Victoria Derbyshire: ‘I owe my life to NHS staff; we need more women to survive’

When property show presenter Sarah Beeny revealed in August that she’d been diagnosed with breast cancer, it came like a bolt from the blue. Who among us didn’t feel that jolt of shock, that wave of sympathy, followed by the heavy drag of helplessness? But what can a stranger do in such circumstances?

Victoria Derbyshire’s immediate instinct was to message her. She knew. She understood in ways only a breast cancer survivor could ever grasp.

“I’ve never met Sarah, but I just felt compelled to reach out. Every cancer journey is different but I wanted to say ‘I get it. I’m here if you need me’,” explains award-winning journalist and broadcaster Derbyshire, whose own life was hit by a breast cancer bombshell seven years ago. She is now an anchor of BBC Newsnight, hosts the Ukrainecast podcast and has a personal podcast entitled & Then Cancer Came.

“I did the same when Julia Bradbury was diagnosed last September. Both of them replied and were very gracious - I know from personal experience that kind words and support really do give you a lift and boost your spirits when you are flagging.”

Today, Derbyshire, 54, is very far from flagging. We meet in an upmarket country pub in Surrey near her home. She is glamorous and glossy in a bold houndstooth Rixo silk skirt, a striped Victoria Beckham sweater and white Chloe trainers. Her understated rucksack is from Prada, her butter-soft leather jacket bears a Dolce & Gabbana label.

She looks radiant. She laughs — a lot. She speaks with urgent fluency - but every so often her eyes well up, unbidden, with tears. She references death several times with bold impunity; it is the gentle words that set her off; gratitude, compassion, her two boys.

Oliver and Joe are now strapping teenagers, but they were just ten and seven years old when their mother’s cancer inevitably forced them to grow up early.

“Seeing the pictures Sarah released of her four sons cutting her hair and shaving her head before she began treatment, I thought it was so good she was including her kids,” says Derbyshire.

“What she did was very brave, but not for me. I was determined to be the exception to the rule and keep my hair - I wore an exceedingly unpleasant ice cap on my head during chemo and after my first session felt vindicated that I’d nailed it,” she says with a rueful smile.

“I shouldn’t have been so bloody smug! After my second cycle I was staying at a hotel and getting all dolled up for a party, so I washed my hair in the shower. The force of the water sent long strands cascading down onto the bath.

“I was utterly horrified. I grabbed a clump and rushed through to Mark to show him and I remember saying “Oh God, it’s just begun”.

Mark is Mark Sandell, a TV and radio producer turned podcast impresario, her long-term partner and father to her sons, whom she married in 2018, after treatment.

The pair hugged, long and hard — then Derbyshire, like the pro she is, put on her fancy frock and threw herself wholeheartedly into the festivities. It’s her way.

Like Beeny, she chose to mitigate fear of the unknown by being upfront and open with her sons. Early on, she brought them to the breast cancer unit at her local hospital in Surrey, which was painted pink, where Radio 2 was playing and the staff made a tremendous fuss of them.

They usually accompanied her when she had her chemo. Sometimes because she had no childcare cover but mostly because they wanted to be there. It was a place of such positivity.

“I can’t imagine what it would be like to go through breast cancer now,” Derbyshire says, gravely. “We have NHS backlogs due to Covid, a cost of living crisis, soaring utility bills and inflation at 11 per cent. Just when women are facing the terrifying truth of cancer, there are all these added stresses layered on top.

“That’s why Macmillan Cancer Support is so crucial,” she emphasizes. “You’re scared, you’re emotional and your finances are on the floor, but you can turn to Macmillan for advice; there’s so much more to this amazing charity than its fabulous nurses.

“They give advice on money, on the law, on how to manage both practically and psychologically. I was tremendously fortunate to have a support system around me, but not everyone has that - and for them Macmillan is there.

“Over our lifetime one in two of us will be diagnosed with cancer, partly because we live so much longer. I do understand there are many demands on our healthcare resources, but I literally owe my life to NHS staff; we need more women to survive.”

As they now ought to say in showbiz; what doesn’t kill you makes you appear on I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here, strip off for The Real Full Monty: Ladies’ Night and unflinchingly talk about breast cancer on air and on podcasts at every opportunity.

“It was a no-brainer for me to document my cancer journey,” says Derbyshire of the six video diaries she made about her breast cancer in 2015. “I’m a journalist, I was entering a world that I knew nothing about so it was second nature to take viewers with me, whether that was to the consultant’s room or being wheeled down the corridor to theatre for my mastectomy. I wanted to break the taboo – back then people still referred to ‘the C-word’, can you believe it?”

That we don’t use that term any longer is in no small part due to her openness, her insistence on not just telling but showing and her determination to help other women the best way she knew how. With hours of live news broadcasting under her belt (at the current count she also has five gold Sonys, a Bafta and two Royal Television Society awards), podcasting via her smartphone came naturally.

Born in Lancashire and grammar-school educated, Derbyshire discovered her passion for radio while at Liverpool University, where she volunteered at a community station. After a post-graduate course in journalism at the University of Central Lancashire, she entered commercial radio and then joined BBC Coventry.

By 1998 she was working at 5 Live, where her direct style both impressed and on occasion dismayed her superiors; she famously once repeatedly asked her BBC boss, live on air, why he wasn’t moving from London to Salford when he expected everyone else at 5 Live to do so.

She went on to cover news and current affairs as well as sport: 9/11, the Grenfell Tower fire, the Manchester Arena bomb. Her credentials were impeccable as she set about demystifying cancer treatment.

Nevertheless she was astonished at the success of her Breast Cancer Diary, which is still available on the BBC website. And who could possibly forget those two images from it: in one, from her hospital bed, she is holding up a handwritten sign. It reads: ‘‘This morning I had breast cancer.’’ And then another sign: ‘‘This evening I don’t!’’ In the picture she grins – slightly goofily - with clear relief.

But that was just the start. Only after 301 days of treatment, a mastectomy, six rounds of chemotherapy and 36 radiotherapy sessions, did her consultant announce there was “no sign of active cancer” in her body.

“It’s a careful phrase with lots of wriggle-room,“ grins Derbyshire. “But it was good enough for me. I was given Tamoxifen and a check up every year for five years. Now it’s every three years and I’m 100% okay with that.”

Not every cancer journey ends like this. She tells me about a woman who got in touch with her saying she had been prompted to see her GP after learning Derbyshire’s story and had been diagnosed with breast cancer.

“At first it seemed treatable, then it wasn’t,” says Derbyshire softly, eyes glittering. “We stayed in touch and exchanged messages until suddenly she didn’t reply. Her husband then contacted me to tell me she’d died. They had two small children.”

She shakes her head. After a pause – one of the reasons she makes such a fine interviewer is because not only can she fire off questions like Exocets, she’s also comfortable with a silence – Derbyshire pulls her self up and continues to talk.

Having dipped in and out of television through the years, in 2015 she suggested fronting her own current affairs series - and the Victoria Derbyshire show was simultaneously launched on BBC Two and the BBC News Channel. She continued to present the show during her treatment whenever possible; as she puts it “I didn’t want my identity simply to be that of ‘cancer patient”.

For the next five years the show made its mark, was widely acclaimed and as far as she was concerned it had amply fulfilled its brief. But then in January 2020 an abrupt decision was made to axe it for reasons of cost and a “lack of audience diversity”. So abrupt was it that that nobody told Derbyshire. She read about it in a news report.

It’s fair to say she aired her position frankly in a hurriedly-arranged meeting with management. But there was a surprising upshot; a few months later a damp castle in Wales beckoned

“I was gutted when the show ended,” she says. “It hit me so hard that when I’m a Celebrity came knocking, it seemed like the perfect antidote; a way to remember that year for something less miserable. I’d never have even considered it pre-cancer.

“It was taking place in Wales due to lockdown, which suited me far better than if it had been in Australia, so I threw myself into it, had an absolutely brilliant time and made friends for life in Ruthie Henshall, Vernon Kay and Giovanna Fletcher, who eventually won the show.”

For Derbyshire, far more meaningful was that she got to talk about breast cancer, to an audience of 9 million. What began as entertainment became educational. As she sat with the EastEnders actress Jessica Plummer, the younger woman started asking “very direct” questions and Derbyshire replied with equal candour.

“To their great credit, the programme producers aired it all and millions of women out there discovered that breast cancer doesn’t only present as a lump,” says Derbyshire.

As she explained to Plummer, “What I first noticed was that one breast was lower than the other, and my nipple was starting to invert, as though something was sucking it inside the breast tissue.”

When she left the show – she was fourth to be eliminated – she found she had hundreds of social media messages from women who had gone to get themselves checked out and been given the all clear. But there was

also a disturbingly high number of women who discovered that they did have breast cancer and were receiving treatment.

“I’m really proud of that,” she says. “I want my work to have purpose and resonance and to matter more widely”

Derbyshire has certainly brought that mindset to her new job as co-anchor of Newsnight on BBC Two, alongside veteran Kirsty Wark, 67, about whom she gushes like a fangirl.

“Kirsty Wark! She’s. A. Complete. Legend. I can’t tell you how happy I am to have got the job and be working alongside her. Kirsty Wark of all people! We’ve been for lunch.”

Can this be the same steely woman who recently skewered the UK’s Russian Ambassador live on air? As Andrei Kelin trotted out the platitudinous “We do not have a problem with Ukrainian people” she pulled him up short. “Why are you killing them then?”

“Do not interrupt me, let me finish,” he ordered. “Don’t interrupt me as well, sir,” came the quickfire response.

Great television, important television. But what makes Derbyshire unique is she also has a feel for “ordinary people”. Her ability to connect and draw out confidences is a rare thing.

On the Victoria Derbyshire show she built up enough trust for former footballers Chris Unsworth, Steve Walters and Andy Woodward to open up about being sexually abused when younger by former Manchester City and Crewe Alexandra coach Barry Bennell, who is now a convicted paedophile.

By any standards, we are living through turbulent times. On Derbyshire’s first Newsnight shift, Liz Truss became Prime Minister. Three days later, Queen Elizabeth II died. Then there followed the state funeral, and a mini budget that crashed the markets leading to the political defenestration of Liz Truss.

Derbyshire’s impulse is to talk to those affected by decisions taken in Westminster.

“We’ll still talk to politicians and think tanks but I want to dig deeper and examine the impact of policies on people. Hear at grassroots level what the real world impact is for people,” she says. “I want us to broaden our canvas so we can include a cross section of society.”

These aren’t just random vox pops; Derbyshire will be returning to the same people, building up a vivid patchwork picture of how these individuals are coping in the weeks and months to come. Building up trust.

Her wishlist of interviews is spot-on. As an I’m a Celebrity alumna she’s mustard keen to get Matt Hancock into the studio.

“The main thing you want is not to be voted off first, so for Matt Hancock anything else is a result.”

In the wake of the much-disputed racism imbroglio, Lady Susan Hussey would be a coup. Baroness Michelle Mone, at the centre of a controversial PPE investigation, and the Duchess of Sussex would also be first-choice interviewees.

Meanwhile Derbyshire hosts a hugely influential Ukrainecast podcast that was launched the day of the Russian invasion and is garnering both praise and listeners alike.

Then there’s her incursion into TikTok, where her snappy, conversational news takes and at-a-glance simplifiers have racked up 7.5 million likes, reaching the elusive younger demographic who get their news exclusively from social media.

But today, on the day of our Charity Phone-In, the focus is on her mission to help others. Her podcast And Then Came Breast Cancer is warm, wise and humane, offering a guide to what is the most common form of cancer in women here in the UK.

Around 55,000 new cases are diagnosed annually. Around 11,500 sufferers die every year. One woman dies every 45 minutes.

“Breast cancer kills too many of us,” says Derbyshire. “We need to get the message out about early detection, spread information and support patients as they embark on what can be a very lonely journey.

“Macmillan will be there alongside them, every step of the way. But only if people keep donating money to fund their amazing work.”

Macmillan Cancer Support is one of four charities supported by this year’s Telegraph Christmas Charity Appeal. The others are Age UK, Action for Children and RBLI. To make a donation, please visit telegraph.co.uk/2022appeal or call 0151 284 1927