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“Amol Rajan: the republican hitting the royal family for six”

The Today programme presenter has had a rapid rise but his television show on the princes is ruffling feathers Rosamund Urwin, Media Editor, The Sunday Times

Everyone who knows Amol Rajan calls him “a phenomenon”. In 15 years, he has risen from being a “mike boy” on Channel 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 isn’t fronted by Rajan.

The current issue of Private Eye asks “which top jobs should Amol Rajan take over next?”, with options including the Manchester United manager, Doctor Who and James Bond.

Rajan, 38, who earned at least £240,000 last year, only joined the Today programme in May, yet he is already being mooted as a potential successor to the BBC’s political 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 the corporation 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 Twitter and Instagram accounts, he refers to himself as a “Reithian rascal”, after Lord Reith, who established the British tradition of public service broadcasting. 

Yet he has now landed the corporation in hot water, with his new documentary series, 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 at a lack of clarity over the contents of the programme 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 wearing 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, India, and moved to London with his family aged three. His mother was a dinner lady, a nursery teacher, and eventually worked in administration at the Foreign Office, while his father was a general manager at a small 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 Munchetty 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 Varsity. 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 Independent 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 tremendous work ethic.”

Rajan went on to work on the news, sport and comment desks. However, his journalism career almost ended abruptly: he was on the list for redundancy in about 2008 but managed to gain a last-minute reprieve, having pleaded his case. 

There were also hiccups: Rajan was sent to write a “colour piece” (a feature setting the scene) about Madeleine McCann’s disappearance in Portugal, and not knowing what that meant, filed a piece with references to a “magenta sky, lilac walls and terracotta brickwork”. As a columnist, he once also appeared to review the wrong reggae act, in an article bemoaning the London music scene.

When The Independent was taken over, the new 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 Kelner. 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. Working for Lebedev was gruelling — friends recall phone calls in the middle of the night and demands to fly out to Italy with little notice. “It was unbelievably tough,” says one. “But Amol has an asbestos quality — nothing burns him and that enabled him to work for Evgeny.”

Lebedev eventually made Rajan the title’s editor at the age of just 29. “It wasn’t just his age — he had remarkably little journalistic experience for that role,” says one source. 

However, most people correctly surmised that Rajan was going to be the editor who had to shutter 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. “Everyone else — except Justin [Webb], who always had that mischievous charm — sounds stiff and old-fashioned by comparison. Amol has brought his personality to it. So when Mishal Husain interviewed the cricketer Azeem Rafiq about the racism he suffered, Amol said afterwards, ‘I’ve gone to pieces listening to that’ — and that is just unprecedented.” One of the oddities of the programme is that the two presenters rarely interact with each other, but Rajan has brought more of a TV sofa conversational style, which many listeners have embraced.

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 boring 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, catastrophising … Had three massive rums and a bit else. Got 1hr kip, in at 3.45. Survived”. He later admitted in the Daily Mail that he may have been drunk and that he suffered from severe impostor syndrome.

Rumours abound that some of his Today presenting colleagues are not sold on him, with the admission about his drinking before the first show grating with their sense of professionalism. He also forgot his co-host Martha Kearney’s name last week, to her understandable 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 praise his manner “that makes him seem at home anywhere” and call him “a charmer”; those less enamoured say he’s an “operator”. He has always been deferential, calling a lot of 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, saying they are the ones who create the magic, though 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 Charlotte Faircloth, who is 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 enables Rajan to work as hard as he does. The pair met at Cambridge, but did not become a couple until after they had left university. They have a son, Winston, and two daughters, Jamaica and Loveday. He remains close to his mother, who not only appeared in his documentary, How To Break into the Elite, about the prejudice around class that permeates society, but also used to come and teach yoga to his colleagues at The Independent when he was a junior reporter. “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. “Normally, we have the Duckworth-Lewis method to decide that, but we got the Amol Rajan method,” one of his teammates recalls. “Amol charmed the opposition into giving a more generous target, so that charm ended up winning us the game.”

So will the royal row damage Rajan at the corporation? “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, without the foundations that would have given him warning signs.”

Yet Alton believes Rajan will continue his extraordinary ascent. “I could see him as the director-general,” he said, even though Rajan has himself ruled out ever applying. Alton laughs: “I suppose that’s the one job at the BBC which Amol hasn’t been linked to yet.”

4-grands

It definitely sounds like a nice idea, but efficient management is everything, and I personally have no faith in anything managed by people whose livelihoods don't depend on doing a good job - such as anyone employed on taxpayers' dime.

🥶🥶🥶