40 The Times Magazinehether I’m asking about Boris
Johnson – whose photo sits
on her kitchen shelf – or if
her old boss Evgeny Lebedev
deserves his peerage, Sarah
Sands takes a breath, smiles
pertly and says, “Well, as
the Cistercians say,” or, “The
Carmelites are very interesting
on this point...” By the end,
I can’t contain my laughter.
Not because her book The Interior Silence
isn’t an interesting spin through monastic life,
theology and history, featuring religious orders
in Bhutan, Japan, Spain and East Anglia, but
because I’ve never encountered a less cloistered
or ascetic woman. Sister Sarah she ain’t.
The last time we met it was 6am and
Sands, now 59, was whispering questions into
John Humphrys’ ear from the control room
as she serenely steered the Toda y programme.
The previous occasion was at a private dinner
for the PM (then foreign secretary) and the
US ambassador. In the years before, as editor
of the London Evening Standard, Sands was
a fixture at every major party, private view or
first night. Chic, petite, charming yet slightly
unreadable, working the room briskly à la
Anna Wintour, then flying off to the next do.
Even relocated for lockdown to her
rambling house in a Norfolk village, she and
her husband, Kim Fletcher, former editor of
The Independent on Sunday (now working in
corporate PR for Brunswick), zip in and out
of Zoom calls, their phones dinging. In the
living room, every surface is filled with framed
photos of metropolitan fun. Sands with George
Osborne, David Cameron, Standard proprietor
Lebedev at his theatre awards. She pulls
another from behind a pile of books: Sands
in a party frock with disgraced actor Kevin
Spacey. “This one,” she says mischievously,
“now lives very much at the back.”
Although she edited The Sunday Telegraph
too – sacked ignominiously after eight months- it was never really her speed. Too stodgy,
too provincial. Sands, who began her career
as a reporter on the Standard in 1985 and later
edited its gossip column, is London personified,
with a restless appetite for new, more and now.
So what prompted this unexpected turn
to monastic life? It began, Sands says, in
an ancient wall with a lovely clover-shaped
window at the back of her house, a fragment
of Marham Abbey, a convent destroyed by
Henry VIII. When they moved here, a decade
ago, to be closer to her elderly parents in
Swaffham and a son who organises country
pursuits in Thetford, she grew curious about
who had lived behind the wall and why.
Meanwhile she was editor of Toda y, rising
at 5am, at work from 6am until 6pm and even
back home watching the 10pm news to see
if events affected her running order. Six
hours’ sleep a night. But as a BBC outsider (and
mindful she was older than her predecessors),
Sands was so keen to prove herself that she
daren’t complain, and only learnt after she’d
left that she could have delegated the late calls.
“You can get into a total ticker tape of
news,” she says, “where it’s just, ‘What’s next?’
And if something hasn’t happened for five
minutes, you start to feel cheated. That can
become a bit corrosive on things like patience.
You have to know everything all the time. And
I think that’s probably quite bad for your brain.”
Her roiling mind kept her awake. Reading
a book, after a few paragraphs she’d find
her hand reaching for her phone. She
started to crave inner harmony to counter
the informational overload. So she began
birdwatching with her friend Frank Gardner,
the BBC security correspondent who was
shot in the back while reporting from Saudi
Arabia. “He watches birds for the freedom
of it, because he’s in a wheelchair. I was
interested in the idea you envision something
without having to experience it. You don’t
have to be racing about all the time.” She also
started to understand what Tom Bradby, the
ITV news anchor who suffered debilitating
insomnia, meant by “the worried mind”.
Sands admits this relentless schedule made
her difficult to live with. “Kim would say
journalists are bad enough, but broadcastjournalists are the worst,” she says. “There’s
a kind of bossiness and hubris of just being in
the news all the time. I was forever getting up
from the table in a slightly self-important way,
saying, ‘I’ve just got to take this call. It’s the
news. The news is happening!’ ”
It was not burnout, she makes clear,
that caused her to leave Toda y after three
years, but a combination of BBC cuts, the
centralisation of news, plus the birth of
her first grandchild. Then one evening, leaving
the theatre, as she always did, before the
second act, she realised, “Actually, I’m just
not enjoying it so much now. I’ve loved
being there, love that team, love the Toda y
programme, but I just want to go and do
something else now. So that was that.”
She started work on The Inner Silence,
visiting temples in Japan with her daughter,
Tilly, then Bhutan to stay in a Buddhist
rock temple, and then to the Benedictine
monastery in Montserrat, Catalonia. She
chatted with monks, spent the night in simple
cells, relished the deep silence and an itinerary
only of prayer. But she realised too she can’t
cope without her special pillow or face creams:
“We all have our red lines.”
Nor can she countenance the forsaking
of worldly things. It intrigued her that when
she told a Carmelite about her travels to holy
places, the nun was intrigued without any
longing to see such wonders herself. Sands
says: “Sister Wendy Beckett [the late art
historian nun] was asked, ‘What do all the
sisters think about you being on telly? They
must be amazed.’ And she replied, ‘Oh, they
feel sorry for me.’ ”
More monastic trips were planned before
the pandemic broke and forced us all into
monk-like isolation. “Yes, lockdown is a
kind of incarceration,” says Sands. Then she
gestures around her elegant house, out onto
grounds with a wild-swimming pond andW
‘i was forever getting
up in a self-important
way, saying, “i’ve just
got to take this call. The
news is happening!” ’
In the Sunday Telegraph offices when she was editor, 2005 With George Osborne and Boris Johnson in London, 2015GETTY IMAGES, SHUTTERSTOCK