I met with Tom Bradby the day before Osborne’s axe was set to fall. A stressful time for any political pundit, let alone ITV News’ top man in Westminster. Bradby, though, is remarkably laid back. The former student actor has a reputation as a bit of a smooth operator. No doubt this has something to do with his looks, which seem more Hollywood than Holyrood. Indeed, as I found out, he was (partly) inspired to go into journalism by Mel Gibson.
His primary motivation, however, is a desire to be present at era-defining events: “I love history, and my driving force is that every time I studied any period of history, I found myself thinking, god I wish I’d been there. Take the Russian revolution. How amazing would it have been to be in Peterograd when that broke out? Why wouldn’t you want to be there for the great events in your own lifetime? [Journalism] is a great life, and I’ve seen many extraordinary things – not always nice things, but extraordinary.”
As a younger man (Bradby is now 43), he says that he was attracted into foreign affairs by the film The Year of Living Dangerously, in which Mel Gibson plays a foreign correspondent who becomes embroiled in a Communist coup in Jakarta. “Being a foreign correspondent is inherently more glamorous. Ninety-five percent of the time you would not believe how anyone could possibly be paying you to do this – staying in fancy hotels, hanging out under palm trees, riding in helicopters, seeing incredible things. Unfortunately, the five percent that’s really horrible is really, seriously horrible.”
I wonder if the danger is simply too great. “If you get to the stage where I was, by the time I was a fully-fledged correspondent I had three young children. I just found myself thinking, on numerous occasions, I don’t particularly want to die here. You think of your kids who hardly know you, and your wife, and imagine someone asking ‘who was your dad?’. I found that quite difficult to deal with. And then I got shot. In a way, it made it easier, because you always dread something like that happening, and if it does happen, you think: I’ve survived, therefore I must be invincible.”
Bradby was shot in the leg with a flare gun while covering riots in Jakarta. I ask him whether this experience has given him a sense of perspective in his political journalism. “It’s definitely more frightening than interviewing Gordon Brown. I don’t get scared by politicians. I think if you did this job and you allowed yourself to be intimidated, you wouldn’t get very far very fast. Sometimes interviewees get ugly though. Politicians tend to get annoyed if you keep asking the same question.”
Bradby denies that it’s his job to rile politicians up, saying that he doesn’t “go out of his way to create conflict”. So why does it look that way? “If I ask a straight question, it’s very important to get a straight answer. The other day, I asked David Cameron if it was fair that somebody earning £46,000 was losing their child benefit whereas a couple living next door earning £83,000 combined were keeping it. He kept on answering a different question, so I kept repeating the original question. They don’t like that.”
When not subjecting politicians to interrogation, Bradby spends his time writing historical thrillers. He is currently working on his seventh (in eleven years), and claims to rewrite his books eighteen to twenty times each. “I think the main thing about writing is you have to get on and do it. You’ve just got to say ‘I’m going to write between 9 and 12’ and get on with it. I mean, obviously if it’s not there in your head you can’t do it, but the answer is to sit down and start trying to write something. Filling the blank page is always the hardest thing.
Rewriting something is always much easier than writing it down.”
Bradby believes quite strongly that there is no set formula for writing a blockbuster thriller. “I have a personal theory, which is that all great thrillers are kind of flukes. If you look at it, not many people have written more than one or at most two brilliant ones. Thomas Harris wrote Silence of the Lambs, which is a brilliant thriller, but the next book he wrote [Hannibal] was absolute drivel, I mean terrible, awful. It didn’t work at all.”
Tom Bradby’s predecessor at ITN was Nick Robinson – notoriously the president of OUCA while at University College. I ask Bradby whether he has any similar skeletons in the closet. “No definitely not! I’ve never done anything that is overtly political in any way, shape or form. I’m sort of the anti-activist. Every single time I go to every party conference, every year, there’s a moment when I watch people queueing up, and I think – what are these people doing? I mean, obviously I understand that we need politicians, and we need political activists, I just don’t have a set of views that is coherent from one hour to the next. That’s not to say I don’t have strong opinions on things; I probably think quite to the left on some things, and quite to the right on others. I just don’t really view myself as anything.”
I am curious to know how Bradby’s peers at Edinburgh University would have reacted to the Browne review. “Oh incredibly badly. The Scots would have been manning the barricades.” Bradby, who had covered the Poll Tax riots as editor of his student paper, went on to mourn what he sees as the effective dying-out of student militancy: youthful idealism has, to some extent, migrated from the streets to the Facebook group. This prompted Bradby to express regret for our generation: “University used to be much less a sort of jobs factory, and much more of a place to find yourself. There was less pressure on it. It was a time to kick back, be yourself, and enjoy life. With debt hanging over you it loses that sense of carelessness. It’s less attractive now.
There’s a horrible sense that some of us have in some way let down your generation. I do feel that. We had it pretty good, we had more or less free university, we had good jobs when we left, some of us got into final salary pension schemes for a while. You or the next generation of students are all going to leave university with massive debt, you’re never going to be able to afford to buy a house, because they’re hideously expensive, you’re never going to have a decent pension and you’ll have to work till you’re about 80. There’s not a lot to be joyous about, is there? Unless you go into investment banking, you’re just going to struggle on through life. I don’t know anyone of my age group of any political persuasion who thinks that’s anything other than bloody unfortunate, really.”
Debt and struggle make for a grim forecast. Looking for something positive to say about being a student, I ask Bradby whether he remembers his freshers’ week. “God, I do! I remember- I tell you, I’m a reasonably gregarious person, but freshers’ week is the only time in my life when I’ve literally gone up and said hello to people I like the look of – I don’t mean girls I like the look of per se – just people who look like they’d be good fun. I’ve never done that before and I’ve never done it since. It’s quite liberating, in a way, to walk up to anyone and say ‘Hi, I’m Tom, how are you?’. From doing that, I’ve ended up with some really good friends, who are still really good friends now.” We both decided that, at the very least, this had to be reason enough to go to University. Stuff the debt.
