Cathy Newman bumped her head on the way to our interview, which she says is typical. She had a breakfast meeting and collided with a shelf in the loos, raced across town and ran from the station in her trainers. Still, she looks cool and collected, in a cream silk shirt and patterned skirt, that halo of blonde curls neatly in place, though now the trainers feel wrong.
“I always want to change into heels,” she says — the higher the better. She peers into the make-up artist’s mirror and presses at an invisible bruise. “Oh God, it’s bad. Can you do something?” She has a tricky interview with the Russian ambassador this afternoon.
For 20 years Newman, 51, has brought twin styles — the forensic and the empathetic — to Channel 4 News, first as a politics correspondent, then as a presenter and investigations editor. Since Times Radio’s 2020 launch, she has done the same in its Friday drivetime slot.
Last year Newman won every award going for her 2024 interview with Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, which prompted his resignation. It was the culmination of a seven-year investigation into John Smyth, a former barrister who abused dozens of boys at Christian camps in Zimbabwe. Welby had attended these camps in the UK and failed to act after seeing a report into his abuses in 2013, considering it a police matter.
Confronting the serial child abuser John Smyth in 2017Channel 4
“I can’t quite believe it took so long to get some kind of transparency from the Church, but I’ll carry on doing those kind of stories,” Newman says. Her interview with Smyth’s son PJ, a week after Welby’s resignation, in which the 54-year-old recalled the garden shed where he was beaten by his father until he bled, was one of the most affecting half hours of TV I’ve seen.
Some of her investigations begin with an old-fashioned tip-off, a letter in the post, and Newman believes in the long game. Before Channel 4 she spent ten years on newspapers, including the Financial Times. “One of my earliest contacts was David Cameron, and he was a PR at the time,” she says. “People who are entering journalism now approach stories very differently, whereas for me it’s about people I’ve spent a lot of time with. They come to me.”
Now Newman is off to Sky News, to fill the 7pm politics slot vacated by Sophy Ridge, who has moved to breakfast, as well as to do podcasts and investigations. Why? Channel 4 News has the punchy outsider status she likes, as well as a bigger audience.
Newman presents the afternoon Drive show on Times Radio
“Twenty years is so long, isn’t it?” she replies, adding that “there’s a liberation to building a show from scratch”. If Newman minded not getting the lead presenter role for C4, when Jon Snow stepped down in 2021, she’s not saying. (It went to Krishnan Guru-Murthy.)
She has picked out the sofa, in squashy orange velvet, and talks excitedly about The Cathy Newman Show, which will have a rotating cast of MPs and peers and a “chatty, podcasty” feel, designed to be clipped on YouTube and TikTok. “Sky is the biggest UK news broadcaster on TikTok — ten million followers — and that’s a huge audience,” she says. “My kids [Newman has two daughters, aged 21 and 17] don’t watch Channel 4 News. Their friends don’t watch Channel 4 News. But they do get news on Instagram, TikTok and, increasingly, YouTube. So it’s embracing that.” These whizzy, three-minute takes will be balanced by long-form documentaries and deeper dives.
Her husband, the writer John O’Connell, and daughters came to her C4 leaving do in London and were surprised that her colleagues knew quite what a workaholic she is: they thought she kept it well hidden.
“So many people talked about my energy for a story. There was a sketch with someone playing me, running around. Afterwards our girls said, ‘We thought we were the only ones who knew what you were really like.’ ” This makes her “probably quite exhausting” to live with, Newman admits. “I think the girls, if they’re being charitable, would say it helps that I’m very organised. But they all wish I’d relax.” Since the birth of their second daughter, O’Connell has been the chief homemaker and preferred presence at school parents’ evenings. Because Newman interrogates the teachers? “You’ve hit it in a nutshell.” Also, she adds, “Writing doesn’t pay the mortgage.”
Newman with the Channel 4 News co-presenters Krishnan Guru-Murthy, left, and Jon Snow, 2013Channel 4
The traditional modes of political journalism are dying, she says, meaning the combative back-and-forth you get on most news shows. “That four-minute interview, where the politician is trying to get across their lines and I’m trying to interrupt — I don’t think that’s served anybody very well. No one learns anything.”
The Cathy Newman Show will be more relaxed. But does she have the step-inside-my-world warmth or slickness needed for the new age of personality-led broadcasting? Will she show her hand more on Sky? Newman answers a slightly different question, about format rather than personality, but says, “I’m not going to shoot my mouth off… People are still not going to know which way I vote, and rightly so.”
Times Radio
Cathy Newman presents the Drive show on Fridays at 4pm-7pm
The consensus among colleagues is that Newman is very good at her job but sometimes appears too efficient, too professionally steely. As a child she got up at 5.30am to do her homework so that she could practise violin in the evening, and that determination to be across everything has not left her. “You can never overprepare,” she tells me, and worries that I am not taking enough notes: what if my two recorders fail?
The one exception to this preparedness was Newman’s 2018 interview with the psychologist and polemicist Jordan Peterson, in which she lost her cool and even her thread halfway through a debate about the self-sabotaging “agreeableness” of women and Peterson’s right to offend. “Ha, gotcha,” Peterson said, and Newman had to agree. The vicious response from his followers — the interview has been viewed 51 million times on YouTube — led to Channel 4 News calling in security experts for Newman’s protection.
She deflates when I mention Peterson — “Ancient history!” — which is true except that the fallout still follows her: on social media, in the comments under anything she writes or says, though she was guilty of little more than losing an argument. The truth is that she was underprepared, she says now. A producer had given her Peterson’s book 12 Rules for Life the day before and until then she had never heard of him.
It must be frustrating to have your work picked apart by thousands of strangers, for years. “But is that about me or is it about them? Think how many interviews I’ve done since. It’s live TV and things don’t always go the way you expect. You can’t be haunted by the past.” It wasn’t the first time Newman had been threatened online: she has had persistent stalkers, and in 2014 a restraining order was taken out against a man who had sent her more than 100,000 messages on Twitter and turned up at the Channel 4 offices. She worries a lot about personal safety; she is private for a reason.
Newman describes her childhood in Guildford as “very contented”. Her parents were teachers, though her mother stopped working while she and her older sister were young. It was a conventional upbringing in many ways, unconventional in others: there was no TV until Newman was 16 and the girls were encouraged to follow their passions in a home environment inspired by Michael Deakin’s 1972 book The Children on the Hill, about a mother who restricts outside influences in order to raise exceptional children.
Newman as a schoolgirlCOURTESY OF CATHY NEWMAN
“There was a huge focus on teaching yourself. My mum was never given the chance to learn music, my dad neither. But it was, ‘Ooh, you’ve got a good ear — go, here’s a violin.’ ” It worked, in that Newman became a voracious reader and keen violinist — she still plays, in a Westminster-based quartet called the Statutory Instruments that includes the politicians Baroness Debbonaire and Emily Benn. But it did mean that TV, when it came, had a eureka effect on her. Seeing Kate Adie in a flak jacket made her want to be a journalist.
School was less happy — first a fee-paying girls’ school (“like Mean Girls: I had heavy NHS glasses, not cool”) and then sixth form at Charterhouse in the early Nineties, where her father taught chemistry and she was one of very few girls. The boys would rank them out of ten as they passed, and in 2018 Newman revealed that a boy had unzipped his flies and put her hand on his penis in the canteen. Charterhouse reported this to the police, but Newman said she didn’t want to criminalise someone so young at the time.
It must have been a shock, after all her parents’ gentle encouragement and pride at her full scholarship. “I remember, and I can’t believe I got so upset about it now, but on the first day a really scary boy in the upper sixth called me into his study and said, ‘So what happened? Did your mum sleep with the milkman?’ Because both my parents were brunette.” By then, her mother had taken a secretarial job at the school. “It really freaked me out.” But she did well anyway and went on to get a first in English from Oxford University.
The parliamentary string quartet the Statutory Instruments; from left, Emily Benn, Newman, Thangam Debbonaire and Katherine ChibahPA
In Newman’s book The Ladder, a women’s guide to success that draws on her weekly Times Radio interview of the same name, she recalls experiences as a young journalist that are both jaw-dropping and standard for the Nineties and Noughties: the editor who invited himself up to her hotel room, the colleague who literally chased her around the office, the peer who told her to wear the long boots he liked to lunch (she didn’t).
While Newman laughs some of this off (“it was having my bum pinched, totally low level”) she draws a direct line between that period and investigations that have focused on abuses of power. “It’s like the sexual assault at school. It puts you in a different box. If you’re on the therapist’s couch, as I slightly feel I am, it explains why I’ve so often championed the outsider — because you’re constantly made to feel that you don’t belong. I think it’s good, as a journalist, not to belong. You’re looking at institutions and seeing how they are failing people.”
She believes the workplace is now “dramatically better” for female journalists, so the conversation gets sticky when I raise reports of discrimination at Channel 4 News. In 2022 the Observer reported that at least seven non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) had been issued by ITN, which runs Channel 4 News, between 2018 and 2021, after women there voiced concerns over equal pay and harassment. Two years later an independent report found “low trust” in ITN’s complaints process and prompted an apology from its CEO, Rachel Corp. Some of those women have since said that Newman could have done more to support them. Newman blocked the former Channel 4 News producer Daisy Ayliffe on X after she asked her, “What happens to women who say ‘me too’ in your own newsroom?”
With her husband, the writer John O’Connell, in 2018Francesco Guidicini
That period must, at the least, have been an unhappy time. Newman pauses. “Literally, that was above my pay grade and I had no role in all that. I know ITN doesn’t use NDAs any more.” Was she aware that some women felt they were treated unfairly? Newman talks about her own reporting on NDAs (“in no way would I ever condone them”) and tries to remember if there was a meeting to discuss them. What I’m getting at, I say, is whether, as someone who is vocal about the need to speak up for female colleagues, she felt able to? It’s not clear because Newman keeps referring me to her work (“I hope the journalism I’ve done speaks for itself”) and her record as a mentor. “I did what I could as a senior woman to help younger colleagues. But I can’t be a spokesperson for the company.”
As her new Sky show approaches she can’t wait to get back to Westminster, where everything and nothing has changed since she first became Channel 4’s political correspondent. “My producer bought me a copy of The Times from my first day in 2006 and there’s an energy crisis story, a story about Putin — a sense of history rhyming.”
She thinks Sir Keir Starmer will make it to the next general election. “Everybody in government is expecting an absolute wipeout [in the local elections]. Angela Rayner is on manoeuvres. But the more people I speak to, the more I would bet on him still being in post.”
The newsbeat is hard when the cycle is so apocalyptic, but Newman reminds her own children that “things felt bleak in the 1970s, [when] people were doing three-day weeks and eating by candlelight, and we got through that. If you get into the grand sweep of history, you can feel more positive about the future.”
Stuart McClymont for The Sunday Times Magazine
Stuart McClymont for The Sunday Times Magazine
She was pleased when both girls said in their Mother’s Day cards that they valued her cheeriness — she has made a real effort “not to be the voice of doom when I walk through the door”. Still, they wish she would slow down. The family live in south London and her idea of a relaxing weekend involves a modern Greek lesson (with homework) before catching up on the news, though she will no longer do a weekend TV shift.
Her mind is on the Russian ambassador as she settles into the make-up artist’s chair: will he just lie to her? When I watch the interview the next day, Newman lands her points on Iran, Ukraine and UK political interference, and that bump on her head is just beginning to show.
The Cathy Newman Show airs at 7pm on Sky News on weekdays and streams live on YouTube from next month
Opening and shoot images: Stuart McClymont for The Sunday Times Magazine. Hair and make-up: Viorela Coman. Styling: Kate Barbour. Blue look: jacket by Reserved, dress by Forever New, shoes by River Island. Cream look: jacket by River Island, blouse by Jaki London, skirt, stylist’s own, trainers by Nike. Pink look: top and trousers by Karen Millen, shoes by Dune