Fiona Bruce recalls she was told to rely on boyfriend after pay rise request query

Fiona Bruce has recalled how she was once told by her boss at the BBC that she didn’t a pay rise because her boyfriend would pay for everything.

Bruce, who recently replaced veteran broadcaster David Dimbleby as the host of Question Time, revealed details of the conversation she had early on in her career, during an interview with Vogue magazine.

Soon after she asked for a “desultory” pay rise, she was met with a surprising response.

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“My boss said, ‘Do you really need it? What does your boyfriend do? You live with him, don’t you? Doesn’t he pay for most things?’”, she remembered.

Asked how she responded, Bruce recalled: “Well, I do the supermarket shopping, so I need to pay for that.’”

“How ludicrous is that?”, the broadcaster said in reference to the previous conversation.

During the interview, Bruce also spoke openly about what it was like working at the BBC when she joined in 1989.

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She told the magazine: “If the six o’clock [news] had a story they didn’t want the one o’clock [news] to know about, they wouldn’t put it in the running order.

“It was a terrible atmosphere – dog-eat-dog, bitchy, not a nice place to be.”

Despite her vast experience, Bruce admitted that she still gets nervous when she has to present in front of the camera.

Referring to her latest role as the host of Question Time, the Independent reported Bruce as saying of her debut: “It was rather an unpleasant shock.

“For the first 10 minutes I thought, what is happening?”