Selina Scott interview: I blame Sadiq Khan for the day I was mugged

Telegraph

2 days ago

Selina Scott emerges sunnily from an arbour at the side of the restored North Yorkshire farmhouse she has lived in for 20 years. It's a lovely spot, sweeping down to a lake, with woods covering the hills beyond. Her land stretches for 180 acres; she 'slogged away' running a farm on it for many years. It has occurred to her that she could have done a Clarkson's Farm years ago – 'I took the decision long before he did to come here and do my thing for nature,' she says, with a sly smile.
Her show would have been all about the dragonflies and hedgehogs and otters that have returned, though – not Top Gear kit like combine harvesters, which shows just how 'television is often made for men,' she says.
She's only half teasing. The former BBC presenter admires Clarkson, who she says 'has the wonderful gift of being able to relate directly to people', but she talks as passionately about the Belted Galloway cattle she used to keep on the land as he ever has about shooting badgers. ('I'm tired of seeing these men giving us their view of the world, no matter how well they do it, no matter how engaging they are,' she says later of television in general.)
For some time, though, Scott, now a youthful-looking 74, and looking very fit in skinny jeans and a T-shirt, has had to step back from farming. 'I've just come out of five years of walking through the valley of the shadow of death with my mother, who had dementia,' she tells me, the ordeal of it still visibly haunting her. 'It takes a tremendous toll on you. Nights you don't sleep, nights you get out of bed, because, you know, my mother couldn't sleep at all… Anyone who's been through dementia with a loved one, or is going through it right now, doesn't need me to explain what hell on earth it is.'
Her mother, a centenarian, died last November; her cat is napping somewhere about the farmhouse – her mother's last wish was that Selina would take good care of it. Scott's wire-coated dachshund Doogie emerges instead in great excitement at a visitor. Soon, there will be more, in the shape of Stan the builder and Scott's brother Robin, for many years the editor of Sporting Gun.
Her family are country people, Scott says, although both have lived in London. (She also has three sisters, including the artist Fiona Scott, whose lovely portrait of a hare Selina displays in pride of place on a favoured wall.)
Scott still has a home in London where, less than two months ago, she was mugged in broad daylight in Piccadilly.
A gang of youngsters, 'really well dressed in athleisurewear' surrounded her outside Hatchards bookshop in what seemed to be a co-ordinated robbery. 'They closed in on me. And I just knew there was something really awful about this 'press'.' A blow to the back of her leg knocked her off balance. 'The pain was so bad I did think I had been stabbed just briefly, but then I fell forward, and I felt the tug on my bag, and I kind of knew then.'
She held on to the bag, but soon realised that with them all around her, they had been able to unzip it and remove her valuables. She looked in vain for police assistance.
'I ran from Piccadilly through to Leicester Square where there were all kinds of security officers there protecting whatever they were protecting, you know, big burly guys, but no police,' she says.
Without cash or cards she had to walk several miles home still reeling from the attack. 'I would say to anyone walking through central London, put 20 quid in your shoe or down a sock or in your knickers or somewhere, because the worst thing was not having any money. I'm fairly fit, so I could walk, but I did try to get on a bus.' They wouldn't let her on. Later, the commissioner of the Met apologised for what happened.
"Of course we're sorry about that."
Sir Mark Rowley apologises to presenter Selina Scott, who was told after a violent mugging that officers couldn't come to take a statement because they couldn't find a police car. pic.twitter.com/phrqrGar1u
— LBC (@LBC) June 24, 2025
' Sir Mark Rowley had the decency to apologise,' she says. 'I actually blame the Mayor of London [Sadiq Khan]. More than I blame the police, actually, because the Mayor of London took on the job to keep the people of London safe, the police come under him.
'Everywhere you go there is security for well-known people, the Royal family have security. The Mayor of London has security. So what's different? Why doesn't the public have security? Why don't I get it?'
She's not the only celebrity to have been attacked either. Bond star Rosamund Pike was punched in the face in a violent phone-jacking robbery in London in May; actress Susan Hampshire, who's 87, was mugged in a London Underground station and had her purse and phone stolen in February.
Scott says she's over it now, but that it compounded her feeling after her mother's death that 'you've got to be prepared for looking after yourself in ways that I perhaps never thought I would have to when I was growing up… The older you get, the more self-reliant you've got to be and hope that your health holds out.'
All of this is delivered with the composure that took her on a rocket-ship rise from press officer for Scotland's Isle of Bute to newsreader on ITN to the face of BBC Breakfast Time in the 1980s. Composure and that voice. Her head-girl TV voice. It's a marvel. Put it next to that other unmistakeable voice of the 1980s – Margaret Thatcher's gullet-swallowed hardened steel – and it's like a Lamborghini purring up beside an articulated lorry.
Perhaps if she had gone into politics, Scott would have had to accentuate the masculine depths of her voice too, but she understood its soft power, as any clip of the era will show.
It's a little deeper now, less willing to please, the North Yorks accent more pronounced, her father's Scots still clear and direct in it. And it's full of passion and anger when she talks about something she really cares about: namely animal cruelty, and the continued killing of cattle, sheep, goats and poultry for halal and kosher diets in Britain, without a requirement that the animals are stunned first.
Since 1933, UK law has required animals to be stunned before slaughter to ensure they don't experience pain, but it granted exemptions on religious grounds in those two instances, which demand that all blood must be drained from the carcass via a deep cut to the throat while the animal is still alive. A 2015 RSPCA YouGov poll suggested that 77 per cent of Britons are against the practice. Yet tens of millions of animals are still slaughtered this way every year.
The issue was debated by MPs in June in response to a petition which decried non-stun slaughter as not in keeping with modern values and out of step with countries such as Denmark, Sweden, Slovenia and parts of Belgium, which have banned it. The former Reform MP Rupert Lowe called the practice 'vile' and suggested that millions are eating surplus halal meat 'without their knowledge due to our deceitful labelling system'. The government response was that it preferred stunning but there would be no ban. Independent Iqbal Mohamed said the framing of the debate represented a xenophobic 'targeting of Jewish and Muslim communities'.
Scott does not accept this. The issue, she says, has become one that 'no one dare speak its name because they are afraid of offending'. She says Waitrose, which prides itself on being first in animal welfare, will not label how meat [in branded products] has been killed.
'For people like me, who are actually non-religious, I don't want to eat this meat. I don't want to have anything to do with it, but I can't tell. They will not label it.'
Even Nigel Farage, she notes, 'has come out now and said Reform doesn't want to have anything to do with a ban'. It's just a fear of losing votes, she says, and enough to make her turn against Reform. Yet judging from recent polling, she adds, it is Farage alone 'who can break the political consensus on this'. Many in her constituency of Thirsk and Malton are turning to Farage's party, she reckons.
She's asked herself before if politics might have been an option for her, but decided she wasn't 'a clubbable person'. She's spoken out many times over the years, though, on issues as diverse as ivory poaching (her shocking 1986 documentary on the subject played a big part in provoking a worldwide ban on the sale of ivory, saving thousands of elephants' lives) and ageism in TV (after waging her own legal battle with Channel 5 in 2008, she threw her weight behind Miriam O'Reilly, who was axed from Countryfile in 2011, in her fight against the BBC). From her earliest years in television, Scott has set herself against unacceptable prevailing attitudes, as she readily recalls.
'There were a huge number of predators around for women at that stage. I'm not naming names, because a lot of them are still alive. But I wasn't the only one that experienced that. You just had to deal with it. You had to handle it somehow.
Casual sexism and innuendo were the norm; Michael Parkinson introduced his interview with Scott for Desert Island Discs back in 1986 with a quote from the Daily Express describing her as 'the woman that men yearned to find laid out on their breakfast trays like a long Yorkshire rose'.
The 2022 Netflix documentary Jimmy Savile: A British Horror Story showed the several occasions on which the paedophile DJ was invited on to the Breakfast Time sofa alongside Scott and Frank Bough. Savile's sinister on-screen 'flirting' with the much younger presenter was a recurrent theme – gazing provocatively at her, asking for a kiss, suggesting she spend Christmas with him. Watching it back on the documentary, Scott described how 'excruciating' it felt watching herself 'encouraging' his behaviour, sleazy as it was.
'To me, it was creepy, but then a lot of men were like that. That's probably why I didn't say immediately, 'keep him away from me'. This is what you had to contend with at that time as a woman in television, there were a large number of them like that. You had to just try and weave your way around it.'
It was 'a culture' at the BBC, she says, 'which ran from the very top to the very bottom'.
'The people like Jimmy Savile, people like Frank, who both had a particular attitude towards women which was just kind of glossed over… Well, nothing has much changed, has it? We've just had the MasterChef carry-on. They don't seem to realise that if you put a man who thinks a lot about himself in front of a television camera, the exposure does something to their psyche. It doesn't seem to happen with women to that degree.'
Bough's own high-flying BBC career would be ended by a 1988 scandal involving cocaine, escorts, swinging parties and a Mayfair brothel. A photograph from the first Breakfast Time in 1983 shows him, not for the last time, turning to plant a kiss on Scott, who also complained that he undermined her on air by deliberately disrupting her interviews to focus attention back on himself.
Scott's career, though, was still on the rise. After a stint hosting Wogan in 1985, which she says the producers disparaged her for because she ignored their questions ('I never used any of them'), she presented The Clothes Show on BBC One and discovered that her off-the-cuff Wogan interviews had struck a chord elsewhere. Her interview with Formula One driver Alain Prost, in which he called her 'a beautiful woman' and she responded, 'Does your wife drive you home?', was later used in the film Senna (about Prost's rivalry with Ayrton Senna), while her encounter with Prince Andrew led to an offer to host a prime-time current affairs show in the US.
CBS also made her the star of The Selina Scott Show, which it broadcast across Europe. Three subsequent interviews with Prince Charles reinforced the image of her as a woman who was accepted and invited into Royal circles. She certainly seemed to have the then Prince of Wales's ear when he told her how lucky she was not to be 'trapped' in her role, like he was.
King Charles appeared to trust her almost as an intermediary between himself and a broader public. 'Diana was capturing the headlines – the way she looked would overwhelm anything that he was doing. I remember he was in the middle of the Amazon rainforest when I got a call from his press secretary saying that he'd like to speak to me, because this was his big moment to talk about what was happening to the environment, but no one had turned up – no newspapers, no magazines, no television.'
People in Britain, she well remembers, were captivated by Diana instead. 'I met him in Sandringham and we did a long interview for CBS, which went out in America, about the environment and everything else. You could sense this frustration, that he felt very strongly about what was happening in the world, but he couldn't ever get it out properly, couldn't ever compete against all of that.'
Was he jealous of her? 'I don't think it was jealousy. I think it was that he was so overshadowed. I genuinely think that he was in love with her when he met her and married her, but he became a nothing person, you know. That was, I think, the tipping point.'
She thinks the King perhaps saw a sensitivity in her that made him feel he could talk to her. Prince Andrew, on the other hand, openly flirted with her when she sat in for Terry Wogan. During their interview, the then Navy helicopter pilot offered an explanation for his 'Randy Andy' nickname, requested that she sign a piece of fuselage to take back to the boys on HMS Brazen, and asked for her phone number on air. He also asked her out afterwards. How did that feel? 'I didn't think anything really of it. I mean, I thought it was nice, I thought that it was cheeky of him, and he had been cheeky on the show and I enjoyed his company.'
She was almost a decade older than the 25-year-old Royal. She waved it off (Scott has a very eloquent way with hand gestures). 'I was being asked out by a lot of people then,' she says, with a laugh, 'just another one.'
Scott's private life has always been a closed book. She was hounded by paparazzi in the 1980s; doorstepped and spied on, but no scandalous liaisons turned up. The perception that she had suddenly vanished from TV is inaccurate, but her extended period working in America was sparked by the desire to escape tabloid attention. In 2002, she launched a furious broadside at the then BBC director general after he discussed her sexuality in a documentary: 'How dare Greg Dyke sit there and join in speculation on whether I am a lesbian or not?' she said at the time. 'It's not in my contract to tell them who I am seeing, who I am sleeping with or anything else.'
Later, she told a journalist in 2006: 'I've had my guys, but I pretty much forge my own path.'
Settling down to run a farm in the north of England seems to have been born as much from a desire to try something new as to get off the TV treadmill.
She has never expressed regret at not having children, and suggested in 2021 that 'marriage and being tied to a particular person is fine for people if that's what they want, but it can be seen as an achievement that you don't get married today'.
'I'm a free spirit,' she tells me. 'Contrary. Don't do what people expect.'
Does she ever feel lonely? 'No, never. I'm very self reliant,' she says.
Still, that Andrew encounter became etched into public consciousness. Later, when she heard Andrew's name linked to the scandal involving the paedophile Jeffrey Epstein, she was aghast. 'I can't believe it, actually,' she says, 'I can see the interest in women. I can see all of that. But he had a great allegiance to the Crown, to the Queen, to the status of the Royal family, and to put that in jeopardy like that. It doesn't fit with this man who I'd met several times and talked to, sat next to at dinner. To be so stupid…'
The sense is of someone still coming to terms with the worst possibility: 'If what's written about Prince Andrew is true, I don't think there is a way back,' she says. 'I think the problem with the Royal family is that they're so used to subservience, and so used to having everything given to them, that it goes to their heads. I mean, to most people in this country, having to struggle to live, to find work, to pay the mortgage, and then to hear Prince Harry talk about security and demanding this and demanding that…'
She pauses. 'I have a lot of sympathy for Harry as a child – children carry through their lives the trauma of their growing up. And what happened to his mother is still there with him, obviously. But I get the impression that the Royals are the least of people's concerns right now. and the more it goes on, the more they see privilege being abused, the more it'll be no longer the way it used to be with the Queen. I'm sure that Charles is very aware of that. But, you know, one extra wrong move and it can swing easily in a different direction.' That extends to Meghan, too. 'The whole thing jars,' she says.
Scott has never been afraid to say what she thinks, and she made an enemy of the man who is now the most powerful person in the world when she made a documentary about Donald Trump in 1995, which included a repeat interview at Mar a Lago that highlighted inconsistencies from their first filmed chat. The documentary intercut the two together, infuriating the future president, who for many years afterwards would badmouth her in public and send her postcards highlighting how great everything was going for him.
'Well, he's a liar,' she says. 'Everyone's called him all kinds of different things, but the fact is, he's a liar. And the documentary I did showed it absolutely bang on the nail, this orange honky-tonk is a liar.' She was warned beforehand about his vengeful nature, she says, by someone who rang her suite at Trump Tower, where her room was filled with red roses, but refused to talk over the hotel phone, saying it would be bugged.
'There's something wrong with him,' she says. 'Obviously.' Does she think he's a dangerous man? 'Oh, god, yes.
'But the thing that intrigues me is that other men around him, these men who think a lot about themselves, are so up Trump's a--e.' She thinks of 'Peter Mandelson standing next to him with a whole lot of other men and Trump made some pathetic joke about something, and they were all laughing. This abasement. I didn't think originally that men could sink so low, but they do.'
She's seen plenty of evidence of that. But she's still standing. Does she still have ambitions? 'Stay alive and stay healthy,' she says. 'I don't have any ambitions to do anything, no. But if I have a platform to do or say anything, then I will use it to try and make things better. That's all.'