Margaret Thatcher ‘didn’t like being interviewed by women’, says Kirsty Wark

Broadcaster Kirsty Wark said Downing Street once tried to stop her interviewing then-prime minister Margaret Thatcher on the BBC.

The Newsnight presenter said she “infuriated the prime minister” and claimed Ms Thatcher did not like being interviewed by other women.

“Mrs Thatcher thought I was impertinent, though I don’t think she would have thought a man was impertinent,” Ms Wark told the Radio Times.

“She didn’t like being interviewed by women and Downing Street tried to get me taken off the job (to do the interview).

“The BBC were steadfast. ‘There’s absolutely no question of that’, they said. ‘You’re not dictating who does the interview’. The same would be the case today.”

Ms Wark revealed how Ms Thatcher did make some attempt to get her onside just before the 1990 interview.

“Margaret Thatcher didn’t talk much in make-up but she’d done her research because she tried to soften me up by saying, ‘It’s difficult for women holding down a career’. Once the interview began, she tried to put me off course.”

She said of the interview: “I’d made her feel so uncomfortable that she had a very sharp go at me afterwards. She was standing right up beside me, accusing me of interrupting her.

“I just smiled, and stood my ground, I was polite.”

Ms Wark also shared her regret at not getting the chance to do one of the first international interviews with Barack Obama when he was in the US Senate and still little known in the UK.

She said Newsnight was offered behind-the-scenes access to Mr Obama at the Democratic National Convention in 2004 “to make a film in the lead-up to the speech, but the powers that be didn’t want it”.

She added: “Now I think, ‘Good God! We’d have been so far ahead of the curve’. What a piece of history that would’ve been.”