John Sergeant has a highly successful journalism career spanning more than 30 years. He has spent time with Tony Blair, Margaret Thatcher, and the George Bushes. So, of course, the first question asked of him after his engaging talk at the Oxford Playhouse about his life and career was, “Are you still in touch with Kristina Rihanoff?”
Strictly Come Dancing seems to have been both a blessing and a curse on Sergeant’s life. He appears keen to close a door on that ‘celebrity’ time but, as he said himself, he would not have had half the opportunities of the past three years were it not for the fact that he ‘once dragged a half-naked woman across a dance floor.’
His next project will be to commentate on the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee river pageant with his old interviewee, John Major. It would be interesting to learn whether Major is aware that Sergeant does a fairly convincing impression of him finding out about a sex scandal set to break during his leadership - Sergeant’s story turned out to be regarding David Mellor, but the truth about Major and Edwina Currie could have come out at any time.
Unsurprisingly (one hopes) Sergeant’s career is not all half-naked women and sex scandals. One of his most memorable moments was outside the British Embassy in Paris, just after Margaret Thatcher had lost the first ballot of the party leadership contest in 1990, when he was in the way of the path to the main microphone, and was manhandled by press secretary Sir Bernard Ingham. It is political activity however, rather than the rise and fall of individual politicians, that was significant to Sergeant as he looked back over his career. He highlighted Major and Blair’s work in Northern Ireland as remarkable political activity, emphasising that it is the action of politicians that counts. He stated that a politician is different to a moral leader; a good politician is a fixer, able to inspire people to be willing to make a sacrifice, citing both Churchill and Attlee as examples.
It must be difficult for Sergeant to balance the political and the showbiz in talks such as these, and he could have talked at much greater length about the importance (or otherwise) of truth in politics, and about technocratic vs. charismatic leaders. But he probably had to nip off to text a reply to Kristina.