Victoria Derbyshire: 'I'm not super-intellectual. I work hard at my job' - The Guardian

On the morning I visit Victoria Derbyshire's 5 Live radio show, there is a tech-trauma. A journalist and a sound engineer have been dispatched to Devon to establish a live satellite link to a couple who are being evicted from their home (a horsebox without planning permission). But no matter where the aerial is sited, no link can be set up. The interviews have to come in via gasp! ye olde telephone.

Much consternation in the London production gallery, though you wouldn't know it from Derbyshire's on-air performance. She is nothing if not a pro. Her voice remains warm and calm; she continues to concentrate fully on what the couple, Stig and Dinah, are saying, explaining sometimes, sometimes asking nippy questions. Her empathetic yet journalistic technique serves the story well and soon listeners are calling in, some of whom actually live in the same village as the Horsebox Two.

I can see her through the glass partition, a well turned-out woman in smart top, jeans and cool wooden heels. Victoria isn't a well-known TV face (she's hosted a Channel 4 sports programme and has her own interview show. It's on the BBC News Channel, though, so hardly any one watches), but she's been a proper success at 5 Live.

Derbyshire started at Breakfast with Julian Worriker in 1998 and has an impressive haul of Sony awards to her name, including a gold last year for the best news and current affairs programme category. Her current programme, which she's had from 2004, is on from 10am to 12pm weekdays and specialises in interviews: with politicians, the odd celebrity and she's good at these ordinary people dragged into the news through circumstance. Her practice is to grill the interviewee and then allow callers to ask questions, which can lead to surprising exchanges. You notice, though, it's usually she who extracts the telling quote.

Just a few weeks ago it was her interview with Ken Clarke that kicked off the furore over his attitudes to rape and led to the government's rethink of its new sentencing proposals (Clarke's department wanted to halve sentences for those who plead guilty). During Derbyshire's programme Clarke intimated that he believed date rape was less serious than stranger rape (Derbyshire: "Rape is rape, with respect." Clarke: "No it's not."), and was confronted by a woman caller, Gabrielle Brown, who'd been attacked by a rapist who had been let out on licence.

Victoria's programme has finished for today. We sit in the courtyard at the BBC's White City building while she has a cigarette and talk Ken Clarke. Clarke did not perform well on the show, to put it mildly (Derbyshire: "I don't know how that helps your point." Clarke: "If, if, if it doesn't help my point"). Even so, she was astonished by the instant uproar his appearance caused.

"I know that makes me sound naive," she says, "which I'm not, but the speed and intensity of the coverage was bewildering. Everything happened so quickly. It's the power of the internet, people sending clips round of him speaking. Some listeners took offence at his tone. His language about rape was imprecise and maybe a bit casual. And some listeners didn't like the [50% discount] policy. They thought it was crazy."

Anyhow, half an hour after Clarke left, political correspondent John Pienaar came on to Victoria's programme to explain that everything was kicking off. "We didn't realise, but [Clarke] had been door-stepped [by the press] as he'd left our studio. I handed over at five to 12 to Sheila Fogarty for PMQs and the first question was from Ed Miliband using our interview to call for Ken Clarke's head."

As a direct result of being interviewed on Victoria's programme, Clarke was forced to rethink his policy and fight for his job. There is a coda: the Ministry of Justice asked if Clarke could meet Gabrielle Brown a few days later. He did and she on Victoria's show the following day professed herself satisfied with his policy changes. This news was not reported with anything like such fanfare. Did Derbyshire feel sorry for Clarke?

"No. His quotes were cherry-picked, but he knew they would be; he's been a politician for a long time. People will pick out a two-minute clip, or newspapers will take certain quotes. All we did was bring his policies to a wider audience, in a legitimate manner."

Clarke flailed and failed, but in terms of Victoria's programme he was a success although she is keen not to crow. "I don't know if it brought us any more listeners. We may have fewer listeners as a result of it, I don't know."

She is sensitive about her public persona, aware possibly because she interviews so many politicians that reputation is everything. So what is hers? Derbyshire has been described to me as "formidable" by more than one 5 Live colleague, and clearly has the hard-to-crack resilience of a proper news reporter. Yet she admits that she woke up in the night worrying about being interviewed and emails me afterwards to clear up points where she thinks she might have been misunderstood.

I like this about her; not because of any "chink-in-the-successful-woman's-armour" rubbish, but because it shows she really cares about her job. Victoria works hard and doesn't want her efforts ruined by a slack quote. And she has had the odd bit of bad press in her time: Jamie Oliver called her a "stupid cow" after she interviewed him, and in 2007 her programme was rapped for letting convicted paedophile Jonathan King protest his innocence on air (although Derbyshire repeatedly challenged him). Once, she had to change the basis of a programme mid-broadcast when so many listeners complained.

"The McCanns had just been made arguidos and we asked: 'Do you have sympathy for the McCanns?' And it became clear, through the calls, texts and emails, that we were dealing with the subject in a way our listeners didn't like. So we were happy to accept what they were telling us and simply asked them if we should stop talking about the subject entirely. And actually, Kate and Gerry McCann chose our programme, along with Sky and Woman's Hour, to do a long interview on the fourth anniversary of Madeleine's disappearance."

To be honest, Derbyshire does pretty well in terms of keeping to the rules: live radio can be hard to control. And she's very much 5 Live rather than Radio4; reacting to news as it happens, rather than sticking to the script. "I love this radio station and its listeners."

Despite her love, there was a point, around 2008, when Adrian Van Klaveren became 5 Live controller, when Derbyshire appeared to be falling out of favour. Her show, which had run from 9am to 12pm, lost its first hour; it was filled by Nicky Campbell, from Breakfast, doing a phone-in programme about a topic from the morning's news. This seemed to trample all over Derbyshire's remit her show took calls from listeners too and she tells me that, at the time, she and her producers "felt a bit backs against the wall".

But she's a fighter and she and her producer, Louisa Compton, redefined her programme as an interview-based show rather than a traditional phone-in. This means spending a lot of time building up relationships with interviewees, especially the non-professionals. "We can't afford to pay for interviews, so people have to turn down money from papers and rival broadcasters to come on our show. All we have to go on is our reputation and the way we treat people, which is with courtesy. We ask firm questions but we don't edit what they say; they talk to our listeners directly. And we always keep in touch afterwards."

Firm questions is right, no matter who she's talking to: she was fearless when she interviewed Van Klaveren on her show last year, putting her boss through the wringer about 5 Live moving to Salford: "Why aren't you properly moving to Manchester?" "In order to get the job you would have had to commit to move to Manchester. If you'd made it clear that you weren't properly moving then you wouldn't have got the job." "Will you be using licence payers' money to rent a flat up there?" She was so hard on him it was almost funny.

The station's relocation throws up problems for Derbyshire too. She lives outside London with her husband and their two young sons, and at the moment she gets up at 6am, to be in the office by 7.30. After work she goes home to watch The Daily Politics and Newsnight, which she's recorded, then picks up the boys from school and nursery. When 5 Live goes up north her family will remain down south: for her husband's job (he's the editor of World Have Your Say on the World Service), the children's schools, "and the house is in negative equity anyway!" she says with a laugh. So she's going to stay with her mum in Bolton on Sunday night, then commute up and down Monday through Friday. "I hope I can do all my work on the train so that when I get back I'll be able to just be there for the boys and Mark."

She works hard at her family as well as her job. The week I'm in, she has the Wednesday off for her eldest's school sports day and she's very close to her mum. When she and her husband got together, in 2002, there was a fuss because he had been married to another 5 Live presenter, Fi Glover, but that's blown over (Glover is happily settled with another partner). "I don't think it's relevant," says Derbyshire when I bring it up, which is fair enough. Her look, I must say, would silence Jeremy Paxman.

Victoria reminds me, a bit, of the no-nonsense women you get in tabloid newsrooms. She has the confidence of those who have worked their way up in a profession she's paid her dues at postgraduate college, at local radio (she covered the Stephanie Slater kidnapping case in her early 20s) and the ballsiness that comes from not being given anything on a plate. At every step along the way she's made the most of her opportunities, asking if there are any jobs going, and creating, while working in local radio in Birmingham, her own show for 20-somethings. (She had to drive the desk herself and, on her first show, had a complete meltdown: "I just closed down all the microphones there was silence for quite a few seconds and then opened mine, confessed to the listeners that I had really messed up, and started again.") Where does her toughness come from?

"I'm not a fan of amateur psychology," she says, carefully, "but if I was asked if what I do for a living has anything to do with my background, I'd say it may have. I came from a violent home. My mum was wonderful but my father was violent. Would he hit me? Yes. Me, my mum, my sister and my brother. I couldn't match his physical strength but when I became a teenager I attempted to outwit him verbally: playing devil's advocate or putting forward the counter-argument to whatever he was shouting about."

She hasn't seen her father for more than 20 years; she talks about her stepfather, now dead, with affection. When she'd visit, he would ask taxi drivers if they listened to 5 Live, and if they said yes he would say, loudly, "Well, did you know you've got Victoria Derbyshire in the back here?" Derbyshire laughs as she tells me this and gets a little misty-eyed.

So, not quite as tough as you might think: you can't be a good interviewer if you don't have a heart and Victoria is an excellent interviewer. One of the most moving things I have ever heard on live radio was her interview with an alcoholic doctor who, just before she checked herself into rehab, called in to Victoria's show.

"I just tried to be very careful with her," she says. "She was obviously very vulnerable and it was brave of her to call in to the show. You know, I'm not super-intellectual, I work really hard at my job, but I enjoy it and it seems to come naturally."

In an unguarded moment, she tells me she'd love to present Question Time in the future. She emails me afterwards to insist she's not applying for the job. Fine, but I think she'd be good at it: it involves politicians and ordinary people, Derbyshire's perfect combination. I wouldn't want her to leave 5 Live just yet. Did you hear Hugh Grant and phone hacker Paul McMullen on the show on Tuesday? Top stuff!