Kay Burley has been the face of Sky News for over twenty years but she’s also developed a separate career as a writer. Her debut novel, a racy read stuffed with political intrigue and media backstabbing, has just been published. Alan Corr meets the first lady of 24-hour news
Kay Burley, the doyenne of the UK’s rolling news industry, swept into the lobby of the five-star hotel. Dressed in skin-tight Prada and killer Manola heels, her striking blue eyes coolly took in her surroundings as she tossed back her lustrous russet mane. Kay, who had worked her way up from humble working class beginnings to the dizzying heights of Sky News, looked amazing for a woman of her age. Men wanted her, women wanted to be her . . .
Oh, eh, sorry, clearly I have been reading Kay Burley’s debut novel First Ladies a bit too closely. In reality, Burley enters Dublin’s Westbury Hotel with a spring in her step and a wide, welcoming smile. She is dressed simply and spotlessly in white linen trousers, a loose-fitting, bright orange top, and a pair of immaculate navy plimsolls. Her flight from London has been delayed but Burley, a brisk business-like 50-year-old, laughs off the inconvenience with a roll of her eyes (blue) and a perky, “Right, where shall we do the interview?”
Burley, twice married and the mother of an 18-year old son, has worked for Sky News since 1988. She’s the longest serving female newscaster on television. In fact, she was recently told she’s done more live TV than anyone in history covering major stories including 911, the death of Diana, the Asian tsunami. She has also interviewed everyone from royalty to heads of state.
But now Satellite TV magazine's “Most Desirable Woman” for three years running has written a book. It’s called First Ladies and it centres on a magnetically handsome, womanising Prime Minister called Julian Jenson, his alcoholic and neglected wife Valerie, his lover Sally, the editor of a glossy celebrity mag, and his other lover, Isla, a naïve and gorgeous young tv reporter.
It all rollicks along on a froth of sex, newsroom bitchery, political scandal and nice shoes and while it’s not quite The Thick of It, it is a hoot. But despite spending all of her career interviewing politicians and stalking the corridors of power, Burley is keen to point out that no, her dashing PM is not modelled on Tony Blair, neither is northerner-done-good Valerie based on Cherie, and Jenson’s odious spin doctor Ben Watson is certainly not based on New Labour’s Alistair Campbell.
In fact, Burley spends so much of our interview denying connections between fiction and reality that she begins to sound like an MP under interrogation on her own afternoon show. And when I mention the word “bonkbuster” her somewhat overpowering Cheshire cat grin dissolves into the sphinx-like countenance she uses on her day job.
“It’s not a bonkbuster,” she says as she takes a seat in her hotel room. “There’s three paragraphs of sex in 400 pages and if you call that a bonkbuster you obviously haven’t read bonkbusters. I don’t mind it being described as a bonkbuster but it isn’t. I don’t want to give people the wrong impression, that it’s full of sex. If that’s what they’re buying it for, they’ll be mightily disappointed.”
However, the three lead females in First Ladies do represent different facets of Burley’s own experience on her climb up the slippery pole (told you it was catching) of the British media. “I stretched parts of my life into fiction,” she says. “Isla is in her early twenties, she’s come down from Newcastle which is where I’ve worked in the past and she’s outside Downing Street in the pitch black at 3am in the morning, which I have done before, when she gets seduced by a Prime Minister which I have not had done to me. I think the Valerie part of my character is her parents loving her unconditionally and her brother, ie my own sister, always being there for her and the northern grit and determination that sees her through.”
Burley is proudly working class. She was born in Wigan, grew up on a council estate, and her parents both worked in a cardboard box factory. “I’m working class and northern, you can tell by my flattened vowels.” she says. She began her journalistic career on a local paper but always had designs on tv reporting. Every night she would try to elongate those vowels by reading Ceefax reports from the TV into a tape recorder and then playing it back to correct her mistakes.
She landed a job at TV-AM and by 23 had been promoted to presenter. She joined Sky News on its launch in 1988 and she’s the only one of the original line up still standing or, these days, striding around the studio. That’s the kind of determination that has earned Burley a reputation as a bit of an ice maiden, something that the publication of First Ladies might change.
She says she thoroughly enjoyed the writing process but those three paragraphs of naughtiness did cause her some difficulty and she had to ask her good mate novelist Kathy Lette for advice on getting the steamy stuff right. “Yes I rang Kathy and she said, `oh you have to put on your lingerie my darling and go and lie down and write it down’. I said, I’m not doing that and she said in that case you’ll write bad sex. Oh well! I can tell you that my son is a bit embarrassed because his mother’s written about sex. She’s embarrassed him all her life by being on the telly and to compound that she’s writing a novel which is really terribly embarrassing and it has some sex scenes in it that his mates are going to read . . . my goodness me!”
She also rang Bertie Ahern on an entirely different matter. “I was looking for a story in the book that would connect UK and Ireland as part of a political plot and I rang Bertie because his daughter is a novelist and he might be able to help me,” Burley says. “I rang his office and we spent an hour chatting to me on the phone. I know a lot of people diss him but as my mother always said; you can only speak as you find people. I thought he was incredibly charming, very helpful and he gave me some good insight.”
Westminster was less co-operative. When she asked could she launch First Ladies on the terrace of The House of Commons she was rebuffed. “My MP asked and he was told a not very polite no.” she smiles. She sees this as a victory. As well as having a bit of fun, First Ladies was also Burley’s chance to get her own back on politicians who’d been less than nice to her over the course of her long career. “Of course!” she says. “My catchphrase is if you’ve hacked me off you’re in it. Some politicians have hacked me off so hopefully there a few bottom twitchers going on when they turn the pages. I have a pink notebook and in they go. I change the names to protect the guilty.”
Unsurprisingly, the critics have been less than kind about the book. In fact, there is something about Burley that seems to inspire an intense dislike in the British press. She has been branded a bully, viewers have called for her sacking, and when she famously made Peter Andre cry live on air, she was roundly condemned. A quick search of YouTube will yield such toe curlers as Burley being called “a bit dim” by a Labour MP during an interview, and Burley mistaking Vice President’s Joe Biden’s ashes on Ash Wednesday as a bruise he sustained from a fall.
How does she react to the criticism? “It comes with the territory,” she says. “I’m very comfortable with myself. I’m a journalist, I have a thick skin. But if my family or friends say something I said was inappropriate, I take it on the chin but if some chap comes on waving a banner saying sack Kay Burley he’s completely entitled to his opinion but thankfully I have three and half years left on a five year contract so obviously my boss thinks I’m doing something right.”
Burley, who reportedly earns £500,000 a year at Sky News, lives in London and her son, 18-year-old Alexander, is in university. She is something of a self-sufficiency advocate; she has 14 chickens (15 until a recent visit from a fox), sponsors two donkeys, and has passed a course in pig-rearing in preparation for a planned move to the country. That’s not forgetting her three Irish setters, Fred, Dill and Gordon.
First Ladies may be very loosely based on her own experiences but Burley doesn’t think that power is an aphrodisiac. She has spoken about how she was “adored” by a senior cabinet minister and how it took her a while to rumble why she was getting such access to him.
She has been twice married and is currently in a relationship but she has a strict policy of not talking about him. However, she has said that she felt undervalued in some of the relationships she has been in. “I think probably most people have been in that position,” she says in a quiet but firm voice. “I generally keep my personal life very private. I am in a relationship but he is not in the public eye and doesn’t want to be in the public eye and that’s the end of it.”
At 50 Burley has achieved a lot but is Sky the limit and does she worry about younger women on the way up behind her? “Not at all,” she says. “Lots of younger girls say to me, `can I ask you a few questions over a coffee?’ I always say no but if you make it a glass of wine, then yes.”
First Ladies is published by Harper
