Susanna Reid has issued important words of wisdom to all politicians who run the risk of private comments awkwardly being made public live on TV.
In July, Reform UK MP Robert Jenrick appeared on Good Morning Britain to speak to Reid and her co-host Ed Balls about the early release prison scheme.
As their conversation wrapped up, Balls and Reid were introducing the next segment on the show when someone could be heard saying on a mic: ‘That was a waste of time.’
It quickly transpired that it was Jenrick who had made the remark – and on Thursday, at a talk attended by Metro at the Edinburgh TV Festival, Reid opened up about the awkward moment that quickly went viral online.
At the time, Balls and Reid didn’t shy away from addressing what had just happened live on air, with the former saying that he didn’t feel that their interview was a waste of time, and the latter expressing her gratitude for Jenrick coming on the ITV programme.
Speaking on a panel alongside fellow esteemed news presenters Clive Myrie and Cathy Newman about the importance of telling the truth in the news, Reid said: ‘Okay, so a couple of things there. The first is you are never alone with a microphone, as many political figures have found out.
‘When you are mic’d up, what you say, Gordon Brown found out, obviously, in the car after he’d spoken to a constituent in an electoral campaign. Other politicians, other individuals have discovered you are never alone. When the microphone is on, don’t assume it’s been switched off.’
Reid explained that when Jenrick made the comment about his interview being a ‘waste of time’, she initially wasn’t sure if it was him who’d said it, with the expression on her face conveying her shock.
‘I’m not even sure I knew it was Robert Jenrick. But then in the gallery, you’ve got the feed of the gallery, the editors, the producers, the director in your ear all the time when you’re doing a live four-hour show, and then it was clear that it was Robert Jenrick,’ she recollected.
‘And Ed immediately said, “I don’t think it was a waste of time”, and we decided to kind of report and acknowledge the fact that Robert Jenrick said it, because it’s really important to back our viewers. To say that an interview is a waste of time felt to me that it wasn’t the case. The viewers deserve a quality forensic live interview.’
Reid then went on to explain the context of the interview, as they booked Jenrick onto the programme to talk about the early prisoner release scheme. This summer, there was an uproar over the possibility of two of PC Andrew Harper’s killers being freed from prison early under the scheme.
Reid wanted to speak to Jenrick about the scheme, about how the politician felt about the possible early release of PC Harper’s killers, and what he thought of Wes Streeting and Shibana Mahmood laughing about the early release of prisoners in a video that they later apologised for.
‘At the end, Ed asked him about the allegations of this Metropolitan Police investigation into a possible donation to a campaign that he’d been running, and that obviously is an awkward moment for any politician to answer questions. But he answered them. He stated his position, as you’ve seen on that interview. So why did he say it was a waste of time?’ Reid stated.‘Well, shortly afterwards, he did an interview on the Jeremy Kyle programme, and he said it was a waste of time because they didn’t ask me anything about Reform’s economic policy, nothing about what Reform would do in government on economic policy. But that wasn’t the interview that he was booked to do, and I would have accepted if he had thought that we had squandered that opportunity.’
A week later, Jenrick returned to GMB, ‘because he knows that talking to the viewers of Good Morning Britain is never a waste of time’, Reid affirmed.
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