Jon Sopel on new memoir Strangeland, working with Emily Maitlis and the ever-changing news cycle

Over seven dramatic years Sopel was witness to Donald Trump overturning American politics and, to his own astonishment, the 2021 storming of the Capitol Building in Washington DC by Trump’s supporters after the outgoing president claimed Joe Biden’s election victory was fixed.

"I’ve covered natural disasters, I’ve covered wars, I’ve seen terrible things," he says. "But for American democracy to feel like it was faltering? That was shocking."

Returning to the UK, Sopel assumed he was leaving such shocks behind. "You think, 'Thank God the same thing couldn’t happen in Britain,' and then you return and we’ve had three prime ministers in one year, the Supreme Court has ruled that Parliament was prorogued illegally, the queen’s been misled…"

It’s this realisation that the UK had become, in his absence, somewhere strange and not entirely pleasant that explains the title of Sopel’s new memoir, Strangeland.

We are not short of books from London-based liberals telling us everything is terrible – Sopel’s colleague at Global, LBC presenter James O’Brien, specialises in it – but Strangeland stands out for its sharp focus on the BBC’s role in what Sopel sees as a decline of standards in public life.

And he pinpoints one reason: coverage of Brexit. "There was a bet made on the coverage, which was the line of least resistance where every piece had to be internally balanced." That, he says, is "cowardice dressed up as impartiality".

"If you know something is a lie and you can demonstrate it is a lie, then you should call it out."

It was while working with Maitlis on Americast that Sopel stumbled upon the answer to the BBC’s other big problem – age.

"Conventional news programmes are engaging people who are over 60 years old," he says. "They are not engaging young people. What Emily and I found was that if you do in-depth stuff in a fun and engaging way then people are interested."

The BBC had taken the wrong message from the old Reithian principles by making separate programmes to entertain, educate or inform. "What we have alighted on, unwittingly, is to do the whole thing wrapped up in one."

Even though the BBC offered him the job of political editor, Sopel left the corporation in February 2022 to start The News Agents alongside Maitlis and Goodall, who’d been policy editor at Newsnight.

"Emily and I coordinated; we both rang our bosses at the same time to say we were handing in our resignation." How did people react? "I think there was a 'Holy s**t!' moment that went through the newsroom.

"It was a huge media moment and then, two days later, Putin invaded Ukraine and we’re not a story [any more]."

Now Maitlis is the story again, following two TV dramas, Scoop and A Very Royal Scandal, both about her 2019 Newsnight interview with Prince Andrew. "Gillian Anderson’s portrayal in Scoop was a million miles away from Emily Maitlis," says Sopel. "Emily is not grand, she is not haughty, she is not aloof, she is not condescending. She brings in wine gums!"

The News Agents passed the 100 million download mark earlier this year. "I feel utterly humbled by the whole thing; it is slightly incredible to me," says Sopel. "A really senior executive at BBC news, who has recently left, wrote to me and said, 'I think you are redefining what public service broadcasting is.' I thought, 'Wow.'"

You can see why he might be inclined to crow. "There is a great deal of liberation, not from tyranny or an oppressive regime, but from some of the restraints that were there at the BBC. And they were self-imposed by the BBC because they were frightened of this or frightened of that." I wonder what frightens Sopel – a Trump victory, perhaps? Or worse, a narrow defeat?

"If Kamala Harris does win, I just hope she wins by a mile, so we don’t go through the agony and the disturbance that we did in January 2021, because I don’t know if Americans can go through that again."

Sopel knows better than most just how bad that might be. "Some say 6th January was just a few hot-heads. I think, with the passage of time, it’s far worse than it seemed. If you look at the organisation, there were paramilitary groups with a chain of command, there was a leader, there were weapons – they were ready to go."

• Strangeland: How Britain Stopped Making Sense by Jon Sopel is out now

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