Interview: ‘The big beasts used to front up, now they try and avoid it'

For those of us determined to stay awake overnight – at least until, to coin a phrase, a new dawn has broken, has it not? – one question we are grappling with today is where to watch election coverage.

Judgements about broadcasters are subjective of course, like judgements about political parties, but I’m sure I’m not alone in knowing, whichever channel I choose, that within a few minutes of Big Ben striking 10, and the exit poll indicating whether Labour’s majority will be colossal or merely large, I will wish David Dimbleby was still the other side of the screen to guide us through the next few hours.

The word ‘doyen’ is overused. But for nearly four decades he really was the most respected and prominent TV broadcaster of the biggest national events. Perhaps it’s just nostalgia, but does the BBC’s political coverage these days not seem to be missing something of the authority, professionalism and gravitas with which he anchored 10 general elections from 1979, as well as Question Time weekly for 25 years?

Dimbleby’s face and hair are thinner than when he regularly appeared on our screens. His voice may be a little weaker. Otherwise, he defies his 85 years. When I ask him about his career in the past tense, he shoots back: ‘It’s not over, you know’. He is sprightlier than many men years younger. He says he opposes retirement as a concept. Later this year, he will present a new BBC series on the monarchy and, with his daughter, Liza, co-curate an exhibition of audacious drawings at a gallery he chairs. His book – Keep Talking, which is part memoir and part commentary on the BBC, an institution he clearly cherishes, and the reason he grants me an audience – is one of the best books of its type of the past year. His mind remains razor sharp. Sharp enough to anchor another general election better than anyone we’ll watch tonight, I should think, though he insists he was right not to do another beyond 80.

‘You kind of know that you can’t go on doing it forever,’ he says. ‘The reason I stopped Question Time is that I had done it for 25 years, and I thought that I needed to find another way of living. At some point I was going to have to stop and so I thought I would decide when it’s done. Since then, I’ve made podcasts and I’ve done a series about the BBC and I’m now embarking on another series. I’m busy. But what I wanted to get out of was the grind of doing every Thursday on Question Time in a different part of the country.’

The flagship show is not what it was, to put it kindly. Audience figures have declined. It no longer feels like essential viewing, even for political anoraks like me. Fewer leading politicians appear as guests. Their reluctance may have pre-dated Dimbleby’s departure, if I recall correctly, and may have much to do with the decline of linear TV, though it now seems clear that for some years his gravitas was holding the programme together.

‘When I was doing it, we didn’t do too badly with guests. I think we had one or two who would never come on, including the chancellor of exchequer I think.’

I think he means Gordon Brown.

‘It didn’t feel that it was falling apart. But it was getting difficult, and Downing Street was becoming more controlling. There was a wonderful moment when they didn’t want Ken Clarke to come on Question Time and, forgetting to tell him, they rang us up and told us he’d got flu. Then we rang him and said we were sorry he couldn’t come, and he said: “I don’t know what you mean – I’m getting in my car now and I’m on my way”. Downing Street had asked us to get someone else, so we had already found some hapless backbencher who came all the way up to Birmingham or wherever we were. We had to give him dinner, but he just sat there for the rest of the time and did nothing, while Ken Clarke arrived and went on the programme.’

Clarke was one of any number of politicians of previous generations who clearly was up to the gig without the constant protection of special advisors and public relations gurus and who at least gave the impression of saying more or less what they thought rather than parroting central office cliches, almost AI-like. Of how many of the outgoing cabinet, or their successors Sir Keir Starmer will appoint this weekend, could that be said? He was a big beast when dinosaurs roamed Westminster, in more ways than one perhaps.

‘All the big beasts are uncontrollable. That’s the point about them. They make their own weather,’ says Dimbleby, admiringly, lamentingly.

He names the big beasts who first come to his mind: the late Shirley Williams, Michael Heseltine, Clarke, the late Tony Benn, and John Prescott. Clarke and Williams, in that order, have made comfortably the most appearances on Question Time, followed by Ming Campbell, Harriet Harman, the late Charles Kennedy, Clare Short and the late Paddy Ashdown.

His words are economical and meaningful. I got only 12 minutes with him – half the time allotted, before an exacting photographer insisted on getting the right shot – but those 12 minutes were enough for a broad, thoughtful, persuasive sweep through the evolving relationship of politicians with the traditional media.

‘I worry that the political interview as a genre is dying on its feet, under pressure from social media. I mean, political interviewing has always been, however courteously it’s done, two people with entirely opposed views of what they’re trying to achieve – the interviewer trying to understand what’s going on in the politician’s mind and the politician trying to put the best gloss on the way things are going. There’s always a certain kind of conflict, and that’s important and valuable.

‘There was a period when politicians took them really seriously. Gradually, and I blame Alastair Campbell for this, it dawned on the Blair group that actually you didn’t need to do these long interviews, and that in a way they were dangerous. I did an interview with Blair on the eve of his first general election, and we discovered something about him to do with trade unions. He wasn’t going to rescind the Tory trade union law when, in committee four years before, he had called it trampling with hobnail boots on the rights of working people. That kind of thing seemed to disconcert him. That came up because it was a long interview. You see, Campbell issued instructions to all the cabinet every day about the lines to take, and of course that kills dialogue, and it kills differences, which are interesting.

‘At one time, the big beasts would come on Question Time, and they would take on the audience and argue their case. Now, the big beasts try to avoid it. They have a “there is nothing in it for me” attitude. The terrible thing is that “there is nothing in it for me” is a deeply undemocratic argument because it’s not for you, the politician – it’s for the voter and the public. Not to engage in that way is, I think, letting down the democratic process.’

There is a message in that, or should be, for some of our deputies.

‘I wasn’t so much interested in what they were saying. I mean, within bounds – I wasn’t particularly keen on far left and far right – but within a kind of central range of Labour, Tory and Liberal Democrat. I just admired politicians who spoke their minds and could defend their corner. There was a long list of those actually. Now I don’t know them so well of course, but I get the feeling they don’t have quite the same self-confidence just to go out there and say it and, you know, bugger the opinion polls and all the focus groups. Now it seems to be so tempting to fall into “I can’t say this, and I can’t say that”. That debases the political process because the voters don’t actually believe in it if you appear to be hypocritical. Now, with the speed at which Twitter descends on any little trip up explaining your policy and getting a little bit wrong, everybody hones in on that, and I think it makes them fearful. I hope politicians will get used to it and adapt in time.’

A national newspaper which recently interviewed Dimbleby at his home in Pimlico – he also owns a farm in Sussex – noticed a Vote Labour poster in the window. He said the poster belonged to Belinda, his second wife, with whom he has a son, Fred, one of his four children, who incidentally is a journalist with ITV in Jersey. As far as my research can tell, even in the years since being freed of BBC rules, Dimbleby has never come close to revealing support for any one political party. Actually, politicians and political watchers often misunderstand how easy it is for journalists to become quite neutral about most political issues, and to be much more concerned with the content of their coverage or reporting than the outcome of any particular debate or election.

Dimbleby’s book, and some interviews in recent years, give the impression that his politics probably fall somewhere around the old social democratic right of the Labour Party and the One Nation wing of the Tory Party: moderate, pragmatic, mixed economy, broadly internationalist, respectful of institutions. It is known, though, that he was no fan of certain recent Conservative prime ministers who, having essentially taken their party off the reservation, as they say, deserve, along with their lickspittles and apologists, much of the blame for the crippling defeat they surely face tonight.

‘I don’t know what the recovery will be of British politics from the craziness of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss. I think it has clearly settled down again into a more sober form of politics. I mean, Boris Johnson is a rogue politician, and dangerous actually. Not dangerous in whipping up the fervour, which is fine, but dangerous in flouting constitutional conventions on things like the proroguing of Parliament and disobeying his own laws and instructions to the country.’

The former host of Radio 4’s Today, John Humphrys, while interviewing his contemporary a few years ago, described him as quite posh, which slightly annoyed Dimbleby. ‘You had a very distinguished father,’ Humphrys shot back.

Richard, David’s father, was the BBC’s first war correspondent and then its leading news commentator. He sent his sons to Charterhouse. The family owned the Richmond & Twickenham Times: Richard was editor-in-chief and, after he died aged only 52, David took over, until the Dimbleby Newspaper Group was sold in 2001, reportedly for many millions. Richard is probably best remembered as the commentator on the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953. David came out of retirement to commentate on the Queen’s state funeral in 2022. But he was absent from the coronation of King Charles III the following year.

The BBC has said that Dimbleby On The Monarchy, the three-part series out later this year, will ‘re-evaluate’ the role of the monarchy in modern British life, offering a ‘fresh appraisal of an old institution’, exploring its ‘power, wealth and public role’ and asking ‘what today’s monarchy tells us about modern Britain’.

He tells me he had no regrets about not commentating on the coronation, but hesitates when I ask him if that was because he no longer misses such broadcasting generally or because of the nature of the event itself.

‘I don’t know what the answer is to that. I went abroad – to Paris. I was uneasy about doing it, to tell the truth, though I wasn’t asked. It was my father’s kind of gold standard broadcast, and the coronation then was a very, very different thing, with a 23-year-old queen and the Elizabethan era and all that, and from the bits I have seen what we had [this time] was different.’

Six months earlier, Dimbleby had suggested that the BBC does not appropriately question the power of the Royal Family and said he was always shocked by the amount of control the monarchy has over broadcast coverage of it.

Dimbleby On The Monarchy promises to be a fascinating series.

• Matt Fallaize was speaking to David Dimbleby while he was at the Guernsey Literary Festival. The interview appeared in the Guernsey Press on 4 July 2024.