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Q&A with Emily Prescott

2023-05-05 | Q&A

Can you talk a bit about the day to day nature of editing a Diary. How do you find your stories and what the column means to you?

You need to find lots of scandals and stories about famous people. And, here’s the ever-exhausting challenge: We need to regale our readers with entirely new information. We never bore them with things they might have already heard. Though I have to confess, when we stumble upon a new anecdote (from the last century) we reassure ourselves with the adage: ‘It’s not old until it’s told.’

But mostly things have been told before so to find new information we diarists go hard on the breakfasts and lunches and dinners, grilling our high-profile contact over mimosas or wines. Often this is quite a productive way of getting new information and of course people are usually willing to impart gossip. We also attend posh parties where we can bump into well-heeled types.

Naturally, this mode of story-finding comes with a few existential crises. There’s only so many times one can be rejected by David Gandy before one starts questioning one’s life choices. My sister is a paramedic. And then, there’s the panic when midway through the week there are still no stories for the page. No totally stood-up, definitely accurate ones at least. Mid-panic I will often think of the description of newspapers as ‘tomorrow’s chip paper’. It eases the pressure somewhat but the existential crisis is not entirely averted.

When the end of the week finally arrives though and there are shiny new stories on the page I remember why I love my job. Occasionally the stories and scandals bring about real change. When a celebrity starts talking about an issue, people listen. Often the stories are entirely trivial but by this point I’m satisfied that just inducing a reader’s smile or piquing their interest makes a job well done.

So what’s the connection between your day to day life and your book Whatever Pieces Come Your Way? It would be fascinating to know a little about the genesis of the book.

While sitting in the newsroom on a rare quiet day I started looking over the archives at the old gossip columns. I wondered whether the pieces would still be funny or interesting. They were both. But perhaps not in the way they had originally been intended. Now they seem interesting and funny due to changing context: The way women were talked about in the gossip column in the early 1920s was tragic but also, quite amusing. Panic over rumours women might be entering the barrister’s bar for instance did make me laugh. I decided I wanted to track these changes and the progress and collect all the best bits of gossip. I decided to start in 1916 when the Evening Standard’s gossip column, the Londoner’s Diary began.

I also know that every time we go to print there are usually more interesting stories behind the page than what’s actually on the page. I want to give a flavour of this too, and hopefully not be sacked in the process!

One thing you’ve been interested in is the idea of gossip as a female phenomenon. You’ve mentioned to me that Sasha Swire references her friend Kate Fall who implored her to publish Diaries of an MP’s Wife by telling her, ‘it’s always men who write history’. What insights from women have been forgotten or dismissed?

Oh yes, I think I spoke about the irony of the fact that gossip is perceived to be a female phenomenon: Think gossip girl, think  mother’s meetings. And yet the gossip columns have been, for the most part, run by men. At the time of writing this I am the only female gossip columnist on Fleet Street.  Women do feature in the gossip columns but so often they’re either simply there to be a pretty face or they’re auxiliaries to the men. I want to look at all the stories we’ve missed and delve deeper into the interesting female characters who have appeared in the gossip columns over the years

We think of gossip as somehow trivial – and yet something in me – and I know, in you – wants to push back on that. You’ve mentioned that the Profumo scandal was broken by the Standard where you used to work. So without pre-empting the book, and apologies for the rather grand question, but what role does gossip play in human affairs?

Gossip is what people do when they’re relaxed with friends, when they’re given free rein to talk about whatever they want. Not in meetings with set agendas. Put simply, gossip is what people want to talk about, gossip is what people are truly interested in. Gossip is about people and about things that matter: It’s no wonder love is such a common theme in gossip.

And I’ve discovered that gossip can be a force for good. It punctures the pretentious, it’s bonding and it’s often very funny. The Diary pages, although scrapped from The Guardian and The Independent, show another side to our establishment figures and provide some light-relief in our mid-apocalypse world.