From telegraph.co.uk
The presenter on his enduring BBC career and why men must get tested for prostate cancer, the disease he’s lived with for 12 years
“Ideally, we’d all like our prostates left alone by the doctors,” says the Radio 4 broadcaster and former Today presenter Edward Stourton, 68, sitting at his kitchen table in south London, pouring us both a morning coffee, “but my experience proves the opposite. For God’s sake, get it tested and find out the good news – or the bad news. If I hadn’t got tested, I’d probably be dead by now.”
Stourton is in the middle of chemotherapy treatment. His former Today editor Rod Liddle has just published a column in The Spectator with the headline “Hands off my Prostate”. In it, Liddle eschews any kind of preventative rummaging around his own backside, prostate cancer-preventing or not, and supports the UK National Screening Committee’s controversial decision to not test the PSA levels of the majority of high risk men for fear of causing unnecessary harm.
“I’m very fond of Rod,” Stourton says, “he picks up on things which you feel. He’s quite clever like that. But do you think people read Rod and think, ‘That’s going to be my guiding light?’”.
Given that 12,000 men die of prostate cancer a year, one would hope not.
Today, we are in Stourton’s refined double-fronted villa where he lives with his second wife, Fiona Murch, a television producer, to whom he has been married for 22 years. The house is full of oil paintings, books and antiques, with the drawing room painted in a shade of Chinese yellow.
Stourton’s final broadcast on Today was September 11, 2009. After a decade on the show, he was replaced by the BBC, with no explanation, by the then BBC’s North America editor, Justin Webb. But he is still as popular as ever with Radio 4 listeners. And since the Today axe fell, he has been broadcasting on Sunday, the BBC’s early morning live religious affairs programme, filling in for his old Today colleague Sarah Montague on the World at One, and presenting The World this Weekend and Analysis. He has also, in the autumn of his life, become an established and prolific writer.
His latest book, Made in America, written in what he calls “a tearing hurry” – just three months – comes out in January to tie in with the first anniversary on January 20 of Donald Trump’s second inauguration. The book, born out of a segment on Sunday in which Stourton analysed the thinking of Right-wing MAGA Christians, explores the connection between Trump’s MAGA popularity and American history. “The news in Trump World can make you seasick. This book will provide an anchor,” he writes in its introduction. “It will not stop the storm, but it might steady the ship as we seek to make sense of our turbulent times.”
Stourton was Washington correspondent for Channel 4 news in 1986 (and then diplomatic editor for ITN). His deep interest in American politics has lasted throughout his career (he was in the US for the 2024 election, reporting at the Republican watch party in Atlanta). By his own admission though, back in 1986, he had arrived in the US “with all the prejudices of a liberal newsroom in London”.
Stourton distances himself from opinion in the book, writing: “I am a reporter and not a polemicist”. But he is clearly an intellectual, long interested in the interplay between American politics and American history. Of Trump’s second win, he writes, “I felt, for the first time ever, unenthusiastic about making any future trips to the United States… it was not the election result, rather the way brutishness and coarseness seemed to have overtaken American politics.”
“If you really want to understand Trump,” he explains to me now, “you have to understand that he’s as American as apple pie… tariffs, all the stuff about pinching Greenland and taking over Canada as the 51st state, the backdrop to the whole deportation and immigration debate [that] goes back to the Civil War, the white supremacists and the Jimmy Crow laws…
“I was driving down one of those long motorways to our house in France, and I realised that if you look at Trump in a particular way, you see that everything he has done and everything that shocks people isn’t really maverick. It’s rooted in American history. And that’s what the book tries to demonstrate.”
It’s fortunate that he wrote Made in America quickly. Stourton is currently in the trenches of 10 rounds of chemo, due to finish next spring. The fourth three-week cycle is about to start tomorrow.
As we talk, his wife comes in to say hello. Stourton left his first wife, Margaret McEwen, daughter of a baronet and mother of his three children, for Murch, decades ago. In that transition from first wife to second, Stourton underwent a kind of shaking off of a life of upper-class privilege – a colonial childhood in Nigeria, a private education at Ampleforth, a degree at Trinity College Cambridge, and a once unquestioning devotion to the Catholic church, marred by incidents of sexual abuse. Some monks at Ampleforth were latterly exposed as paedophiles. Back then, he sent his two sons to Eton.
All his old male friends remain – ex politicians, judges, editors, diplomats – but Stourton’s life has undergone, at the very least, a reassessment, which he wrote about two years ago in his memoir, Confessions. He wrote it because he said prostate cancer means “I shall probably not celebrate my 80th birthday”. When I spoke to him in 2023 he said: “It is a life review. It was a feeling that I wanted to make some sort of sense of [my life], sort of curate it.”
Murch is of a different order background-wise, not Catholic like Stourton, who still races to Mass at his church in Brixton as soon as he goes off air at 7.53am every Sunday.
Stourton and Murch have, for years, had an extremely close family – four adult children between them, two boys, Ivo and Tom (Stourton’s) and two girls, Eleanor and Rosie (daughters of each of them) and three granddaughters, the mere mention of whom – one nicknamed Squidgy – makes Stourton visibly melt. All this is ever more important because for 12 years, as Stourton says “I’ve been living with cancer”.
Stourton was diagnosed with prostate cancer in February 2014. It has been managed ever since with an ever-changing series of treatments. But now it is requiring more serious interventions. In 2023, he wrote that “the finishing line is that bit clearer, and it will probably become more predictable as the disease progresses.”
There is new “activity” in his old tumours, he explains, which are pressing on his nervous system “and a whole bunch of new ones that had popped up, a couple in my spine and all over my upper body.” They had caused him acute pain at Easter and he ended up in A&E at King’s Hospital in the middle of the night. “It was really bad.”
When I wave goodbye, he’s going off for a blood test in preparation for the next round of chemo. The cold cap to protect his impressive head of hair goes on tomorrow, when he’ll be wired up to the drugs, all being well. But he seems so upbeat.
“You catch me in peak time,” he says, “Week one is pretty vile, week two you’re beginning to recover, and then week three it’s as if you are normal. So today, I’m on the last day of week three. I’m in cheerful mode. Tomorrow, I will be back into week one again of cycle four. I’ll be feeling pretty grim.” He first had chemotherapy in October 2017 through to January 2018. Then, the doctor told him it would be a one-time treatment, “but here I am again,” he says of medical advances.
“We all sit round in a semicircle”, he says of the chemo sessions. “Fiona and I always say we will go out for lunch afterwards, but somehow I never fancy it.” He is phlegmatic about his cancer. “I’d just rather not make it the dominant thing in my life. There are times you can’t do that and obviously now [in treatment] is one of those times.”
But he is just deeply relieved to be alive at all. “It’s amazing the way they have kept me going all this time. It’s an argument for early diagnosis. There are prostate treatments keeping me alive now which didn’t even exist when I was first diagnosed.”
Murch, who persuaded Stourton to have the PSA test, remembers when Stourton was told, two years after diagnosis, in 2016, that the cancer was metastatic. In 2014, when it was first discovered, it was only in the prostate, a smattering of tiny tumours too small to remove with surgery. Stourton had opted not to have his entire prostate removed, having been given 80-85 per cent chance of total cure from radiotherapy and hormone treatment. “I was on the wrong side of that equation”, he says. “My doctor had said, “if you are clear in seven years, I’ll pat you on the back. Unfortunately, a couple of years later…”.
In 2016, when he was 59, he was told it had spread to his bones and around his body, to his spine, his neck and his pelvic lymph nodes. “So I had made the wrong decision [not to have the prostate removed]. The doctors never tell you what to do. But I have lived for 12 years with my prostate. I could never have known.”
That moment was the most challenging time. “Initially I went straight into planning Ed’s funeral in my mind,” says Murch. “You immediately leap to the worst-case scenario, to organisation devastation mode. And then you come back from that, and here we are, 12 years on.
“You have to live in the moment. My hairdresser said to me, ‘What makes you think Ed is going to die before you? You could be killed in a plane crash or run over by a bus. Don’t be so dramatic.’ And I thought that was the best thing anybody had said to me.”
Stourton’s sons Ivo, a banker in his 40s and Tom, an actor and writer in his late-30s (who was a friend of Prince William’s at Eton), who both live in London, have since had PSA tests, the first line blood test that picks up a potential problem.
Prostate cancer can run in families, although the National Screening Committee has just ruled that men like Ivo and Tom – potentially at risk from a family history – are not eligible for screening. Stourton cites himself as an example for the case for screening. As he says, he’d probably be dead now if he hadn’t asked for a PSA. He never liked going to the doctors.
“I think it is something to do with boarding school,” says Murch. “Joking apart, I think boarding school probably is a factor,” agrees Stourton, “You’re on the rugby field and you get a very big cut and you just get on with it… the day I went for my prostate biopsy was the first day I’d ever taken off work,” he says.
Stourton is a big teddy bear of a man. He has a refinement and an understated manner, redolent of a better era when good manners and old-fashioned courtesy were highly valued. He could have been a diplomat. The wonderful authoritative voice that made him such a reassuring presence on the Today programme is unchanged.
The decision by BBC suits to move him off Today was quite possibly because he was seen as too posh in an era in which the channel sought to democratise itself.
As he writes in his book, “I should have been more alert to it and been smart about trying to mitigate it. It never really occurred to me that I might have to apologise for who I am or make myself different in some way.”
His enforced departure caused such an uproar among Today listeners that there were questions in the House of Commons and a campaign for his reinstatement by both his three adult children and this newspaper. He had deep support from his fellow presenter, John Humphrys.
The BBC management is currently collapsing in on itself amid revelations (broken by this newspaper) of Panorama doctoring a Trump speech, a criminally-convicted News at Ten presenter with egregious predilections allowed to exercise an out-of-control ego for years (Huw Edwards), and accusations of institutional Left-wing bias, fuelled by the documentary fronted by the child of a Hamas leader.
But, broadly, Stourton remains loyal, especially to Radio 4. “For all its problems, the BBC is a uniquely wonderful thing. The best of it is radio because the standards are still very high.”
Two years ago, he told me: “I think I have become a liberated person. If you don’t ally yourself to change – with the environment around you – you are dead as a broadcaster, and probably as a person too.”
This newspaper gave Confessions a rave review but it also noted that he did not say whether a man of his class still had a place at the BBC.
“Well, I’m still there. I’m still on air,” he says now of his 26 years on Radio 4, which he believes sits above the disarray of the institution because of its absolute rigour and professionalism.
“My experience is mostly with live news programmes, and it tends not to be about woke stuff, it’s much more about getting the balance right, being rigorous about everything you say and every source you use. So when you get a disaster like the Hamas documentary, the people who are most angry are the regular presenters and producers because we’ve all been desperately trying to get it right, and then something like that blows the whole thing up.
“I take the view that if the bit I’m working for – Radio 4 – is doing what it should, then that’s enough for me. The director- general job is a hugely important one, but if you look at the record, pretty much everybody has taken a battering. Getting rid of the BBC would be a hell of a faff and I can’t see the Government wanting to dismantle it. I can genuinely say that at Radio 4 we are incredibly serious-minded and we don’t have a problem with bias at all.”
And what does he make of the Today programme now? Today, after all, employs presenters who bear no resemblance to the old guard (apart from Nick Robinson who perhaps most resembles John Humphrys’ famously combative style with politicians).
We are regularly thanked for our company, a style that has migrated from a phone-in format. And it can sometimes feel like its presenters (bar the newest recruit, Anna Foster) are engaged in a podcast arms race as teasers are regularly dropped into the running schedule, signalling “scoops”.
The recent departure of Mishal Husain (whose voice Stourton loves) and Martha Kearney signals, perhaps, the final nail in the coffin of the golden age. Stourton looks appalled at my attempt to elicit from him an opinion on the new line-up. And yet, I think I detect a suppressed acknowledgement of what I’m trying to convey.
“I have strong views but I can’t possibly tell you. Among presenters in the same stable, there has to be a degree of omerta. You are not going to get that out of me. I am pulling up the drawbridge.”
Murch, his wife, says emphatically and loyally: “Oh, Ed has absolutely no ego!”. He looks thoughtful. “Well, I do when it comes to wanting to get things absolutely right. But I’m a very reluctant social media person. The idea of firing something off, you’re almost bound to get into trouble. I just don’t feel any desire to do that.”
When Stourton stopped being a Today presenter, Christmas cards from those in political power quickly fell away. “Presenting Today fools you into thinking you matter,” he writes in Confessions.
That world is not his world anymore. He has no inside track to Westminster, to whether or not Keir Starmer will still be PM next year. But of Reform’s power base, he says: “I don’t know what is going to happen. I was a founder joiner of the SDP. The political pundits thought the SDP was going to take off and become the main opposition party to the Tories. It almost got there, but not quite. It didn’t take off in the end. I think it’s worth bearing in mind with regard to Reform.”
Stourton has what he calls “a benign view of what will happen to me next”. For all the blood tests and the chemo cycles, he’s still thinking a lot about this world, with the new book and broadcasting, and in so doing, giving the world a lot to think about in return.
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