Mishal Husain: ‘With a name like mine, my career would only have been possible in Britain’

The presenter has written a book on how to get ahead at work, but is BBC Radio 4’s Today programme her toughest gig?

• Read an exclusive extract from The Skills below

Mishal Husain has written a book, The Skills. It’s not a how-to-be-me, since it understands implicitly how unusual her career is, plus there aren’t a lot of openings presenting the Today programme. Rather, it works as a manual-cum-memoir, with macro elements quoting many psychosocial sources about work and how to thrive in it, as a woman, mainly, but also as a person. In a different context, it would have landed as a kind of bluestocking version of Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In: practical, intricately researched, honest, self-questioning but outward-looking. Recent history has given it more of an edge. It’s enlightening and rather challenging, like going through a stranger’s cutlery drawer and realising how tidy other people are: successful people plan and prepare; they teach their children not to fear the word ambition; they build resilience and conquer anxiety; but they also engage deeply with where they’d want to be in 10 years, rather than waiting to see where the decade takes them. It sounds a bit swotty in principle, but is inspiring in practice. It’s a bit lame, I realise, to sit in your job like a marshmallow (as I do).

“I really wanted to distil the tools of the trade that have worked for me,” Husain says, drinking a virgin apple mojito in a London pub. The day is hot as hell, and everyone else looks like a hat that’s been sat on. Husain looks intrepid, full of vim, practical, not so much groomed as naturally perfect, like a war reporter in a 30s novel. It’s not that you want to agree with her, more that you desperately want her to agree with you. “I’d always been personally interested in the ‘how’ of anyone’s field,” she explains of the book. “If we had more time today, I’d want to know how you do what you do.”

Since she began writing The Skills in 2016, a few things have landed that completely change the context of the book, and rather vex the plucky self-reliance-for-a-rigged-system philosophy. The first is that the BBC, where Husain has built her career for the past two decades, has been revealed to have gender and race pay discrimination in its bones. The China editor Carrie Gracie’s pay dispute blew up at the start of this year, after she revealed that she was paid far less than her male equivalent, because she was classed by management as “in development”, despite having worked for them for 30 years. Six months earlier, the public broadcaster had been forced to reveal its top salaries, as part of the conditions of its new royal charter: of the top 96 earners, only a third were women; it was routine among co-presenters for the woman to be paid less than the man; the top 10 featured only one woman, Claudia Winkleman.

John Humphrys, Husain’s opposite number, was paid around three times what she earned. Humphrys seemed to find the scrutiny ridiculous, joking mirthlessly off-air to the BBC’s North America editor Jon Sopel (earning at least 50% more than Gracie), “I could volunteer that I’ve handed over already more than you fucking earn, but I’m still left with more than anybody else and that seems to me to be entirely just.” (Whether or not just, this was certainly true: Humphrys took a pay cut over phases and his pay has been reduced to between £400,000 and £410,000.)

The editor of Today, Sarah Sands, meanwhile, told the BBC’s Feedback programme that Humphrys had a particular “quality of holding power to account”, while Husain and Martha Kearney were better at fashion. I hate to swear, but John Humphrys does and maybe that’s how he earns the big bucks: this is fucking ridiculous, no?

“Have you never said anything in private that you wouldn’t want to see repeated?” Husain says of Humphrys. And of Sands’ comments, she asks another question: “Did you actually hear the interview?” I did hear it; I was about to get straight on Twitter, but I was chopping garlic, and by the time I’d washed my hands, Twitter was already ablaze. “Have you never said anything that couldn’t have been misunderstood?” There is nothing brittle about Husain when she says this; she is warm, human, she understands that you have to ask. Yes, of course, I say, we’ve all said things we wouldn’t want made public – but they’re rarely the opposite of what we think. It is impossible to escape the idea that she’s working in Jurassic Park.

Why would Sands think she – or Kearney, for that matter – knew anything about fashion? “My husband would be the first to agree with you, that I know nothing about fashion. Honestly, if I thought my editor was putting me on the soft stuff, I would be the first person to have a problem with it. One day, you’ll have the 8.10 [the main political interview on Today] and you know Dominic Raab is doing his first interview as Brexit secretary – that’s a moment, because you know it’s setting a new direction. Or it’s Andrew Parker, doing the first interview in MI5’s history.” This is a typical and magisterial Husain pivot, because it leaves me as the person who doubts her seriousness, rather than her own boss. Her deflections are so calm and sympathetic, you never feel closed down. Rather, the conversation is now closed.

For the record, her relationships with Humphrys and Today as a whole are very familial, no more to be undermined than you would bitch about your siblings to a stranger. “I expected it to be a bit of a bear pit, and it was much more collegiate than I imagined. That was a very pleasant surprise.”

Husain has a very expressive face, which is part of what makes her documentaries so memorable. When, in 2014, she was the first journalist into the army school in Pakistan where the Taliban had killed 132 children and 16 teachers, she told their story with magnetic intensity, actively listening, respectfully curious. Her deep knowledge, from childhood summers spent in the country, coupled with her expertise, having covered stories in Pakistan from the Musharraf coup in 1999 through to the killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011, was obvious. But you get the sense that she’s her own least favourite subject; while never being evasive or compromising her integrity, she can be as impermeable as an egg.

Back to Jurassic Park. I ask her what difference the pay disclosures had at the BBC? “The extraordinary thing was not just what we learned from them, but how women and men started talking to each other. I learned so much more about the experiences of people who I’d been working with. That happened, #MeToo happened, and I started to become really aware that my path had been much easier than other women’s. I earn a good wage, I married a good human being, all those things really helped.” Surely that can’t have been it? Surely her take home – from this revelation that women are systemically undervalued – can’t have been how lucky she was? “Well, I earn more than Justin Webb,” she says, laughing.

With that good human being, funds lawyer Meekal Hashmi, Husain has three sons, a 12-year-old and twins of 10. “It really was a scrum at the beginning. I don’t remember much of their babyhood.” Both in the book and in person, Husain is decisive and no-nonsense about work, parenting, and the balance between them, quoting the sociologist Prof Phyllis Moen, who says that rather than speaking of work and family as in competition for your time, we should use the term “life-course fit”. Broadly, this means recognising that whatever the pressures at home, what makes us really miserable is a presenteeist, unreasonable workplace. And perhaps raising three children, with no shade cast over her flourishing career, has predisposed her to loyalty towards the BBC. “I don’t think I have been held back,” she says, careful not to imply that maternity leave is a walk in the park. “But I think my circumstances are quite unusual: three children in two years means you’re not having the in-and-out of the workplace.” She took two short maternity leaves. “Secondly, I work shifts and it just so happened, they worked.”

Certainly, it’s impossible to imagine anyone moving faster up the career ladder while raising small children: from serving as Washington correspondent in 2002, interviewing all the crucial figures in the run-up to the Iraq war (Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Armitage, Richard Perle), she cemented her place in the BBC’s TV broadcasting. She made documentaries on the Arab spring, Malala Yousafzai, EU immigration. In 2012, she was one of the main faces of the BBC’s Olympics coverage, taking the solo morning slot throughout.Husain came to the Today programme in 2013, and got good reviews for her professionalism, coolness under fire and deft intellect. But that delayed the criticism, rather than heading it off: in 2017, Andrew Pierce in the Daily Mail wrote a spiteful piece about her “lightweight” chairing of the pre-election leadership debate in Cambridge: he accused her of failing to control panellists and a “Corbynista mob in full cry”. There was also a “car-crash” radio interview with Boris Johnson – the one in which she famously told Johnson to stop talking, and he returned, “You’ve invited me on your show to talk!” (“He did interrupt me in that,” she clarifies now. “My full sentence was going to be, ‘Please stop talking about Diane Abbott.’”)

But she also says she “could have been better prepared”, and the self-criticism is characteristic: in a chapter covering the language of politics, the first culprit Husain lights upon is herself, for unthinkingly calling the Calais refugee encampment “the Jungle”, and later reading an article by my colleague Joseph Harker, which argued that it was dehumanising (‘What kind of people live in a jungle? Are they civilised? Are they respectable?’” Harker wrote). “I don’t just attack myself,” she says, of the book. “I do choose quite a few other examples. I had to be really honest. I don’t think there would have been any point if I hadn’t been. There’s a fine line between that honesty and maintaining a professional reputation.” Her suggestion seems to be that, if your reputation is based on impartiality, the only person you can really criticise is yourself.

The neutrality of its presenters doesn’t seem to protect the Today programme, though, which is currently attracting controversy as fast as it is losing listeners: it shed 800,000 last year. Critics, variously, blame a shift to the right and its often splenetic, stressful tone. The most recent controversy came this month when Kearney interviewed Raheem Kassam, formerly of Ukip, now employed by the white supremacist Steve Bannon, about the EDL founder Tommy Robinson. Kearney was robust on some things, less so on others; let’s say she just didn’t have time to properly challenge the idea that the entire religion of Islam was a “fascistic ideology”.

But the question stands, why is the far right being given this kind of airtime? Husain is firm: she won’t talk about that interview. She was on holiday, and didn’t hear it. She rejects the idea that the programme has resettled its assumptions considerably to the right of where they once were. “There are no directions that come from on high. I don’t see it as that kind of culture. I don’t recognise that description. What I see around me on the programme, every day, is the constant questioning of everything. A huge amount of time and effort goes into thinking, ‘Have we got the best possible stuff to put to this person?’ And you win some, you lose some.”

I make a disappointed face; is the best approach to the creep of racism to politely broadcast its most extreme proponents? Husain is sensitive to cues and, while not a pleaser, won’t leave a question like this hanging. “I don’t want to make excuses, and I hope it’s not coming across that way. For obvious reasons, I’ve thought a lot about being a Muslim in this country, after 9/11, then again after 7/7. Had my parents moved from Pakistan to any other European country, I don’t think, as the daughter of Muslim immigrants, I could have had a comparable career. With a name like mine, my career would only have been possible in Britain. That is something for which I am profoundly grateful – what I think of as profoundly British values. So when I see anti-Muslim prejudice, particularly prejudice that tips into hatred, it’s really painful. I see it keenly, and for obvious reasons. But it’s very easy to point the finger at one institution.”

We meet on the day that Boris Johnson publishes his “letterbox” column, comparing women in burqas to inanimate objects and criminals. It was rather chilling, saying very little of import about policies or race or feminism, but quite a lot about what a person of his politics thinks are the necessary notes to strike. Does his language stoke racism? “I would hope that, next time he comes on air, someone asks him exactly that question,” Husain says robustly. She is adamant that, if there is a problem, it’s with society rather than its public service broadcaster. “I do think that it’s more normal to hear prejudice voiced. There is a normalisation of it, and I think that’s abhorrent. But what does it mean for me? It means that maybe people will look at me and think differently about Muslims and what Muslims can be. That’s not why I do what I do, but if it has some effect on some people, I think there’s a value in that. These are really febrile times. They’re not easy. The coarsening of public debate in so many ways is really disheartening.”

In the event, later that week, Johnson did not go on air: instead, Middle East minister Alistair Burt went on Today, and Humphrys raised the column in this extraordinary way: “Very quick additional question, which you may or may not want to answer, and I would quite understand if you don’t …” Husain, meanwhile, did a forensic and thoughtful interview on the same day with Fiyaz Mughal, the founder of TellMAMA, an organisation that campaigns against anti-Muslim hatred and Islamophobia.

Husain is typically humble about her own role in countering prejudice, casting herself more as a positive role model than a crusader for justice. In this, I think she undersells herself, but that doesn’t necessarily run counter to the advice in her book. It’s not about puffing out your chest to be the Big I Am; it’s a more head-girl creed of knowing you’re in the right place because you worked as hard as you humanly could to get there. When she interviews, she is calmly insistent upon getting to the truth, exposing prejudice where it exists; she ruminates on the quality of everything, leaning in when I list my beefs with Today, saying, “Do you really think that?”

“This is a time of decisions with profound consequences,” she says. “But what that means for us [news presenters] is that the pressure and the scrutiny we’re under is the same all year round as it would normally be on the night of an election.” She concludes, as her book would, that “all it means is, you pull out all the stops, and you are the best journalist you can possibly be”. And she is, conversationally as well as journalistically, impressive: forensic but not cunning, open but not revealing, every exchange like a game of chess she is bound to win, but managing to leave you delighted to have lost.

Prepare, speak up, find a balance that works for you: an exclusive extract from Husain’s The Skills

Owning it: how to make a positive impression
My high-stakes moments come in the form of big interviews. Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s engagement was the first time I had been asked to do a royal interview, and with more notice (I found out the night before and the interview happened the following afternoon, shortly after the engagement was announced), I would have taken a much more considered look back at what each of them had said in the past, and at other royal engagement interviews.

In that case, there would be a finite time to record, and no chance to go over anything. I had about six topics I wanted to cover and 20 minutes to do it, but most of the time I think in terms of just three points – any more than that can become difficult to remember. It’s an approach that can be applied to any significant conversation where you want to be setting the agenda. Going into an interview, what are the three aspects of yourself you’d want remembered? In an appraisal, what are the three achievements you want to see recognised?

Make sure your first point is not only a strong one but also gets you off on the right tone, framing the conversation that will follow. If the meeting’s been called over a specific grievance, be prepared to address it straight away. If you’ve initiated it, spell out the problem and have evidence to hand that backs up your description. Keep it precise, neutral and professional – almost as if you are talking about someone else and looking objectively at their track record rather than your own.

Plot your points on paper ahead of time and if there are obvious questions that will come up, such as in a performance review, make sure you have some answers. Note down every achievement or milestone and be ready to bring them up. Have an answer to the probable question about weaknesses or “areas of development”, making it as positive as possible: perhaps by saying where you’d like to gain more experience.

It may feel awkward to be in the position of having to deliver a personal “sell”, but you have to find a way to do it at times like these. Being understated effectively leaves the appraiser or interviewer with more to do in working out whether you are deserving of the outcome you seek.

Speaking up: don’t be diffident
There are phrases I would commonly use that I now guard against. When complimented on an interview, my default response used to be to question or undermine the praise (“Do you think so? I’m not sure about that last question”) or say that I had got lucky. Perhaps it was my background. When I was growing up, compliments or praise would invariably have a phrase such as “maashallah” – by the grace of God – attached to them, rather than being all about individual achievement.

I started to realise how questioning positive feedback might appear to a manager. My only experience of being at the hiring end of the recruitment process has been when looking for childcare, and one day it hit me: if someone I was thinking of employing was similarly doubtful about their abilities, saying, “Yes, I think I can look after your sons”, they would hardly inspire my confidence. Now, I try to make a simple “Thank you” my default response to a positive comment.

In writing, too, I am conscious of phrases that add doubt where it is not necessary. Rather than beginning an email with “I just wondered” or “Sorry to bother you”, I try to open with something more neutral like, “I am writing to ask if you might consider”. The recipients may never notice, but I feel I have begun on a positive rather than a diffident note.

On balance: ‘It hit me as I lifted my father into the car’
My work-life balance has been easier than that of many working parents because I married a man who pulls his weight at home, my children have been blessed with good health, and I have been able to afford childcare. But with three children, 20 months apart, there was still plenty to grapple with. I was filming a documentary in India when all three boys and their father came down with chicken pox, and there was hassle that I unnecessarily brought upon myself: doing the online supermarket shop from Beijing because I realised the house was perilously close to running out of nappies.

The most useful thing I have learned is that there will be periods when your hands may be full in the most literal sense, with little creatures requiring feeding, changing and bathing. At other times you may finally be able to reintroduce weekend lie-ins, but the dramas are more grown-up, and then the needs of elderly relations may mean priorities have to change. The most difficult times will be when challenges come all at once.

I love what I do now, but I don’t think Today would have been the right place for me earlier in my career, when I had less experience, or when my children were still waking in the night.

I also know my limitations; while some of my colleagues can go out the night before an early shift, I need my sleep. If I do find myself getting ground down, I remind myself of one of my grandmother’s favourite Urdu sayings: harkat may barkat – there are blessings in being busy.

Sometimes life comes at you in a way that makes it starkly clear what is important. In the autumn of 2016, my father’s cancer treatment stopped being effective. My mother, brother and I witnessed his pain increasing and realised there was little time remaining. But there was also a strange and beautiful balance in it all. It hit me as I lifted his feet to help him into the car as we drove to the hospital. I imagined all the times in the past that he would have lifted me up as a child. And it was there every time I arrived at my parents’ home in the early hours in those final weeks, to take over from my mother, who would have been up with him in the night. A decade before, it was my newborn babies she would have been handing back into my arms after looking after them overnight.

Muslims are taught that only three things remain of a person after they are gone: an ongoing act of charity; knowledge from which others benefit; and the prayers of a righteous child. I like to think my father made a continuing gift of knowledge because he left his body to medicine. In the last few days, I overheard him telling my mother she was the love of his life – words I had never heard him say. And it was probably only in that period that I truly understood how my parents shaped me. My father was generally bemused by my various work–life–family dilemmas, saying only, “You’ll work it out.” I think of them more as a work in progress. But that’s good enough for me.

• This is an edited extract from The Skills by Mishal Husain, published on 6 September by Fourth Estate at £16.99. To order a copy for £14.44, go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846.

Comments on this piece are premoderated to ensure the discussion remains on the topics raised by the article.

Commenting on this piece? If you would like your comment to be considered for inclusion on Weekend magazine’s letters page in print, please email weekend@theguardian.com, including your name and address (not for publication).

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbTEoKyaqpSerq96wqikaKWVmbaie5FpaHFnkaq0cH2XaKSiq5iWuW601KyYoqZdnru1sdGvoJ6vXaOurrGMpaCknV2itq%2BxjJyYq52Vp3qwusuyZKmno6i2o7jEZpmroaSWtq8%3D