Nick Robinson, BBC political broadcaster, interviewed by Rachel Sloane, at the Launch of Suffolk Churches Ride and Stride /Pedal & Drive at St Bartholomew’s Church, Orford on Saturday 27th July, 2024.
First of all, thank you so much for coming along. How did you end up with a home in Orford, Suffolk?
We came to this part of the world because we live in Highbury in north east London, and we used to come here for lots of holidays.
One year we rented a place in Iken in an absolutely glorious summer. A perfect summer when, looking out on the water I fantasized about sailing, because although I’m not a sailor, I like the idea of sailing. Although you try convince yourself that it’s not actually going to be weather like that most years, you kid yourself. Some friends of ours, who live down the road from us in London, had a property here, and as we drove home, they said that the one opposite had come up for sale. We’ve been here ever since, so 12 years.
The pace in London is so different to Suffolk generally, never mind here in Orford….
Well, that’s the joy of it! Pippa, my wife, often drives me up here and I work in the car, and the second we drive off the A12, everything goes…. phone down, laptop down, and suddenly all the worries of the world go, and it’s lovely.
This is your local church?
Yes, it is and the joy of the church is that it’s used, I mean, in the sense of not just used as a church, but it’s also a lovely concert venue and we’ve seen a lot of concerts here, which we’ve loved.
It is really genuinely at the heart of the village. Funnily enough, if you said to me ten years ago, that I would wander around looking at old churches, I would have thought you were completely stark raving mad! Then, last year, we bought the Simon Jenkins ‘Thousand Best Churches’ book and we started to explore. The great joy of churches is the history is so fascinating. Whether you find a gravestone or some plaque on the wall, or an empty niche, a new thing, it’s absolutely fascinating.
But churches can be daunting to people, can’t they?
Yeah, they think that they’ve got to know the terminology. Do they know their nave from the apse, but, in the process of exploring, you learn it.
But the joy is it’s a history of people. In the end, churches are a history of the area. It’s a history of wealth and the loss of wealth, and that’s what makes them endlessly fascinating.
My mother’s Jewish, my father’s C of E, but never really practiced, and I married a Catholic, so I’m completely confused, ecumenically!
I’m not religious, but you don’t need to be. Know the history of your country, the history of your culture, history of society….
And people who never set foot inside their local church for a service, still value it as part of the history of their community…
Absolutely. I mean, literally, geographically, they are often at the centre of the community.They’re a place that brings people together for births, deaths, marriages and they are a reminder of your roots.
It is something, at least, that ensures that people like me, who will still be seen as an incomer in 20 years time, have some sort of sense of place, that’s the joy of it.
Can I briefly ask you about the day job? I called you a political broadcaster, but what would you say you were?
I just usually describe myself now as a Presenter on BBC Radio Four and now also a programme called Political Thinking, which is a conversation with a politician rather than a kind of newsy interrogation, often looking at their life. I’m a political journalist by trade. I was a producer for ten years, then a reporter, political editor, and then went into presenting but, you know, politics has always been my main thing.
It was very exciting to hear you this morning on the Today programme saying ‘…and from Ipswich, Nick Robinson’.
Well, it was a great favour of letting me broadcast from so near to home, but I’m doing them a favour as well. The director said, rightly I think, that one of the things we should all have learned post- Brexit, is that people in the big cities, London in particular, did not have enough of a sense of the mood outside the city. One small way of remedying that was to broadcast more often from outside Broadcasting House, so I quite often broadcast from Salford. My family is from there.
There was the odd listener who started to write in and said, ‘is it a coincidence that Manchester United home games seemed to coincide with Nick Robinson presenting from Salford!’ But there’s a serious point as, being in Ipswich this morning, meant we could do something about the controversy around the pylons coming from Norwich down to Tilbury.
We’ve just had such a busy time for you, with the General Election… Were you surprised when suddenly an election was called?
It completely took me by surprise because, although I could use this formula about ‘second half of the year’, which technically allowed July 4th, nobody I knew thought they were going to do it because the Tories were so far behind in the polls, and because there were things that might get better for him and all these opportunities. We’ve seen Keir Starmer at the summit of Blenheim Palace, the NATO summit in Washington, the Olympic Games opening ceremony, and Rishi Sunak could have been at them… and he chose not to do it.
So it took me by surprise and made it quite stressful because we didn’t know, when the election was called, whether all the leaders would agree to be interviewed. There was quite a lot of faffing around with
‘I’ll only be interviewed if he’s interviewed first’, etc. so it meant that, just to add to the stress, we had to effectively prepare seven half hour interviews simultaneously, but it was fun to do.
Okay, there’s great expectations now for what’s going to happen now. Any predictions of the big challenges ahead?
Yeah. How do you turn change expectations into reality?
This one word ‘change’ on his manifesto. The reason he did it, is it’s what everyone can project onto that word… what change they want.
But, you know, one of the oldest cliches in politics is ‘to govern, is to choose’. Take that electricity pylon story I was describing. People on the one hand want green power and they want it fast, and they want to be less dependent on Vladimir Putin, but also people don’t want pylons going through their beautiful scenery. He has to choose and so the big question is, does he disappoint those people who want to change, because they don’t like what’s being delivered? Or, in the end, can he take people with him? And nobody knows.
How many prime ministers have you interviewed in your career?
Well, let’s see… I was a producer when Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister and when John Major was Prime Minister so really I interviewed Blair and Brown, Cameron, May, Johnson and Truss. So seven now …and 11 elections.
Oh, that’s a lot! Thank you so much for giving up your time today, Nick Robinson.
Ride and Stride and Pedal & Drive will be held on Saturday 14th September and is open to all.
