Edward Stourton, the distinguished broadcaster from an eminent Catholic dynasty, has titled his memoir Confessions: Life Re-examined. On the first page of the book Stourton discloses his second round of chemotherapy, and that he has been living with cancer for seven years. “It seems likely I will be able to stretch my life to the biblical three score years and ten,” he writes (he is now 65), “but I shall probably not celebrate my 80th birthday”.
Perhaps in consequence, his memoir reads more as a final reckoning than is generally the case; he places almost every part of his life and motivation under the microscope, scratching away at it, scrutinising his existence for evidence of privilege and unconscious bias. I am not a Catholic myself, so perhaps I cannot be sure, but I sense the formative influence of the Benedictine monks of Ampleforth Abbey at every turn.
I should probably declare that Stourton has been a close friend of mine for 47 years; we met at a teenage party shortly before becoming contemporaries at Trinity College, Cambridge. And yet there are numerous episodes in this memorable book of which I had only the haziest knowledge: his multiple tours as a war correspondent in Beirut, Damascus, Haiti and Bosnia, including the episode when a Serbian sniper’s bullet in Sarajevo whistled through his car, narrowly missing his head. The sheer number of conflicts and coups he has covered, in every part of the world, is something remarkable.
Stourton may have the most pleasing and educated speaking voice of anyone on radio; he has a particular gift for explaining complicated subjects in clear, simple language. I can never hear him present the Today programme, or From Our Own Correspondent, or the religious programme Sunday, without thinking: “What an intelligent, thoughtful journalist he is.”
Periodically caricatured as unfeasibly posh, this former head boy of Ampleforth College is at heart a classic BBC liberal, with all the instincts for social justice and borderline wokeness that comes with it. At Cambridge, where he was President of the Union, his Adonis-like good looks and senatorial gravitas made him a magnet for women of all backgrounds and castes. He chides himself (too harshly, I think) for his colonial childhood in Ghana, and for his “privileged and male-dominated upbringing”. In fact, I have no memory at all of him being an arrogant, entitled person; he was sensitive and inclusive from the get-go.
In the second half of his career he has cornered the market in documentaries about faith: from Catholicism to the CofE, Islam and Judaism, Buddhism and the rest. He has a particular talent for speaking to faith leaders in a manner that is empathetic and insightful, and brings out the best in his subjects.
I wish there was a bit more about Stourton’s private life in this memoir, but on this area he is discreet. He was married first to the willowy beauty Margaret “Miff” McEwan, of the well-known Scottish Catholic family; they wed at the Brompton Oratory and have three intelligent children. His second marriage is to the delightful and talented television producer Fiona Murch, through whom he has acquired a step-daughter, and they live happily between Stockwell and south-west France. As he points out, the upheavals of life have diluted his once strict Catholicism, but not by any means demolished it.
He writes at length about the various Ampleforth abuse scandals, which shook him and so many other Amplefordians to the core, and to which he was oblivious at the time. “And I began to wonder whether I myself had a case to answer. The abuse report covered the 1960s until the present day, so includes all my time at Ampleforth. As head of school for a full year during this grim saga, surely I would have – and certainly should have – known something of what was happening. Was I guilty of negligence, even of collusion in the conspiracy of silence that allowed the abuse to continue for so long?” Stourton says he feels his past “to have been poisoned” by it.
The impression I was left with, at the end of this engaging autobiography, is of a life of great value and responsibility, which will surely be enjoyed by every reader, Catholic or not.
Sir Nicholas Coleridge is Chairman of the Victoria and Albert Museum
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