Airhead by Emily Maitlis

Author:Emily Maitlis
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781405938358
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2019-04-17T16:00:00+00:00

Steve Bannon Emerges from the Shadows for His First International Broadcast Interview

I don’t think I’ve ever worked harder to secure an interview than I did with Steve Bannon, the political strategist and architect – many believe – of Donald Trump’s electoral victory in 2016.

Before I interviewed him he had been a creature from the undergrowth, concealed in the shadows and unknown. He rarely, if ever, appeared on television. He talked widely to journalists, but almost always off the record. He was known to be fiendishly bright, hilariously blunt and, quite possibly, extremely dangerous.

Everything I’d heard and read about him suggested an arch-manipulator. A man whose greatest thrill was to see a kind of chaos – his chaos – take hold around the world. He wanted to shake things from top to bottom, upend the world. He called his mission ‘The Movement’ and wrapped it in a populist guise of giving the people back their true voice. But a little bit of me has never stopped thinking of him as a kind of Prospero: staff in hand, out to raise tempests for his own sheer bloody entertainment.

After months of prodding and poking the beast on email – to no avail – I was finally introduced to him in person by a friend, Niall Stanage, of Washington’s The Hill news site.

One night, after Newsnight had gone out live from Capitol Hill, DC, we were summoned to Bannon’s house: the notorious Breitbart Embassy. The setting was like something out of revolutionary Cuba (if Che had been extremely right wing). Everything that was said in that first meeting was off the record – and has stayed that way. But I committed all I saw that night to memory and can still call it up photographically. The half-bottle of red wine on the table, label peeling with a kind of decayed grandeur. The photograph of his daughter – a second lieutenant in the Screaming Eagles Division deployed to Iraq – seated on the throne of Saddam Hussein shortly after he’d been deposed. And the surprisingly ornate chintzy loo – seemingly at odds with the guerrilla austerity of the rest of the building. We had arrived at his basement door at 6.30 p.m. and been escorted upstairs to meet him. I had expected a fifteen-minute hello and handshake. But we stayed until nearly midnight, never running out of things to say, questions to ask. I left disorientated and thrilled, attempting to embark on an hour’s walk home fuelled by adrenalin. I had kept it together for five hours but suddenly the wine had gone to my head and I was desperate to write everything down before I forgot it. I thought he had agreed – in principle – to a BBC interview. But the further away from that night we got, the less and less sure I became of what I’d heard.

Since that first meeting I had tried to keep the channels of communication open, but a fog of radio silence had descended. I started to think I’d made the whole thing up.

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