We Have to Start Asking Questions

‘Scoop’ – a docudrama on Maitlis’ now-infamous interview of Prince Andrew – had just arrived on UK screens and for those weeks, the election, in the UK or otherwise, was far from anyone’s mind.

Privately, those organising the event with Maitlis – part of Hanover’s The World Rewired event series – were planning to make sure the conversation could be hauled back to a pivotal political year and away from the controversial royal. As it was, all it took was serendipity.

On the evening of the event, three hours prior, Rishi Sunak stood in the Downing Street drizzle and called the election.

“It was bad planning,” she told Gavin Megaw, Hanover President, at the event in central London. “Rishi Sunak is standing there saying, ‘we’re the ones with a plan’. They didn’t even plan for an umbrella.”

“And so the election began, in less than auspicious circumstances,” said Maitlis. The presenter of The News Agents podcast, who will host Channel 4’s election coverage this year, said that there was a sense that Sunak had given up by calling an earlier than expected vote. At the time of writing, the campaign is just a fortnight old but already the conversation has moved on and Labour and the Tories have settled into a typical tit-for-tat back and forth.

And while the polls have long showed Labour in the lead, Maitlis said the result is by no means a done deal and believes the polls will narrow up to the day of the vote.

Maitlis, who has covered elections for BBC, including for its flagship news programme, Newsnight, for decades, said the election has brought back into focus the role of journalism in politics. “We have to start asking questions,” she said. “We have to start interrogating Labour on what they say they are going to do.”

Discussing what has been called Labour’s “Ming vase strategy”, which reflects caution in saying too much by not saying much at all, Maitlis said the vase was yet to come out of the cabinet, but that it must.

“The beauty of [an election campaign] is that you don’t know when you’re going to get your moments,” she said, “you never know when Sharron Storer is going to confront Blair about the NHS, when John Prescott is going to punch someone.”

This, while the beauty of politics, especially an election, raises the question of how podcasts operate in such a fast-paced news environment. Maitlis, whose podcast on Global, The News Agents, launched with peers Jon Sopel and Lewis Goodall to much fanfare in 2022, said the Westminster rumour mill poses a particular challenge when it comes to veracity and speed.

On the day the election was announced, rumours were growing stronger for some 24 hours, but this has happened before and come to nothing. But Maitlis knew they had to do something. “The rumour was not going away so we did something we did ahead of the Queen’s death,” she said, “we kind of pre-empted the thing that everyone thought was going to happen.”

“We recorded a piece on the election and we said we might have got this all entirely wrong but we think you should know that everyone is talking about it. We took our life in our hands a bit because you could be proved wrong very quickly but we decided we had to discuss it because we are the place that people come to see if what everyone is talking about is garbage.”

“And that is the anatomy of how a podcast breaks a new story in this day and age.”

And while all eyes are on the UK currently, it is hard to ignore the impending election across the pond. At the time of writing (the problem with a magazine issue in an election year), Donald Trump has been found guilty on all counts in his “hush money” trial but is awaiting sentencing. Will the outcome impact the vote in November?

"It’s really hard to imagine Trump going to prison,” said Maitlis. “Everybody in America probably thinks he’s guilty of the things he’s been accused of, but he may well still be president. To find those things not mutually exclusive is a brand new place. I wouldn’t put money on America having gotten Trump out of their system.”

But as America so with the UK, Maitlis said her for an election campaign, “you need to go into it with your eyes wide open, but with your mind open as well. I am always very aware of the herd mentality,” she said, and forces herself to scrutinise if the story everyone is talking about is really the key take. “We have to be honest with ourselves,” she said. “If only so much could be said for those running for office.”