Meet BBC’s ‘Mr Safe’: New political editor Chris Mason’s pals joke he’s been like a 50-year-old since he was a student, he once considered being a bus driver and still subscribes to his local Yorkshire paper
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After months of speculation about who would replace Laura Kuenssberg, Chris Mason’s promotion from a host on Radio 4 to BBC political editor seems to have taken many people by surprise – and the public outpouring of praise appears to have touched the born-and-raised Northerner.
Indeed, who could expect anything more from Mason, the straight-talking grammar school-educated ‘proud Yorkshireman’ from a working class background whose Cambridge friends humorously called him ‘basically a 50-year-old man since he was a student’?
‘Cripes, thank you for the lovely messages. The news popped out while I was in a pub in Halifax, with no signal,’ Mason told his Twitter followers just earlier today, 24 hours after the big news broke that he would be taking on the biggest brief in British political journalism.
‘My phone did the can-can in the car park when I came out & hasn’t stopped dancing since. The new job is an immense privilege & responsibility and I’ll give it everything’.
Mason was born at Airedale Hospital on April 21, 1980. Having a builder for a grandfather and schoolteachers for parents, the young Mason, who grew up in Grassington, North Yorkshire, briefly flirted with the dream of becoming a bus driver, before developing his insatiable appetite for news.
To this day, Mason makes sure that he gets every print copy of the local Craven Herald and Pioneer newspaper posted down to his south-east London home, where he now lives with his primary schoolteacher wife and their two sons.
‘It’s the perfect thing to kick back with, in the company of a cuppa, when I get home after Any Questions at the weekend’, he told Iain Dale on the LBC presenter’s All Talk podcast an interview released in July last year.
But where did Mason’s hunger for news come from? Even he can’t quite explain.
‘I don’t know where that passion for radio and news and politics and current affairs came from. There isn’t any journalistic or media heritage in the family. My parents are both primary school teachers, my grandad was a builder. I got a little white radio when I was seven and just got obsessed with it,’ Mason told Dale.
However, he has revealed that as a child, he would watch ITN’s political editor Michael Brunson – one of his big influences in journalism. Mason would later described Sir Trevor McDonald, a legend in the British media landscape, as another inspiration.
Mason attended Ermysted’s Grammar School in Skipton before enrolling at Christ’s College at Cambridge, where he studied geography.
One friend who has known Mason since university told The Guardian: ‘He’s basically been a 50-year-old man since he was a student. But a genuinely lovely person and untouched by fame… Unlike some of his colleagues, I genuinely never hear a bad word about him.’
Mason began his journalism career as a trainee at ITN the week after 9/11, before moving to BBC Radio Newcastle one year later. He also then worked for 5 Live, the Regional Political Unit, the Westminster Hour on Radio 4 and in Brussels as a Europe correspondent.
Mason took over as presenter for Radio 4’s Any Questions?, a topical discussion with a panel of people from politics and media who are posed questions by the public, in October 2019, and is regularly on the podcast Newscast.
No profile of Mason is complete without a passing nod to the moment he went viral after a BBC Breakfast broadcast in 2018 after admitting he didn’t have the foggiest’ about ongoing Brexit negotiations.
Speaking outside the Houses of Parliament as Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union clogged up the worlds of politics and media, Mason gave a candid, refreshing assessment of the state of affairs.
‘So, where are we in this Brexit process? You know what? People like me are paid to have insight and foresight and hindsight about these things, and to be able to project where we’re going to go,’ he said.
‘To be quite honest, looking at things right now, I haven’t got the foggiest idea what is going to happen in the coming weeks. Is the Prime Minister going to get a deal with the EU? Dunno. Is she going to get it through the Commons? Don’t know about that either. ‘I think you might as well get Mr Blobby back on to offer his analysis, because frankly I suspect his is now as good as mine.’
In this day and age of equality and diversity, Mason’s strong Yorkshire accent will allow BBC bosses to keep Boris Johnson’s prowling Culture Secretary satisfied as the Government insists on more regional representation within the corporation’s ranks.
Certainly, Mason thinks his Yorkshire roots have benefitted him.
In the past, he has said his experience of growing up in the Yorkshire Dales had a ‘massive influence’ on him. This year he competed on Celebrity Mastermind where his specialist subject was the Yorkshire Dales, finishing second to comedian Rufus Hound.
And in an interview with the Radio Times, Mason mused: ‘I think it [his accent] has probably been an advantage to me because I have come of age journalistically in an era where there’s a far greater awareness that the BBC in particular, and broadcasting in general, needs to sound like the audience it’s broadcasting to.
‘I think there could be a far broader range of voices than we hear on the national media. When have you ever heard on a news programme somebody with a West Country accent? I can’t think of a single person, and that’s mad. How many people with a Brummie accent? Or a Geordie accent?
‘There’s hardly any. It’s absolutely absurd. We’re broadcasting to a country with this incredibly rich diversity of voices and accents, and we hardly hear any of them broadcasting on the national airwaves.’
How funny then, that he didn’t listen to the BBC’s primary news-driven station as a teenager because he found it ‘southern and quite posh and not me, really’.
But unlike many of his contemporaries at the broadcaster who have been accused of vaulting over the line between impartiality and partisan journalism (think Kuenssberg and Newsnight’s Emily Maitlis) Mason has been careful to keep his political views private.
Reports suggest that the BBC quietly reopened the job ad for political editor specifically with Mason in mind after the 41-year-old Cambridge geography graduate was courted by rival broadcasters including Times Radio. The broadcaster has been suffering from a so-called ‘brain drain’ of talent including Emily Maitlis and Jon Sopel in recent months – a characterisation it has dismissed – and will not have wanted to lose yet another top journalist to a competitor.
Mason is believed to have applied for the £260,000 post last week, had the interview on Tuesday, then got the job offer less than 24 hours later.
It is also understood that the BBC had originally wanted to hire a ‘scoop-getter’ after missing out on most of the Partygate stories about illegal lockdown-busting gatherings in Downing Street broken by the Mirror and ITV News. With this in mind, bosses whittled their preferred list of candidates down to ITV News’s Anushka Asthana and Sophy Ridge from Sky News.
However, the BBC has been under immense criticism over its failure to always abide by its commitment to impartiality. With Kuenssberg at the helm, the broadcaster’s critics claimed that its top reporter was biased and essentially ‘in the pocket’ of the Government – a suspicion that only intensified after Dominic Cummings told MPs at his explosive anti-Boris evidence session on Covid last year that Kuenssberg was the former aide’s only regular media contact.
Maitlis also famously triggered a bias row after accusing Cummings of lying when he denied breaking Covid rules by driving from London to Barnard Castle during the first lockdown.
The BBC’s recent history of feisty journalists who tread the line between impartiality and partisanship may have caused bosses to opt for someone ‘safer than sorry’, sources claimed.
One senior political journalist previously told The Sunday Times: ‘They said they wanted someone who breaks stories but I think they’ve realised they actually need a wise statesman who is good at analysing events, and Chris will do brilliantly at that. This feels like a moment of self-realisation for the BBC, that they can’t be that bold.’
The BBC has also come under huge pressure from Nadine Dorries to promote ‘regional diversity’ within its ranks, amid concerns that it has become too ‘London-centric’ and detached from the often Brexit-voting regions of England and Wales.
It is thought that his tact on this matter has made him such an attractive prospect to BBC bosses who searched long and hard for Kuenssberg’s replacement. As Dale remarked: ‘To this day I have no clue what his politics are, and that’s a great thing.’
It is thought that Mason’s strong Yorkshire accent will please the Government, which is threatening to scrap the licence fee after 2027 – though one source chuckled: ‘Chris is very solid, plays things very straight and is charming. But he will need a more expensive suit and haircut.’
Reports also say that BBC chiefs are planning to market married father-of-two Mason as the ‘BBC’s Robert Peston’, the well known pundit for ITV.
Others hinted that promoting Mason was a return to pre-Kuenssberg impartiality. In a tweet, Sir Robbie Gibbs, who was the head of the BBC’s political programme output before quitting in July 2017 to become Director of Communications at 10 Downing Street under Theresa May, said: ‘Chris is the perfect ambassador for the BBC – fair, impartial, decent, with bucket-loads of character.’
PR agent Mark Borkowski told MailOnline: ‘I think it would have been hard for the BBC to justify filling the role with a stale pale posh Etonian male, no matter how good Mason is.
‘I think there was probably also a feeling in the BBC that they wouldn’t have wanted to have risked losing more good talent. There’s this “brain drain” going on, and it doesn’t look great for them if they can’t keep onto top notch journalists, like Mason.
‘I think certainly the fact that Mason is from Yorkshire will have helped him. The BBC is under immense pressure at the moment to make sure it is reflecting modern Britain, and will want to be able to announce a successor to Kuenssberg who fits in with the Government’s Levelling Up programme.’
Certainly, his contemporaries regard Mason as an ‘adept broadcaster’, with ‘sound judgment’ and ‘a flair for political analysis’.
One source said he was a ‘bloody good journalist’, while reporters who praised him on social media described how he was known to be fair but tough.
Others said that he might not bring the broadcaster exclusives, but will be able to explain difficult political matters in a simple way for the BBC’s millions of readers and viewers.
In a statement yesterday, the self-effacing Mason again emphasised how lucky he felt to have been given a front-row seat as the corporation’s political editor into Westminster life at such a febrile moment in British and global politics.
‘What a tremendous privilege to take on what, for me, is the most extraordinary job in British broadcasting and journalism. I clamber upon the shoulders of giants like Laura, Nick [Robinson] and Andrew [Marr] with a smattering of trepidation and a shedload of excitement and enthusiasm,’ he exclaimed.
‘To lead the best team of journalists in the business on the best news patch of the lot is something I’d never even dared dream of. I can’t wait to get started.’
Only time will tell whether, with Mason at the helm, we can expect a break from the impartiality rows that plagued his predecessor.
Meet BBC’s ‘Mr Safe’: New political editor Chris Mason | Daily Mail Online