Confessions by Edward Stourton — the journalist re-examines his life

Ever the diligent journalist, Edward Stourton went back to contemporary sources to check his recollection of events in this memoir, and found they confounded his memory. When he was head boy of Ampleforth College, he had no awareness of the abuse of boys by monks that was revealed decades after he left.

His university diaries, written on Florentine paper, make him cringe at their pretentiousness. And when he digs out press cuttings about his time presenting BBC radio programme Today, he is “surprised by how often the ‘posh’ label pops up”.

By the time he gets to the BBC — via prep school, Ampleforth, the Pitt Club and the presidency of the Cambridge Union — readers of Confessions will be surprised at his surprise. Stourton seems the epitome of an establishment insider. When John Prescott attacks him live on air for being the descendant of 19 barons, his response is: “Lots of us are descended from barons.”

If he realises that his life often reads like an Evelyn Waugh novel, he doesn’t show it

Stourton is surrounded by politicians, journalists, judges, ambassadors and generals. He counts Conservative MP Andrew Mitchell as a friend and met Nicholas Coleridge, former chair of Condé Nast Britain, at “a grand teenage party in Chelsea during our gap year”. He admits that he probably felt comfortable at Today because in those days it was “a journalistic version . . . of the Pitt Club or the Ampleforth Monitors’ Room”. About being given more big interviews than experienced broadcaster Sue MacGregor, he writes: “I confess I was not aware of being a beneficiary of old-school chauvinism.” If he realises that his life often reads like an Evelyn Waugh novel, he doesn’t show it.

Stourton took a once typical route into broadcasting. Post-Cambridge, he was sounded out as a spy and flirted with the London Weekend Television network before joining ITN as a graduate trainee. He made his name as ITN’s diplomatic editor, where he “shimmied between summits, took in the odd war (the Balkans, Iraq)”. Despite a fleeting admission of PTSD, he makes war reporting sound light and fun. Here, his memory lets him down again. He was a witness when the Soviet flag was lowered over Red Square for the last time, when Checkpoint Charlie was cleared, and when Nelson Mandela was released. But his recollection is blurred by the rush to make the News at Ten and the scramble to the next story.

While the japes and scrapes of foreign reporting are more vivid than his subsequent career, the latter seems more satisfying. He devotes nine pages to his coverage of Sean Sellers, a death-row inmate in Oklahoma, and is justifiably proud of his documentary about the Khiam detention centre in Southern Lebanon, which won an Amnesty Award. “It matters to tell these stories,” he writes, especially those of people “who are left behind by the swirls and surging currents of daily news.”

Raised on the Catholic model of autobiography as a spiritual journey, Stourton has named his memoir after St Augustine’s Confessions. “I cannot quite shake off . . . the idea that life is a journey with a moral destination,” he writes. Stourton believes his career as a journalist has shaken his complacency and taught him compassion, patience and a capacity for rage. And if you don’t have that, he says, “you should give up, go home, and get a different, more useful job”.

Confessions: Life Re-Examined by Edward Stourton, Doubleday £20, 304 pages

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