Shortly before Emily Maitlis launched her new podcast The News Agents (alongside co-hosts Jon Sopel and Lewis Goodall) in late August 2022, she was worried that they’d already missed the biggest news moments of the 2020s, with Boris Johnson’s resignation and the ongoing war in Ukraine dominating headlines.

But just a few days after the launch, the UK was contending with a new prime minister in the shape of Liz Truss, the death of Queen Elizabeth, the economy crashing and another new prime minister in Rishi Sunak. And while all of this was traumatic for us all to live through, it created the most fertile territory to launch a daily news podcast. 

“Those first few months felt like a headlong rush into the craziest news period any of us could imagine,” Maitlis, who often found herself rerecording episodes of the podcast as the news changed by the hour, tells Stylist. “We didn’t really draw breath; it was like being pelted with news for the first few months. We were all shellshocked.”

That intensive initiation into the world of podcasting was worth it. By May this year, The News Agents had surpassed 30 million downloads and is consistently one of the top three most listened-to podcasts in the country. Indeed barely a day goes by in the Stylist office where I don’t quote something I heard on the podcast the night before (probably passing it off as my own thought in the process). 

Maitlis has been one of the most high-profile news reporters in the country for years. In 2020, she was named network reporter of the year at the RTS awards, after her history-making Newsnight interview with Prince Andrew about his friendship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein (Scoop, a Netflix film starring Gillian Anderson as Maitlis that focuses on the car-crash interview is currently in production). 

The trio launched the podcast after Maitlis and Sopel left the BBC in early 2022, and last summer she delivered the powerful MacTaggart lecture at the Edinburgh TV festival about the rise of populism and the problems with impartiality

I’m often struck when listening to the podcast with how comfortable Maitlis seems to be in disagreeing with or challenging people she disagrees with, and I’m keen to find out if it causes her the fear it would instil in me.

“I don’t mind disagreeing with people,” she says. “Nobody wants to say something that immediately holds them hostage, but I think if you’re saying, ‘What about this?’ it’s not so head-on.” She goes on to explain, in light of that MacTaggart lecture and this new platform she’s become more fearless. “I’m not as scared to call something out if I know that they’re full of shit. It’s that simple. Sometimes you think: ‘I’m pretty sure that is a lie and I’d like to nip that one in the bud.’”

To find out more about Maitlis’s standout moments in a year when the news never stopped, the way politics impacts everything and how she unwinds when the mics are off, you can subscribe to Stylist here. 

Images: Global; Getty