Charlotte Edwardes

Charlotte Edwardes is that rarest of interviewers who – in her exquisite and spare prose – allows her subjects to reveal themselves in word and deed rather than making the interview an exploration of herself. In winning the trust of the interviewees, she is never soft, though she shies away from crude judgement. In the finest tradition of interviews, she supplies – through suggestion, images and quotes –all the reader needs to be informed, entertained and ultimately to assess the interviewee themselves.

Her interview with Keir Starmer was written having followed him around the country during the general election campaign. She learned that it is hard to break down this politician’s mistrust of interviewers, and that only gradually did he reveal for the first-time crucial features of his psychology. Particularly revealing were his claim not to dream or think about what makes him tick. Oxford professor Tim Garton-Ash said this was the “most revealing” of all pieces on Starmer: “It's a great example of what a fine writer can do, given the time, resources and access to craft a piece of in-depth reportage. She delivers some wonderful lines: ‘Stressed, he has a face like a slammed front door.’… Edwardes asks him if he is more ruthless than Blair ‘I don’t know,’ Starmer parries, ‘I've never thought about it’. But she asks the same question of a senior Labour insider who replies simply ‘yes’.”

Edwardes was the first to interview Gary Lineker after he faced a barrage of criticism over his tweets about Gaza. In the interview he disclosed why he has an almost physical need to intervene on these issues. “Everybody I talk to, every single person I know, is going, ‘What? What is happening?’ … At the moment it’s just awful. Awful.” When talking about the numbers of children killed, he says, “I feel sick.” This is a piece that set the agenda for assessments of Lineker’s influence well beyond his football comfort zone.

Part of Jeremy Clarkson’s self-image is his professed contempt for The Guardian and its readers. Edwardes therefore has great fun in teasing out more about this complicated man and what motivates him than has been revealed before. The extremes of the blurring of his private/public life have never been more compellingly described as his accounts of finding fans sitting in his kitchen and wandering around his house as if it were a zoo. Clarkson was serious about the mental health stresses of this existence, about loneliness, drinking and fears about climate and wonderfully comic in his interactions with his girlfriend.