March from Budapest Central Station

  David Attenborough: One Hour in a Hot-Air Balloon

  An Airport Hotel with the Dalai Lama

  Arrested in Cuba

  A Gathering of Neighbours

  How I Was Accidentally Accused of Running a CIA Black Site for Torture

  Rachel Dolezal: The Black Human Rights Activist who Turned Out to be White

  The Fire at Grenfell Tower

  Theresa May After Grenfell

  Russell Brand: How Addiction Starts with a Penguin Biscuit

  Piers Morgan Becomes a Feminist

  Emma Thompson on Harvey Weinstein

  Steve Bannon Emerges from the Shadows for His First International Broadcast Interview

  Sheryl Sandberg: Good Grief

  Gordon Ramsay on Cocaine

  Tony Blair: When the Interview Comes to You

  Zelda Perkins: Harvey Weinstein’s Personal Assistant

  James Comey and His Part in the Election of President Trump

  #MeToo and the Chippendales

  Double Deaf Disco

  Sean Spicer: Corrupting Discourse for the Entire World

  After Twenty-Seven Years …

  Anthony Scaramucci on the White House Lawn

  Stuck in a Lift with Alan Partridge

  And Then They Died (End Thought)

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Emily Maitlis presents the BBC flagship nightly current-affairs show Newsnight and specializes in election coverage in the UK and the USA. The Canadian-born, Sheffield-raised British television presenter and journalist began her career in Hong Kong. She lives in London with one husband, two boys, and a large whippet.

  For my boys, Milo and Max, who have inspired me and laughed at me in equal measure.

  And for Mark, who agreed to marry me, and who continues to make every day of my life better. It was the best question I ever asked.

  The first and greatest sin of the deception of television is that it simplifies; it diminishes great, complex ideas, stretches of time; whole careers become reduced to a single snapshot.

  James Reston Jr, Frost/Nixon

  Introduction: The 2 a.m. Call

  My phone is on silent. But it’s still managed to wake me up. The yellow flashing glare perhaps or a sort of fuzzing of atoms. It’s 2 a.m. and I see on the screen it’s my Newsnight editor, Ian Katz.

  No thanks, I think, and hide it under a book about psychological warfare. It’s the heaviest one next to the bed.

  Ian has a way of wanting to talk about things at odd hours. He normally catches up on his texts around one in the morning – which is lovely for him, but slightly confusing for everyone else. This time, I’m not in the mood. It’s a Friday night in November 2015. I have just stepped off a plane from Washington, after two weeks on the road, reporting. My body doesn’t know what continent I’m in or what day it is. I’ve had a vodka shot and a blue sleeping pill and, frankly, I’m out for the count.

  But five hours later, my phone is still ringing from the depths of psychological warfare where it’s been buried. And this time it’s my deputy editor, Rachel Jupp – her voice sounds both apologetic and pleading. ‘We need you to go to Paris.’

  I am still asleep, my eyes won’t open, my mouth is gluey and stuck. But my mind has raced ahead to the sense of what she’s saying, and from nowhere I hear myself weighing up her request, asking the worst question a journalist can ask:

  ‘How many?’

  And she tells me more than a hundred are dead – many inside the Bataclan theatre – and several gunmen are still on the loose.

  Two hours later, I’m on the Eurostar. My usual grab bag – packed for emergency travel – had just been emptied into the wash, so I’ve scrabbled together just enough to see me through the next forty-eight hours. Something dignified for on-air reporting. Something warm for all the waiting around. Something waterproof for when the heavens open. A zillion chargers, adapters, cables and three slabs of dark chocolate – for skipped-meal replenishment.

  There is a familiarity to this journey. Just ten months earlier I had taken the same Eurostar to cover the Charlie Hebdo massacre. Subliminally, I have begun to associate the City of Light with darkness and fear. The Gare du Nord still makes me shake.

  This time, scrolling through emails on the train, I find a generic BBC one sent to all those heading to Paris. It tells us to avoid a black licence-plate-free Renault if we see it. They believe it’s being used by the terrorists and is packed full of explosives. The email is meant to be helpful, but it makes me burst into tears. I haven’t seen my kids for two weeks, I haven’t slept more than a few hours in two days, I haven’t eaten since the plane, and now I’m being told to avoid black cars. What am I even doing?

  Paris isn’t really working when I arrive: you can’t get a cab, police barricades are up all over, the streets are eerily empty in parts and rammed full in other places where spontaneous virgils have sprung up. We broadcast for an hour – a BBC Two Saturday-afternoon special from outside the Bataclan; we are asking people to give us eyewitness accounts of events they haven’t even processed. I find the band U2 leaving flowers beside our live point, their own commemoration of young lives lost in the simple act of attending a concert.

  The terrorists have struck when Europe is already feeling fragile; the migrant crisis has brought thousands from the Middle East and Africa – some seeking asylum, others better employment – marching across the continent and making EU politicians assess their own political response to the outsider. That night, as we try and piece together the scale of the tragedy, all sorts of conflicting narratives begin to emerge: that the terrorists were home-grown, or Syrian, or from neighbouring Belgium. That they were ISIS fighting jihad in France, or they were disenfranchised young men betrayed by their treatment as Muslim French citizens. It is too early to know why it’s happened. We barely understand what has happened.

  Over the weekend, we see the raw Gothic beauty of Notre-Dame reflected in the flickering of a hundred tiny candles of remembrance on the ground. In Place de la République, a shrine has evolved – photos of loved ones, white roses, a lone violinist playing of the pain which has only started to seep into this grieving city. As I cross the square, a French reporter recognizes me and asks if we, the English, are sympathetic. It is such an extraordinary thing to ask I feel my eyes welling up again. Surely we are beyond the Hundred Years’ War, the neighbourly rivalry of World Cup penalties. I can’t even find the words to tell him that yes, God knows, we are.

  By Monday night we – Newsnight – are back on air. I have already fronted a Panorama report for BBC One and I have interviewed (in French) Rachida Dati, the former French Justice Minister with special focus on migration and counter-terrorism, who blames Angela Merkel for the ‘error of judgement’ in letting so many people cross into Germany. Now I am standing in front of the camera, microphone on, facing one of the most complicated live shows we will ever attempt. We have seven live guests, three different reports, Gabriel Gatehouse will be live in Greece with those crossing the border and our investigations editor will be live in London with news of what they’ve learnt. It is ambitious and complicated and we are about two minutes into the live forty-five-minute programme when everything starts to go wrong.

>   It goes wrong when I suddenly shout ‘MIGRANTS!’ down the barrel of the camera, without realizing my microphone is faded up. The word comes as such a shock to our investigations editor he yanks his head up and his earpiece pops out. I am standing there looking like a swivel-eyed xenophobe stuck in the middle of Paris, but I am broadcasting to millions live on telly. And the reason I have just yelled ‘Migrants!’ out loud, as if seeing a crowd of thousands descend on Place de la République, is because I am trying to warn my producer, Vara, which sequence is coming up next so she can ready the guests and bring them in. I have to be the conduit between the London studio and her as I am the only one who can hear the programme go out. I do not realize at this point my microphone has accidentally been left on. I do not realize my exclamation has come out of nowhere; I do not realize that in homes across the land viewers trying to piece together the horror, grief and pain that has left more than 130 dead in our neighbouring capital will simply see a deranged anchorwoman in the throes of verbal spasm.

  But as soon as I do, I also realize that it will almost certainly be the only thing anyone remembers from our fateful broadcast in Paris.

  Working in television has thrown up some extraordinary chances. I’ve been lucky enough to interview two US presidents, the last five UK prime ministers, the world’s fastest sprinter, Nobel Prize-winning writers, footballers, billionaires and prisoners. I have covered UK elections that shook the political firmament and presidential elections, announcing the moment Barack Obama and Donald Trump could claim the path to power; I revealed the moment in the Brexit referendum when it became ‘highly likely’ we had chosen to leave the EU, and I have covered more incidents of terrorism and mass murder than I care to recall. The news cycle these past few years has been relentless. There’s been little time to stop and make sense of it all. Each time I appear on screen or interview one of the key players, it leaves a defining moment in my head. But each time, I’m left with the impression that that is all it has been – a moment; because of the pressure and time constraints of live television, much of the context is never fully relayed.

  What follows is my attempt to put that right.

  Sometimes I’m asked about a particular tone used in an interview, or a question I put in or left out. Sometimes it’s about why I dressed in a particular colour or even stood a certain way. And of course there is never the space to explain the background to any of these things. I am, above all, flattered people read so much intention into things that have usually emerged as the result of chaos, mechanical failure, a last-minute let-down, or finger trouble. In other words, for all those looking for conspiracy, it’s nearly always cock-up. When people asked why I blurted out ‘MIGRANTS!’ that day, I didn’t really know where to begin.

  When I interviewed President Clinton I was allowed to do so only on condition of an extraordinary deal we had made with his team that morning. You’ll understand why when you read that chapter. I never expected to have to provide Donald Trump with my home address, I never expected to have just ten minutes’ notice before interviewing the British prime minister, I never expected to end up in a room full of male strippers talking about the Me Too movement, I never expected to be drinking red wine at Steve Bannon’s kitchen table, I never expected to spend a bank-holiday Monday stuck in a lift with Alan Partridge or to meet the Dalai Lama at the Prestige Suite of an airport hotel, I never expected to feel empathy for a white woman who thought she was black, and I certainly never expected to be surrounded by twenty thousand Hong Kong students chanting, ‘Thank you, BBC’ in unison when we turned up to cover the umbrella democracy protests one long, humid summer (we had to shush them before our filming was ruined).

  In other words, there was much that was never conveyed through the interviews we showed on tape. Unlike print there is no room for annotation or commentary as you go along. What appears on the screen is what people see. Everything else is just interpretation.

  When I chose the title of this book – Airhead – I did so with some trepidation. It is not my intention to reduce what I do to the cliché of a TV broadcaster with an empty brain; it is my attempt to invert it. To explore the broadcaster’s state of mind in those moments before, during and after the cameras roll: what happens when things don’t go according to plan but your mouth has to keep on moving; what happens when your reputation stands or falls on how you phrase your very next question. What happens when the camera stops rolling and the shouting in the room starts. What happens when you wake up in the dead of night, shouting, ‘No, no, no!’, reliving a cringeworthy TV exchange of your own making.

  This, then – Airhead – is my attempt to explain what goes on in those moments of utter panic: living, breathing, hyperventilating and overthinking the seconds when you’re about to go live on air – and you don’t have a clue how it will turn out.

  Donald Trump and Miss USA

  Six years before he became President of the United States, Donald Trump agreed to make a documentary with me for the BBC. I interviewed him four or five times, as well as each of his grown-up children (Don Jr, Ivanka and Eric) and his wife, Melania. I met Donald Trump on his home turf, in Trump Towers New York and Las Vegas, and on his golf course in Aberdeen, and what strikes me when I see him now is how little he has changed since those days. The girth is broader, the words come slower but the character was already set in stone. The question I never asked him at the time was whether he would ever run for president, a journalistic omission that has given me (as you can imagine) many a pause for thought. But, in truth, my bigger regret is that I never called him out on the lies he told. I shrugged, let them pass, put them down to an exuberant personality. ‘Celebrity exaggeration’. I wonder now how I could have been so relaxed about the truth. That, in all honesty, should be the cause of more of my sleepless nights.

  For our first-ever meeting I am summoned to the twenty-sixth floor of Trump Tower. I take the golden escalator – passing the queues of visitors who’ve come to marvel at the gushing fountains in his rose marble atrium – then the lift, until I am in the more clinical business part of the building. I wait, flipping through magazines, until our appointed time, and I hear him before I see him. He grabs my hand, a proper macho handshake, and when I comment on his reported ‘germophobia’ he explains it with a casual flap of the wrist: ‘Oh, I’ll shake hands with you – you’re fine. It’s them I worry about.’ Them being the general public. Or, as we will come to know them, the voters.

  Our first meeting is about his business, New York real estate, and his deals. It is the meeting in which he tells me he has ‘the biggest ballroom in New York’. It is an odd boast, and one that will not make the slightest bit of difference to the documentary. But I check it out anyway and discover it’s wrong. There are other hotels with larger ballrooms. And I have a choice: I can correct him, sound fussy over something that is in any case quite esoteric, or I can make a mental note and move on, assuming it is just a manner of speech – like a stutter. At the time, it seems unimportant. Journalistic pedantry. I do not want to mess with billionaire ballroom machismo. My producer and I make the decision to leave him uncorrected; the line itself will never make the final cut anyway.

  But the verbal sleight of hand continues. He can ‘dictate’ the number of floors in his skyscrapers by merely numbering them however he chooses. There is no illegality in this. It is a mere trick of speech. If you choose to call your first floor your sixteenth floor, you create the impression of many more storeys. I am not familiar enough with architectural exaggeration to know whether this is ‘a thing’.

  I now realize, of course, it had nothing whatsoever to do with architecture and everything to do with Trump.

  We get what we want that afternoon: an introduction to this larger-than-life man, in his office, surrounded by photos of, well, himself. And as the interview wraps up we get what we really want.

  ‘You must come to Vegas,’ he throws out, an invitation that will be impossible to resist. I am invited to join him at the finals of
the beauty pageant he owns: Miss USA. It will be my second and perhaps most curious encounter with the man who will go on to become America’s forty-fifth president.

  The finals are held in Planet Hollywood, Las Vegas, two months later, and we will attend the dress rehearsal the day before to get a feel for what to film and an interview with Trump, in situ, who this year will not be officially judging but will still be in charge. As we watch him arrive, by limo, an old line from a Simon Le Bon interview creeps into my head. When asked once why pop stars always seemed to end up marrying models he had referenced the joke about why dogs lick their balls: ‘It’s because they can.’ It seems to explain so much about Donald Trump. The fortune, the skyscrapers, the hotels, the golf courses, the private jet and the third model wife. Why would he choose to buy a beauty pageant? Because he can. It is vintage 1980s gold-tap, fluffy-loo-seat Trump.

  We arrive at the auditorium in time for the warm-up – the opening dance routine of the show. The finalists are learning their steps to Kelly Rowland’s song ‘Commander’. Who could have imagined the celestial irony of that moment: scantily clad women dancing under the watchful gaze of Donald Trump as lyrics warn them that he’ll be their ‘commander’ and he’ll supply the ‘answer’.

  There are fifty-one contestants in the beauty pageant, one for each state, plus the District of Columbia, all vying for individual recognition whilst synchronized in step. We can only wonder how seminal this moment is to Trump’s understanding of the Electoral College system.

  One of them, Miss Michigan, has a quote emblazoned on her chest: ‘It’s beauty that captures your attention, personality that captures your heart.’ She’s had the motto printed on a stack of T-shirts which she’s now handing out free to fans.