Camilla Long is not averse to discomfiting people – be they celebrities, politicians, tweeters, interviewees or, as it turns out, interviewers.
When I asked Long, an experienced and multi-award-winning interviewer, what it felt like to be on the other side of the dictaphone, she was blunt: “I don’t like it at all. This is the first coffee shop, sit-down interview that I’ve done – and I don’t like it a bit.”
Later I asked Long – a former Tatler journalist who at one time would attend four or five parties a night – whether she found lockdown and social distancing rules a drag.
“It was fine,” she said flatly. “I’m actually not that sociable, you know? I hate people.”
Perhaps sensing this interview’s headline being written, Long rolled her eyes, bowed her head and stated clearly into my dictaphone: “That was a joke, for the record.”
Then she changed her mind. “No. It’s actually not a joke. It’s not a joke,” she cried, “it’s not a joke!”
I asked Long why she hates people. “I wonder if it’s something to do with being English? And you sort of feel when you meet people that you have to give a performance – and actually, I say English, I mean a very specific type of southern English – and that can be quite mentally draining, can’t it?
“But then,” she added, breathlessly, “also all you have to do is read the newspapers every day and you will begin to hate people more and more and more!”
Feeling slightly uneasy, I asked Long if she naturally assumed upon meeting somebody new that she would dislike them.
“Not at all.”
Ah good, I sighed. That would have been awkward.
“No, so far I like you,” she said reassuringly. “It’s a very long and enjoyable path to truly disliking somebody. So yeah, you’ve got time.”
How am I feeling? ‘Angry, shite and strangely tired’
I met Long, a Sunday Times columnist, interviewer and TV critic, on a dreary Thursday morning in the first week of January at a cafe near her home in north-west London. She works from home and lives with her husband, a photojournalist, and their two young children.
I arrived a few minutes early and was loitering by the till when Long strode in with a confident wave in my direction – “I can always spot a journalist,” she said as we shook hands.
There weren’t many tables available in the pokey cafe Long had chosen, so we were forced to perch awkwardly, coats on knees, at a side table, half facing each other, half gazing out the window. At some point Long, who ordered a hibiscus tea, felt comfortable enough to rest her black, DM-style work shoes on the footrest of my stall so she could face me.
I asked Long if she was suffering from the January blues. “So awful, so awful, so awful!” she wailed theatrically. Much of her week had been spent watching crime drama for her TV column.
“God, they love the dead bodies in January,” she said. “So not only am I feeling angry, shite, strangely tired for having had a holiday – I now have to do probably six different whodunnits on the television as well.”
On the bright side, it wasn’t difficult for Long to find a subject for her column that week. “I think Prince Harry is actually mocking me,” she said (the first gory details of his book, Spare, had begun to leak out the day before). “I make great efforts not to write about the royal family because it seems to me it’s a rolling goatfuck of a soap opera.
“It’s kind of amazing, but there’s at least three or four articles every week that are incredibly interesting. So I just have to sit down on a Friday, thinking: Can I write about it again? Can I write about it again? Okay, yes, I can.”
‘Most journalists were afraid to criticise Harry and Meghan’
Long said she has never been shy of speaking her mind about the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. In May 2018, she compared their wedding to “the 5pm brawl in the cheapo enclosure at Ascot”.
“The anger that came back on that was extraordinary,” she said, describing most other coverage as “wall-to-wall gush”. “If the press is guilty of anything, it’s selling the fairy story too hard.”
Long suggested that other journalists likely held back from criticising the royal couple, especially in the aftermath of their interview with Oprah Winfrey, in which they were scathing of the British press and described it as “bigoted”.
“There was definitely a period when most journalists were afraid to criticise them,” she said. “And it’s really interesting to watch them go on and on about how they were criticised all the time. When I know, from inside the machine, in fact the opposite was true – that people were bending over backwards to be nice about them and to accommodate them and to not be seen as bigoted in any way. And this affected a lot of people, for sure. And I understand, to an extent, why that was.”
Long described this as a “pretty prickly time” when “tempers were very, very high”. “You had to be very careful with the way you chose to make your point,” she added. “You want your point to be heard, and you don’t want to be obfuscated by them saying: ‘Oh, well, she said it in this way so she’s racist.’”
‘It’s okay to be a bit critical of yourself’
Long, 44, was educated at Oxford High School and then Corpus Christi College, Oxford. She broke into journalism – to the apparent “horror” of her parents, both of whom worked in academia – after sending off 65 job applications.
Her first break came when she was offered an admin role at Vogue. Long started writing for the magazine and later went on to work for Tatler, the high-society magazine then edited by Geordie Greig. “He’s like a character out of a novel,” said Long of Greig, who went on to edit the Evening Standard, Mail on Sunday, Daily Mail and, as of this week, The Independent. “It was great to work for him.”
Last month Long was named columnist of the year at the British Journalism Awards (see our video interview with Long from the night). Part of her winning entry was a column documenting how, while at Tatler, she had witnessed first hand how oligarchs had used their ill-gotten gains to inveigle their way into the upper echelons of British society. “For a certain type of impoverished British toff the arrival of the oligarchs was a five-star orgasm,” she wrote.
Long initially joined The Sunday Times in 2007 as deputy editor of Style magazine. She’s held several positions at the newspaper and fondly recalls working with legendary writers including Lynn Barber and the late AA Gill, who at one stage would phone his copy in to Long. “He’d say: ‘Oh, darling, it’s shite,’” Long recalled. “And I just thought: If the best writer, the best journalist, thinks that sometimes, it’s okay to be a bit critical of yourself. Because I am very critical.”
John Witherow, Long’s former editor at The Sunday Times who is now chairman of Times Newspapers, told me he thought Long had learnt a lot from working with AA Gill in her younger days. “He judged the merit of his copy, which was essentially peerless, on whether Camilla thought it was funny or not,” said Witherow. “And if she didn’t think it was funny, he’d often change it. So she became a sort of arbiter of Adrian’s copy. And I think in the process, she became a better writer.
“I just remember her being very irreverent, funny and rather unruly,” Witherow added. He described her as a “very, very good interviewer – a very tough interviewer, actually. I’d get the copy in often on a Friday evening and I’d read it and ring her up and say: ‘So, you really didn’t like this person, right?’ She’d say: ‘Oh no, I loved him, he was wonderful.’ I’d say: ‘Yeah, it doesn’t read like that.’ Because she was pretty tough.”
Lynn Barber, who left The Sunday Times in 2018 and is now a freelance, described Long as “huge fun, both as a writer and as a friend. She’s also very intelligent and perceptive. And fearless, which I think good journalists have to be.” She told me that Long is “an entirely good egg”.
Krissi Murison, editor of The Sunday Times Magazine, said: “There is always huge excitement (and a touch of nervousness) whenever Camilla’s interview copy lands: what is she going to say? What extraordinary thing has she got them to say? Whatever it is, you know it’s going to be totally engrossing, insightful and – assuming you can get it past the lawyers – very, very funny.
“I don’t know many writers who craft their words so carefully. She makes it look effortless, but every single syllable is precision-aimed (and woe betide anyone who tries to enact a lazy edit on her copy). She’s the magic combo of great stylist and great journalist – brutal truths, beautifully told. But mainly I like working with her because she has the best office gossip. She seems to know more about us than we know about ourselves.”
Twitter ban? ‘I prefer to speak through my columns now’
Since July 2020, Long has been suspended from Twitter. She was banned from the platform for sharing a link to one of her own articles that criticised “facemask Nazis”. “I have appealed probably three or four, five times. And nothing has happened.”
I asked Long if she missed Twitter. “No,” she said, adding that she is unlikely to appeal her suspension again. “I prefer to speak through my columns now.”
Beyond Twitter, I asked Long how wary she is of the threat of being canceled. “Less so now,” she said. “Because I think honest speech is definitely coming back into the mainstream, as it were.”
Does Long ever self-censor? “Not at all,” she said. “We are in the business of communication. And if you are riling people to the point that they are blindly angry, well then you haven’t made your point properly.”
When I began to ask whether she is ever told what to write, Long cut in: “Your question is: Does the editor of The Sunday Times – ?” or Rupert Murdoch, I interjected – “does Rupert ever tell me what to write? No, he doesn’t. Hahaha. I think I’d have a heart attack if he telephoned me and said: ‘About that piece you’re going to write about high heels or flats, Camilla – I want you to write this. I really, really hate high heels.’ No, that’s never happened.”
Murdoch’s News Corp owns a sprawling media empire. I asked Long if that creates obstacles. “What kind of obstacles would it create for me? You can be direct with me, William.”
Well, I said, if you didn’t like Piers Morgan’s show on TalkTV, could you write that? “Yes. Yes. In fact, I do remember reviewing the first show that he did. And he got Donald Trump on. It was actually a great hour of television. I can say that without feeling in any way compromised at all. But yeah, I do feel like I can, for sure.”
When I asked Long what she made of Jeremy Clarkson’s recent (now deleted) Sun column on Meghan Markle – in which he shared fantasies of Markle being paraded naked through the streets and having “lumps of excrement” thrown at her – she said: “I don’t want to talk about Jeremy Clarkson. I want to talk about me.” Long added that she could and would write about Clarkson, who also has a Sunday Times column, if she was minded to do so.
Charming an interviewee? ‘You can never go wrong with taking them a present’
One of the major challenges of Long’s work as an interviewer is to generate original and interesting content from famous people that are media trained and often speak to scores of other journalists. “You interview celebrities and you know they’re just regurgitating the same old anecdote,” she said.
“An enormous change has happened in the way that celebrities communicate with the public in the last ten years, which is they can now put up direct information, which may or may not be true, on the internet. And the fans take it as true,” she added.
“You can pretty much bumble along and avoid all scrutiny and still be famous – and just put your music and your books out and not have to do any interviews at all. So I think the piece of ice that interviewers stand upon has shrunk a lot, for sure.”
What is it like to be on the receiving end of a Camilla Long interview? I asked Piers Morgan, whose 2010 profile by Long started with the sentence: “Piers Morgan has one hour to convince me he’s not a total tosser.”
“Camilla’s writing, and interviewing, technique is mischievous, provocative, and occasionally merciless,” said Morgan. “It makes her very entertaining to read – unless you’re in the firing line. I’ve usually found her to be annoyingly accurate in her critiques of me.”
I asked Long if she has any tips for softening up interviewees. “You can never go wrong with taking them a present – this I learnt from Lynn Barber,” she said. (I silently congratulated myself for at least having bought my interviewee her hibiscus tea.)
“Show interest in their work as well,” Long added. “And just strange hobbies that they might be interested in – because actually what’s really surprising is if you get an interview with a celebrity that’s completely unexpected about something you never realised they were interested in.”
I asked Long hopefully whether she had any unusual hobbies. “No,” she said, with a laugh. “Being a journalist?”
Throughout my encounter with Long, I found her to be very much on-brand with her Sunday Times persona – provocative, sharp-tongued, outspoken and witty. Still, I had to ask: is this the real Camilla Long? Or is there some element of theatre and role-play when it comes to writing a column?
“Oh, it’s totally me,” she said. “In fact, I would say I don’t really have any control over what I write. I will start a column not really knowing what I think and it’s quite interesting to find out what I do think towards the end. So the idea is that I sort of think about things over the course of the week a bit. But I don’t know where it’s going at all. It’s a process of discovery.”
Quickfire questions with Camilla Long
Do you have a favourite book? “Err, no.”
Magazine? Private Eye
Newspaper (apart from The Sunday Times)? The Times
TV show? The White Lotus, Below Deck and Selling Sunset
Podcast? The Rest is History – “it brings out the inner nerd in me… I will say that actually every time I put it on I fall asleep.”
Columnist? “Oh, I couldn’t possibly pick. They’re all brilliant.”
Interview you’ve written? “For sheer gob-stopping horror/amusement, the Trumps. Or top amount of amusement – not amusement, but just being funny and clever – Rupert Everett. Or I did Hugh Hefner, but that was gross.”
Career low point? “My career low point was definitely being groped by Dave Lee Travis in an interview. That was not nice at all.”
High point? “Any piece of writing that I’ve done that just is so much fun.”
Worst habit? “My attention span is appalling. Not being disciplined on that – just chatting shit all the time.”
New Year’s resolution? “Chat less shit.”
Email pged@pressgazette.co.uk to point out mistakes, provide story tips or send in a letter for publication on our "Letters Page" blog
