The Sunday Times - UK (2021-11-28)

The Sunday Times November 28, 2021 9

NEWS

Regretful Charles flies to Barbados to watch his realm become a republic

travelling to Barbados today

at the invitation of Mia

Mottley, the prime minister, is

said to be “sanguine” about it.

Tomorrow night he will take

the royal salute as a prince of

Barbados for the last time,

before giving a speech

reaffirming his friendship

with the island and praising

the “invaluable contribution”

of the Barbadian diaspora in

the UK. The Queen will also

send a message of support to

Mason.

But as the royal standard is

lowered tomorrow at

midnight and the presidential

standard raised during the

handover ceremony at

National Heroes Square in the

capital, Bridgetown, the

Queen will be wistful about

the end of an era. A source

who knows her well said:

“The Queen knows the world

changes and moves on,

Barbados is a symbol of that

relationship we want to have

with Barbados. That’s a

conversation we’re having

with the whole of the

Caribbean.”

Republicanism continues

to rumble in Jamaica, Saint

Lucia and Saint Vincent and

the Grenadines, and Jamaica

could be next. Its government

has made soundings about

becoming a republic, and

Mark Golding, the leader of

the opposition, has pushed

on the issue. The Earl and

Countess of Wessex are

expected to tour the

Caribbean next year to mark

the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee.

Professor Philip Murphy,

director of the Institute of

Commonwealth Studies at the

University of London, said:

“In the past Whitehall and the

Palace have preferred to keep

the royals away from realm

handovers, as they see it as a

bit of rejection of the Queen.

“But having Charles there

is an interesting move, with

Barbados remaining in the

Commonwealth as a republic,

it is a way of boosting

Charles’s profile as the next

head of the Commonwealth

and the royal family’s ongoing

pivotal role. There has never

been an appetite from the

royal family or the

government to defend the

system of the realms. What

matters to them is the

Commonwealth, and that’s

what Charles’s presence

demonstrates.”

Barbados joins three other

republics in the Caribbean:

Guyana transitioned in 1970,

Trinidad and Tobago in 1976

and Dominica became a

republic on declaring

independence from Great

Britain in 1978. The last realm

to become a republic was

Mauritius in 1992. From

Tuesday there will be 15 left.

The Queen will feel “sadness”

and the Prince of Wales “a

twinge of regret” as Barbados

cuts ties with the monarchy

this week, becoming the

world’s newest republic after

centuries of British rule.

In an unprecedented

move, Prince Charles, 73, will

be the first member of the

royal family to attend the

transition of a realm to a

republic, during a two-day

visit to the island. Dame

Sandra Mason, the governor-

general, will be sworn in as

president, replacing the

Queen as head of state on the

country’s 55th anniversary of

independence on Tuesday.

As the curtain falls on the

crown in “Little England”,

Buckingham Palace said that

the Queen, 95, “respected”

the decision. Charles, who is

Roya Nikkhah

Royal Editor, Barbados

He has increased

his visits to the

Caribbean lately

This

might

be his

first

misstep

He

couldn’t

say a

boring

word

of regret and a sense that a

link is being weakened. As the

next head of the

Commonwealth, the prince is

determined it should be more

than an emotional thing; it

should be a practical thing

that helps countries with

issues like trade and climate

change. If the realms were all

going off to leave the

Commonwealth, he’d be

desperately sad, but that’s not

the case.”

Another source close to

Charles, said: “He is

pragmatic about realms going

their own way. But he won’t

like the aesthetics if lots more

start to follow Barbados.”

Scott Furssedonn-Wood,

the British high commissioner

in Barbados and the Eastern

Caribbean, formerly Charles’s

deputy private secretary,

said: “It is an opportunity to

look forward and think anew

about what kind of

and she rolls with it. But there

will be a tinge of reflection

and sadness, as it is severing

another link with the past.”

A royal aide said: “As Her

Majesty embraced

independence and welcomed

countries to the

Commonwealth, the Prince of

Wales’s presence and the

message that will be sent to

the president from Her

Majesty, shows it is a

respected decision. They

may have moved out of the

street but they are still very

much in the community.”

Charles speaks fondly of

his time in the Caribbean as a

naval officer in the 1970s and

has increased his visits to the

region as republican

movements have gained

strength. A source close to

him said: “He is sanguine

about it — he doesn’t see it as a

rejection of him personally

but there is perhaps a twinge

Prince Charles in

Bridgetown, the

capital, in 2019.

ARTHUR EDWARDS-POOL/GETTY IMAGES

Lord Blunkett has called for

BBC Radio 4 to “stop taking

its core audience for granted”

as he claimed its news output

had deteriorated and its

dramas were too “miserable”

and “right-on”.

The former Labour home

secretary, who emphasised

that he was still a supporter of

the BBC, said the station was

“playing into the hands of its

critics by becoming almost

the caricature its opponents

think it is”.

Blunkett, 74, said: “This is

friendly fire; I want the BBC

to listen and change. It is not

adapting and becoming less

metropolitan; it’s playing up

to that perception. There’s

too much focus on what its

contributors and presenters

are doing, rather than on

being informative.

“My call really is, ‘Stop

thinking of making

programmes about

yourselves and think about

people “boss” and “legend”, and a

favourite phrase has always been that he

feels like he is “standing on the shoulders

of giants” in whatever role he has at the

time. He always praises his production

team too, although one critic says: “It’s

quite off-putting — it’s a weird humble-

brag and a phoney deference.”

None of this would have been possible,

friends say, without the power behind

the throne: his wife, the academic Char-

lotte Faircloth, an associate professor at

University College London’s Institute of

Education. A friend describes her as

“ridiculously clever and exceptionally

nice”, as well as being the one who en-

ables Rajan to work as hard as he does.

The pair met at Cambridge but did not

become a couple until later. They have a

son, Winston, and two daughters,

Jamaica and Loveday.

He remains close to his mother, who

not only appeared in his documentary

Everyone who knows Amol Rajan calls

him “a phenomenon”. In 15 years he has

risen from being a “mike boy” on Chan-

nel 5’s mid-morning chat show The

Wright Stuff — telling the audience when

to clap — to become a presenter on BBC

Radio 4’s Today programme.

He is one of the corporation’s most

prolific stars: media editor; documentary

maker; stints on The One Show and as a

stand-in for Zoe Ball and Jeremy Vine on

Radio 2. The joke in W1A is that it is now

impossible to find a programme that is

not fronted by Rajan. The current issue of

Private Eye asks, “Which top jobs should

Amol Rajan take over next?”, with

options including Manchester United

manager, the Doctor and James Bond.

Rajan, 38, who earned at least

£240,000 last year, joined the Today pro-

gramme only in May, yet he is being

mooted as a successor to the BBC’s politi-

cal editor, Laura Kuenssberg, who is

expected to step down soon. There are

even rumours in Broadcasting House that

Rajan wants to take over from Andrew

Marr, who will leave next year, and that

he wants to be a contestant on Strictly

Come Dancing some day.

“Amol is one of the best: a first-class

journalist and exceptional modern

broadcaster,” said Owenna Griffiths, the

editor of the Today programme. “He

combines great intellectual curiosity

with a laser-like sharpness in interviews.”

Rajan loves the BBC: on both his Twit-

ter and Instagram accounts, he refers to

himself as a “Reithian rascal”, after Lord

Reith, who established the British tradi-

tion of public service broadcasting. Yet

he has landed the corporation in hot

water, with his documentary, The Princes

and the Press, examining the relationship

between William and Harry and the

media, provoking an outcry. The second

episode airs tomorrow. The royal family

is understood to be frustrated by a lack of

clarity about the content before it ran.

This feels like the first bump in Rajan’s

otherwise perfect ascent.

With his state-school background,

south London accent and proclivity for

jewellery (a silver chain, rings, a diamond

earring and a chunky watch that doesn’t

work), Rajan feels like the new face of the

BBC. He has even been open about his

past cannabis use, writing in a 2013

Evening Standard column about his

“dope day years”.

He was born in Calcutta and moved to

London with his family aged three. His

mother was a dinner lady and a nursery

teacher and eventually worked in admin-

istration at the Foreign Office, while his

father was a general manager at a trading

company. He has an elder brother.

Rajan attended Graveney School in

Tooting, south London, then a grant-

maintained school, whose alumni

include his BBC colleague Naga Munch-

etty and the Outnumbered actress

Ramona Marquez. He applied to read

English at Cambridge, buying a pair of

mustard corduroys for the interview

because he thought that “was what you

were supposed to do”. He was accepted,

and edited the university magazine Var-

sity. At Cambridge his friends included

James Dacre, the theatre director and son

of the former Daily Mail editor Paul, and

the actor Dan Stevens.

Simon Kelner, who edited The Inde-

pendent and was once his boss, puts

Rajan’s success down to a potent cocktail

of “ambition, energy and intelligence”.

They met when Kelner was a guest on The

Wright Stuff and Rajan approached him

after the programme finished. “He said, ‘I

love The Independent and am desperate

to become a political journalist,’” Kelner

recalls. “I was taken by his cheek.” Rajan

wangled work experience, where Kelner

says that he made himself “so incredibly

useful” that he never left: “He had a tre-

mendous work ethic.”

Rajan went on to work on the news,

sport and comment desks. His journal-

ism career almost ended abruptly: he was

on the list for redundancy in about 2008

but gained a last-minute reprieve, having

pleaded his case. There were also hic-

cups: Rajan himself tells the story —

“probably embellished”, colleagues say

— of how he was sent to write a “colour

piece” (a feature setting the scene) about

Madeleine McCann’s disappearance in

Portugal and, not knowing what it meant,

filed a piece with references to “magenta

sky, lilac walls and terracotta brickwork”.

As a columnist he once appeared to

review the wrong reggae act in an article

bemoaning the London music scene that

ended with the words “Jah bless”.

When The Independent was taken

over, the proprietor, Evgeny Lebedev,

chose Rajan to act as his adviser. “The

idea was he would interpret the media

and be Evgeny’s eyes and ears,” said Kel-

ner. Another source said that Lebedev

grew to see Rajan as the younger brother

he never had; and for his part, Rajan has

described Lebedev, who is now in the

House of Lords, as “ferociously clever”.

They spent hours together on Lebedev’s

private jet and in his Umbrian villa. Work-

ing for him was gruelling. “It was unbe-

lievably tough,” says one friend. “But

Amol has an asbestos quality — nothing

burns him and that enabled him to work

for Evgeny.”

Lebedev made Rajan the title’s editor

at the age of 29. “It wasn’t just his age — he

had remarkably little journalistic experi-

ence for that role,” says one source. How-

ever, most people correctly surmised

that Rajan was going to be the editor who

had to shut the paper’s print edition.

Broadcasting was always his forte.

On air he sounds fluent, assured and

affable. Rajan has lightened the

atmosphere on Today, though he

keeps having to remind himself

to slow his speech down. “He

has changed the tone of the

programme and made it his

own,” says a Today insider. “Every-

one else — except Justin [Webb], who

always had that mischievous charm —

sounds stiff and old-fashioned by com-

parison. Amol has brought his personal-

ity to it. So when Mishal Husain inter-

viewed the cricketer Azeem Rafiq about

the racism he suffered, Amol said after-

wards, ‘I’ve gone to pieces listening to

that’ — and that is just unprecedented.”

Roger Alton, another former editor of

his on The Independent, says: “He’s

made Today much more friendly, and has

little gags. And Amol couldn’t say a bor-

ing word if you paid him.”

Despite his on-air confidence, when he

started on Today he admitted to having

had a “full-on panic attack” the night

before. He wrote on Twitter that he had

“worked myself up into a frenzy, cata-

strophising ... Had three massive rums

and a bit else. Got 1hr kip, in at 3.45. Sur-

vived”. He later admitted in the Daily Mail

that he may have been drunk and that he

suffered from impostor syndrome.

Rumours abound that some of his

Today colleagues are not sold on him,

with the admission about his drinking

before the first show grating with their

sense of professionalism. He forgot his

co-host Martha Kearney’s name last

week, to her irritation. “There’s a mixed

view of him at the BBC, but he has plenty

of supporters, and I reckon he can get

Nick [Robinson] off the programme to

[replace Andrew] Marr and have it as the

Amol Rajan show within a couple of

years,” said a Today source.

Friends call him “a charmer”; those

less enamoured say he’s an “operator”.

He has always been deferential, calling

The Today programme presenter has had a rapid rise

but his television show on the princes is ruffling feathers

ROSAMUND

URWIN

Media Editor

The cricket-mad

presenter toiled

for Evgeny

Lebedev, top left,

before BBC roles

such as The One

Show with Alex

Jones, the Media

Show and Radio 2

Amol ‘Asbestos’ Rajan:

the republican hitting

the royal family for six

How to Break into the Elite, about the prej-

udice around class that permeates soci-

ety, but also used to come and teach yoga

to his colleagues at The Independent.

“He was really proud of his mum,”

recalled a former colleague. “All these

awkward Indy guys would come in their

gawky fitness gear, and it was very much

traditional yoga, not the Lycra kind.”

Cricket is his great sporting love, so

much so that the theme tune for Test

Match Special played as he walked up the

aisle at his wedding. He has written a

book about spin bowling and is a batsman

for the Authors XI cricket team alongside

Stevens and the historian Tom Holland.

At the team’s first match, played against

the East London Community Cricket

Club, rain truncated play, and Rajan was

charged with negotiating a revised total

to chase. “Amol charmed the opposition

into giving a more generous target, so

that charm ended up winning us the

game,” a teammate said.

Will the royal row damage Rajan at the

BBC? “It might be good for him — part of

him representing a more youthful BBC,

and being known as a secret republican

will do him no harm,” said a BBC editor

who has worked with Rajan. “But this

might also be his first misstep ... The

other Today presenters have all earned

their spurs as journalists, so will be aware

that he may have got too far too fast.”

Yet Alton believes Rajan will continue

his ascent. “I could see him as the direct-

or-general,” he said, even though Rajan

has ruled out applying. Alton laughs: “I

suppose that’s the one job at the BBC that

Amol hasn’t been linked to yet.”

@RosamundUrwin

‘Right-on’

Radio 4 is

a turn-off,

complains

Blunkett

Rosamund Urwin

Media Editor

MARION CURTIS/STARPIX/SHUTTERSTOCK; CHRISTOPHER LEE/GETTY IMAGES

what matters in the wider

sphere’.”

He was particularly critical

of Radio 4’s dramas which he

said had become imbued

with moral messages, instead

of being enjoyable. “I fear

that good, easy-listening

drama that doesn’t have to

lecture us or ensure we are

‘right-on’ has gone [from

Radio 4] for some time,” he

said. “Misery and a constant

reference to identity politics

are not what people want.”

He even criticised The Food

Programme, which he said

had “lost its connection with

the ordinary cook”, focusing

on the “interests of those

making the programme,

rather than those of the wider

public.” Radio 4’s news

output, especially the Today

programme needed to make

sure that it was covering a

wider range of stories.

Blunkett believes that

radio producers have become

complacent: “They think they

have a captive audience...

but they must stop taking

[that] core audience for

granted.” The average age of a

Radio 4 listener is 56.

Blunkett has listened to

Radio 4 since it replaced the

Home Service in 1967. “I have

enjoyed great drama,

informative current affairs

and interesting programmes

around day-to-day issues...

But I feel there is a drift which

although Tim Davie has

indicated he intends to

counterweight, doesn’t seem

to be happening.” When

Davie became director-

general in September last

year, he told staff that his

priority was making sure the

organisation “represents

every part of this country”.

The BBC said: “People who

love Radio 4 will always have

opinions about what we do

and we are always happy to

hear from them.”

The former

Labour home

secretary said

producers

had become

complacent

and drama

was miserable