British Journalism Awards interviewer of the year winner Laura Kuenssberg beat a shortlist of entries that included Christina Lamb of The Sunday Times, Charlotte Edwardes from The Guardian, LBC’s Nick Ferrari and News UK’s Piers Morgan.
The BBC’s entry for Kuenssberg cited her agenda-setting interviews with Chancellor Rachel Reeves, Brianna Ghey’s mother Esther Ghey and scandal-hit businesswoman and Conservative peer Michelle Mone as stand-out work from the year.
The former BBC political editor said it had been “a huge surprise and a real delight” to win the award, her first British Journalism Award since she was named journalist of the year in 2016.
Her interview with Baroness Mone and husband Doug Barrowman — whose company PPE Medpro had been awarded £200m of government contracts for personal protective equipment during the pandemic — memorably saw Mone admit that she had lied to the press about her involvement with the company. She defended the deception to Kuenssberg, saying it was “not a crime” to lie to the media.
Kuenssberg told Press Gazette that the interview, which aired a year ago this week, had been harder to organise than anything else in the past 12 months.
“One of the reasons we were so keen to cover that story was because… everyone had been affected by Covid, everyone had been shocked by the headlines about the scandal around Covid PPE,” she said.
“Michelle Mone is a fascinating subject because she was also a household name. We knew that people would be fascinated by whatever she had to say — it was a story that had everything. Everyone had a stake in what happened in the pandemic.”
While the Mone interview had been the hardest to put together, Kuenssberg wasn’t sure which had been the hardest to actually conduct.
She said: “The hardest interviews to do are, normally, interviews where the person you’re talking to doesn’t want to let you talk — or when a politician is completely determined to stick on their script and they don’t want to do anything else. That can be incredibly difficult… and there are many of them.”
Asked what she wanted out of an interview as a reader or viewer, she said: “There are lots of different possibilities for good interviews. There is a compelling character, mischievous questions, holding [them] to account, humour, drama, emotion, new information.”
She said that, working in news, she put a premium on novel information.
“As news journalists, we have the double privilege of seeking to reveal new information for our viewers, readers, listeners, audience — but you’re also trying to create something compelling, that people want to pay attention to.”
Laura Kuenssberg on Boris Johnson slip-up: ‘Honesty was the best policy’
The British Journalism Awards judges described Kuenssberg as “forensic, politely determined and never lets her subject off the hook”.
In October Kuenssberg had to cancel her Boris Johnson interview after accidentally sending him the briefing notes intended for her team.
“Well, honesty was the best policy,” she said. “I made a mistake, I pressed the wrong button, there you go.
“There was no dilemma. You tell the truth: I screwed up, there we go, next story.”
Asked about the intensely negative commentary on social media following the Johnson mistake, Kuenssberg said: “I don’t know what conspiracy theories there were, but whatever they were, they weren’t the first and they probably won’t be the last.”
[From 2023: Laura Kuenssberg tells a conference she turned off her Twitter notifications ‘years ago’]
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