Goodbye Mishal Husain, the finest BBC Radio 4 Today presenter of ...

Ah yes, vanity. We can speculate that Husain might have got the TV gig she is rumoured to have wanted if she’d just been that little more pushy, that little bit more like her male counterparts (Huw Edwards spotted outside the Global offices springs to mind). We had a reminder of all this with the arrival of Humphrys, demob happy and delighted to have his voice on the radio again. 

In a segment discussing Husain’s record use of profanity in a single Today interview (quoting the words of James Cleverly), Humphrys blustered that he and Nick Robinson “would have been ripped apart just because we’re men”. I am sure Husain has an ego, but it has never seemed to interfere with her work. As Robinson said, “You don’t need to sound like the Community Champion to be a champion of the community.”

When Merope Mills ended their follow-up interview today with her own tribute, Husain sounded genuinely embarrassed: “I thought they were going to cut that bit off the end, but they didn’t.” Of course they didn’t. The final 21 minutes of the show were dedicated solely to Husain, including a Desert Islands Discs moment where she was able to choose a song to end the show (Daydream Believer by The Monkees – analyse that), and there was a sense of her colleagues willing the moment to never end.

Throughout the show we had reminders of Husain’s brilliance, from skewering politicians to her underrated on-the-ground reporting in Pakistan and Ukraine. We also had reminders of her endearing fits of giggles too, notably over a pampered German shepherd. The story was ridiculous: she asked the right questions, but she also laughed at the right things. How she fares at her new home of Bloomberg remains to be seen, but this is an enormous loss for the BBC. They have let the finest Today presenter of recent times walk out the door, someone who should have been a mainstay of BBC News for many years to come. 

“In my time at the BBC, I have found more in me than I knew was there,” said Husain in her gracious parting words. And now, at the BBC, they find they have much much less.