'I do not regret my Tory past'

Nick Robinson, ITV's News's political editor, was chairman of the Young Conservatives when Thatcherism was at its height. But that has not led to any bias in his reporting, he tells Vincent Graff

"You can make a case for a later bulletin and you can make a case for News at Ten," says Nick Robinson. "But you would have to search Britain to find someone who would make a positive case for News at When?."

Robinson, who has just clocked up his first year as political editor of ITV News, is lucky. He was spared the embarrassment that befell most of his colleagues at ITN. Four years ago, they were forced to put on a public show of composure - while seething in private - when ITV decided to scrap News at Ten after 32 years. Robinson did not have to pretend that the nonsense that followed the absurd decision to kill off one of the best brands on British TV was anything other than a disaster.

Life is too short to recount every fumbled, clumsy move of the affair. So here is the truncated version: News at Ten was scrapped in March 1999, renamed ITV Nightly News and moved to 11pm (except that sometimes it went out at 10.55pm or 11.05pm) and augmented by a 6.30pm "prime-time" bulletin; a year later, joint ratings for the two ITN programmes were 1.3 million down; the BBC announced in August 2000 that it planned to swipe the vacated 10pm slot, so ITV moved back to News at Ten - for three days a week.

The only people to whom it made any sense were the executives at the ITV network centre, who were too proud to own up to their appalling cock-up.

The numbers speak for themselves: in the year 1998-9, ITV's late news programme achieved an average audience of 4.7 million. So far this year - a year in which news audiences will have been boosted by a war - the programme has averaged 3.4 million. Meanwhile, the BBC has held firm. Its late news programme (first at 9pm and then at 10pm) had an average of 5.3 million viewers in 1998-9 - and has the same number now.

Robinson was at the BBC when News at Ten was scrapped, so he does not have to mince his words. He smiles. "I have the privilege of not having been around when those decisions were taken," he says, "and therefore I do not have to defend decisions that, let's be honest, can't be defended."

Even ITV has moved away from that position. Earlier this month, it emerged that Nigel Pickard, who inherited the News at When? débâcle when he was appointed director of programmes earlier this year, has tried to impart some certainty into the news schedule.

The three-day-a-week News at Ten is dead. In its place, from early next year, will be an ITN news bulletin at a fixed time every night: 10.30pm. Robinson says that ITV will now write itself back into "the mental diaries of news-viewers".

Would he prefer their appointment to be at 10pm? He won't commit. That has "never been an issue I've had to think about".

He denies that ITN, still owned jointly by five media companies that do not always see eye to eye, has parents who do not love it. "Well, that's always said, but I think that's changing. There's a transition process going on, where it seems to me that ITV is embracing its news again and saying: 'You're important to us and you are a part of our strategy, rather than an irritant.'"

But he adds: "Everybody has learnt a lesson from that about playing with valuable bits of the broadcasting furniture without being sure it can work." ITV's news matters once again, he says. The return to ITN of the much-respected David Mannion as editor of ITV news, seven years after he vacated the post, has revitalised the flagship programme. The BBC once again faces a grown-up opponent. Regulation will protect ITN from any dangers posed by a new, merged - perhaps American - ITV.

At about this point, though, all his talk about lands of milk and honey seems to be worrying him. Robinson - in real life a mischievous man with a highly developed taste for gossip - apologises for coming across as too corporate. "I'm not bullshitting," he assures me.

Time to move to tougher territory, perhaps: allegations of political bias. Like most political reporters on television and radio, he has received complaints from all sides. But there have been one or two attacks from New Labour that have stung. For it is a fact that - though I, for one, have never detected any hint of bias at all in any of his reports - we do know where Nick Robinson comes from. Between 1986 and 1987, at pretty much the height of Thatcherism, Robinson was national chairman of the Young Conservatives. Perfect ammunition for Alastair Campbell, a man happy to throw allegations of bias around when it suits his purposes. As, indeed, he has done with Robinson himself.

So, I ask, does Robinson wish he had never worked for the Tories?

He ponders the question long and hard. "I have never actually thought about that," he says, finally. "The honest answer is: no, because it was fascinating. It gave me great insights into politics and it has helped me to do this job."

It helps? "Oh, yes. Because I had some involvement in politics, I have more of an understanding about how politicians think. Do I sometimes say: 'Oh, it'll be a bit tedious for this all to come up'? Yes, of course I do. But people tend to judge you on what you do day to day, and it genuinely never comes up now."

He says he no longer fears anyone using his past against him. "That would be a problem if I felt that when people heard it they'd say: 'You're damn right - absolutely, that's what I've always thought.' But I just don't sense that it has any resonance. The fact that I'm talking about it now, which I haven't done before on the record, illustrates that I don't think it's a problem.

"The issue that would bother me would be if it got in the way of people listening to what I was saying, if it were a barrier, but I haven't got any evidence that it is."

In fact, when Campbell tried to play the bias card, he was, to Robinson's great joy, "heckled down by other reporters in the lobby". The ITN man knew he had reached a turning-point. "I won't forget that day, when I thought: 'My peer group don't buy this.'" Campbell soon apologised.

Robinson says: "It's funny - there have been phases in journalism when getting involved with political parties was considered absolutely the thing not to do, and other phases when it wasn't. Robin Day had been a Liberal candidate. Lance Price [a former BBC reporter] had been chairman of the Labour Party's student organisation."

And, indeed, there are many other reporters with secret pasts, possibly even with party membership cards in their kitchen drawers. "I could name other people," Robinson says, "but I don't want to do to them what was done to me."