Susanna Reid opens up about her ‘tough’ split, co-parenting and what she REALLY thinks of her Good Morning Britain co-host Piers Morgan
SUSANNA Reid’s rise from student newspaper editor to acclaimed broadcaster is the stuff that career dreams are made of.
She’s also the woman credited for saving Good Morning Britain from the brink of certain doom – so it’s pretty surprising to learn that failure is her number one piece of career advice.
“It’s not something to be afraid of – it’s a building block for your success,” explains Susanna, 46, illustrating her point with a quote from acclaimed Irish novelist and playwright Samuel Beckett: “‘Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.’ You don’t have to do it correctly at the beginning,” she explains.
“You don’t actually have to be perfect at it. You can keep failing – just fail better, and build on that.”
Ask when she last messed up and Susanna chuckles.
“I did a reading at a concert recently, and when I sat down my middle son said: ‘It wasn’t perfect, Mum, but well done.’ Apparently I’d said a word wrong. But that’s just human!”
Chatting in the back of a car heading to her home in south-west London after our shoot, Susanna is as warm and engaging as ever.
It’s the third time she’s graced the cover of Fabulous in as many years, and boy what changes those years have brought: quitting BBC Breakfast to host ITV’s Good Morning Britain, plus splitting from Dominic Cotton, 50 – her partner of 16 years and the dad of her three sons Sam, 14, Finn, 12, and Jack, 11.
So with this resilient personality, does anything scare Susanna?
“My greatest fear is something happening to my children,” she says.
“But I am pretty fearless when it comes to myself. That sounds like I’m hard as nails and I’m not. Fearlessness just stems from knowing that eventually everything’s going to be OK. Even though I’m scared of heights, I went microlighting earlier this year. Doing what you’re scared of is good for you!
“When I was 11 or 12, nobody in my class would volunteer for the inter-form gymnastics competition, so I threw my hat into the ring on the principle that I didn’t want to let the class down. I couldn’t do gymnastics, so I did two forward rolls and a handstand – versus girls who were county-standard gymnasts! I made a fool out of myself. It was the most embarrassing moment ever, but all these things give you a thick skin and a fearlessness about performing in public.”
Since then, of course, Susanna has become the first lady of breakfast telly – not that it’s gone to her head.
“I’ve always had brilliant bosses and many have been powerful, inspiring women who I am grateful to,” she says, name-checking ITV’s head of daytime television Helen Warner, who invited her to launch Good Morning Britain in 2014 on a reported £500,000 salary.
The opportunity severed Susanna’s 20-year love-in with the BBC and ended her seven-hour commute three times a week from London to the Beeb’s Salford HQ.
Proud of the women who have helped her along the way, it’s no wonder that she has been riled by media reports suggesting that bitchy rivalry exists between the female GMB presenters.
On the morning of our shoot, an online story breaks saying Susanna was “mortified” after Kate Garraway compared her dress to her son’s messy play creation.
“That I continually find annoying,” sighs Susanna.
“Kate and I were laughing about my dress. I don’t like it when women are set up against each other. I don’t think men get that quite so often. Sometimes people think there’s a competition between women but – and I genuinely mean this – I have never experienced it. It’s those false tensions that people attribute to women that don’t occur.”
Tension with her GMB co-star Piers Morgan, 51, is another matter entirely.
As the best of frenemies, the flirty banter and bickering has been likened to that of a couple, and the tension often spills off set, too.
“Yes, we do [have arguments],” says Susanna, who’s dubbed “the most tolerant woman on TV” for handling Piers being, well, Piers.
“He pushes my buttons, I have to say,” she adds.
“There are times I want to poke him in the eye. Sometimes I will tell him if I think he’s gone too far and he’ll say: ‘If that’s how it made you feel, I’m sorry.’ We couldn’t do what we do on air unless we have those conversations. Behind the scenes there’s a lot of mutual respect. I hope I show that I’m no pushover. I don’t think Piers is in any doubt that I can stand up for myself.”
Their high-profile guests aren’t in any doubt of that, either.
Susanna takes her position seriously, describing it as a “privilege and a duty to ask the right questions.”
Just hours after 17 million of us voted leave in the EU referendum, it was Susanna who put UKIP leader Nigel Farage on the spot in a live interview, in which he admitted that leave campaigners had mistakenly promised to pour £350million a week into the NHS.
“That interview has been viewed on Facebook 23 million times at the last count,” says Susanna proudly.
Initial accusations that she dumbed down by switching from the BBC to ITV now seem a world away – as are the worrying early days when viewing figures were down by 13% compared to Daybreak a year earlier.
“That was the lowest career moment,” says Susanna.
“A couple of weeks in, [a story] said the show was going to be cancelled by Christmas. Those headlines hurt.”
Since joining forces with Piers in November 2015, viewing figures have shot up.
The programme now reaches over 3 million daily, and ITV director of television Kevin Lygo holds his breakfast duo responsible, saying: “It has been the problem child since GMTV stopped, but with Susanna and Piers it’s in really good shape.”
Susanna is equally thrilled: “I’m really so, so proud.”
There’s noticeable relief in her voice, too, as she talks of the “very strong friendship” she continues to share with her ex Dominic.
“It was absolutely our priority to make sure everything was as good as it can be for the children,” she says.
That period of her life, she admits, was one of the toughest.
“There was a lot of smiling through. You wouldn’t choose to have that much change in quite so many areas of your life around the same time.”
Susanna had finished runner-up on BBC1’s Strictly Come Dancing just a few months earlier.
“I am at heart a journalist and then a presenter, but around the time of Strictly, the ITV move and the split, there was a lot of publicity on me. You’ve got to be able to handle that, and sometimes that is a challenge. Honestly, everything’s a good learning experience, and it all builds resilience. I was not bursting into tears at work, that’s for sure. Work was definitely a distraction.”
According to Piers, Susanna is “probably the most eligible female in the country” – not that she plans to do anything about it, thank you very much.
There are no men on the scene and no plans to find love in the immediate future.
“I’m not dating, and right now it feels like absolutely the right thing to be single and independent. It’s a positive choice,” she says.
“I am now in a position where I can be with my children as much as I possibly can, because work is in a really good place, and both of those things take up my energy, time and love. I can’t imagine who has the time to then start a new relationship. My goodness…”
Susanna takes a moment.
“I genuinely feel the happiest I’ve ever been. There will be plenty of time for… [she chooses her words carefully] anything else… later, later, later.”
Following all three pregnancies, Susanna returned to work after six months, and never once entertained being a stay-at-home mum, choosing instead to carefully balance her professional and family life.
Every morning at around 10am she arrives home from the studio, eats lunch and takes a two-hour power snooze.
Sometimes she also squeezes in a 30-minute personal training session before her kids return from school at 3.30pm.
She relishes the afternoons she spends with her boys, and when work commitments interrupt – for example when Susanna was dispatched to Brussels last March to report live from the scene of the terrorist bombings – she races home first.
“I always want to see the children before I go anywhere,” she says.
Susanna and Dom sometimes use paid childcare to “fill in the gaps”, but lately, to devote more time to her boys, she has pared back her social life.
“It used to be going out to the Groucho club, drinking and having fun,” she remembers.
“It was all sequins, sparkles, glitter, glamour and gloss, and now I’m never happier than being curled up on the sofa with the children watching a film,” she says.
We meet two days before Susanna spent her 46th birthday with the boys at her mum’s house and enjoyed a low-key lunch.
That evening she tweeted “Celebrate every birthday #AgeingIsABlessing”.
Not all female television presenters would agree, with research commissioned in 2013 by Labour politician Harriet Harman revealing that just 5% of British presenters are women over 50.
But Susanna, who not long ago discovered a non-cancerous cyst in her breast, refuses to dwell – and insists she hasn’t experienced any sexism at work.
“I don’t think about the future [and] don’t see any reason why I can’t carry on working,” she says.
“Mary Berry has put her beautifully coiffured head through that glass ceiling.”
She exercises two or three times a week to stay fit and healthy, and cheerily admits that although she weighs a little bit more than she would like, she’s not losing any sleep over it: “I can happily sit in on a Friday night eating a huge burrito, a Chinese the next night, and there’s never a better Chinese than on the morning after.”
Chomping cold chow mein out of an aluminium box seems the most un-Susanna-Reid-like of behaviour.
“Oh, I can eat some really slutty food,” she says.
“I am not a paragon of healthy eating.”
The youngest of three children, Susanna grew up in Croydon, the daughter of a management consultant dad and nurse mum.
Her parents divorced when she was nine, and it took its toll.
Frightened that her bottled-up emotions would tumble out during auditions, Susanna abandoned childhood acting plans and turned to writing instead.
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While studying politics, philosophy and law at the University of Bristol, Susanna became the first female editor of student newspaper Epigram. A postgraduate broadcast journalism course at Cardiff University followed, then after her first job with BBC Radio Bristol in 1993, she moved to BBC Radio 5 Live and later into television.
It was while working as a reporter at BBC News 24 when pregnant with Sam that she received a chance opportunity to present the 11pm news.
“I felt slightly sick, but knew I had to pull it together,” remembers Susanna.
“I sat down and started to read the news and after about five minutes I said to the director: ‘How’s it going?’ He said: ‘Really well, but at what point are you going to take your coat off?’ In the panic of the moment I’d sat down still wearing it!”
That moment “absolutely” changed Susanna’s career.
She moved to BBC Breakfast shortly after, and within a year was presenting on the sofa with Charlie Stayt, becoming a weekday host in 2012. It was a meteoric rise, so what are her plans for the future?
“I have no idea – I just see opportunities and take them,” says Susanna, the real girl’s role model who dreams big, works hard, takes risks and embraces failures.
For more female inspiration, check out our exclusive interviews with Fabulous Women of the Year (2016), Olympians Laura Trott, Nicola Adams and Jade Jones.
Watch Good Morning Britain, weekdays, 6am, ITV.