[on Mick Jagger] He's a really nice bloke. I thought he was going to be a bit of a... you know. But he was very pleasant.

You must reflect the population you serve, it seems to me. I just feel instinctively that if, say, 30, 40, 50, 60 per cent of journalists at the BBC were public school it wouldn't be right.

I don't like the idea that you absolutely have to have some media training. If you want to be a journalist, then what you need is an inquiring mind. Whether you can learn the skill of asking certain questions I doubt; that comes from experience. I personally think that a media studies degree is more harmful than helpful, and if I were recruiting for the Today programme I would prefer to have someone who had done their degree in history, economics, politics - whatever it happens to be - and then if necessary a year on one of the better postgraduate courses.

I do not express political opinions and nobody would be able to judge from my columns what my political views are. The BBC does not require its presenters not to have any views on anything, it requires its presenters not to make their own political views explicit, for very obvious reasons.

Far be it for me to be hugely immodest but I was voted political journalist of the year by politicians this year. I mean, it's a bit bizarre that the very people whom I am supposed to mercilessly pillory and savagely and ceaselessly attack should vote for me voluntarily in competition with every political hack in Britain. They can't think that I'm such an ogre.

I want to be able, if I've got kids in my car in the morning, taking them to school for instance, I want them to be able to listen to the BBC and I want not to be embarrassed by what they hear. Some of the stuff that Chris (Chris Moyles) does I find not grotesquely offensive, I mean it's not the kind of Jonathan Ross, Russell Brand stuff, obviously, but it's pub talk, and that's fine, but my view I suppose is, if I want to hear a few blokes talking in the pub, I'll go to a pub and hear them talking. I'm not quite sure why I need to hear that on the radio.