‘You can’t see people with their heads blown off and not be traumatised’

As Sky’s top foreign reporter, Alex Crawford has ridden rebel trucks in Libya and trekked across mountains to meet Taliban officials. She tells Alex Clark why the hardest part of the job is returning to her spouse and four children

SKY News correspondent Alex Crawford is tearful. She has seen horrendous things reporting from war zones in Syria and Afghanistan. “You can’t see people with their heads blown off and not be traumatised,” she says. “You sort of have to remember it, right? Because you don’t want to forget. But you don’t want to remember, either, because you can’t carry that on your shoulders, every day.”

In the Central African Republic, she and her crew filmed a 16-year-old girl in childbirth. The girl had been raped, she was malnourished and she had an infection. “There were two midwives on her,” Crawford says. “One was on her stomach, literally jumping on it, trying to get the baby out, because the mother couldn’t push. She was in the hospital, but it wasn’t a hospital, it was just a building; no water, no drugs, nothing. They had to give her an episiotomy without any anaesthetic.” For the first time in her career, Crawford fainted. “I just heard the guys going, ‘Jesus Christ’. I was so embarrassed.” Crawford, who has four children, rightly objects to being asked questions that wouldn’t be asked of men, about journalists who have families jeopardising themselves. I say she didn’t faint because she’s a woman. “I don’t know... If you’ve been through it [childbirth] before, you’re thinking, ‘Jesus wept...’ It makes me want to cross my legs now.”

She says it would be “a very poor journalistic world if it was run by single males, or even males with children. Because female journalists bring a lot to the job, to the profession, in all sorts of ways. They look at stories differently; that’s not sexist, it’s just reality.”

The 50-year-old special correspondent is no-nonsense and cheerful. Based in Johannesburg, in South Africa, after stints in India and Dubai, and now heading the channel’s coverage of the Oscar Pistorius murder trial, Crawford has won the Royal Television Society’s Journalist of the Year award four times, the James Cameron Memorial Award, and been recognised by the Foreign Press Association; in 2012, she received an OBE. She was the first reporter on the ground in Tripoli, during the liberation of Libya, in 2011. She arrived on the back of a rebel truck and broadcast via a camera in a cigarette-lighter socket.

Growing up in Nigeria and Zambia, the daughter of civil engineers, she “play-acted” her future career, asking people questions into a pretend microphone and starting the school newspaper. Back in England, she was a cub reporter on the Wokingham Times. Since then, she has trekked across mountains and crossed rivers to speak with Taliban units, and her coverage in the aftermath of the Mumbai terrorist attacks, in 2008, won a Bafta nomination.

But she does not conform to the hard-bitten foreign correspondent stereotype — she’s not a thrill-seeking loner, but is married to Richard Edmondson, a “very, very, very long-suffering” spouse who spent 20 years on the sports desk of The Independent and who now cares for their four children, aged between 11 and 18. The eldest, her son, Nat, is in university in York, in England; her daughters are Frankie, Maddie and Flo.

Back home from an assignment, there is a period of decompression: “You’re still running on this adrenaline, even when you’re on the plane, and, slowly, you’re coming down. And when you get home, and you’re finally in your familiar smells, and you’re cuddling your children, and you’re in your own bed, because there’s nothing quite like your own bed, even if, when you’re on the way out, you’re put into some fancy hotel with a fluffy pillow, there’s nothing like your own bed. But I am on my knees with tiredness,” she says.

How easily do her family adapt to someone who has returned from a perilous environment? “I think I am absolutely, outrageously difficult to live with at that point. So irritable. Because I’ve come home and I’m really excited to see everyone, but I’m fantastically tired, and my kids are saying: ‘can you take me to the films? Can you do this, can you do that?’ And I want to do all that and I do, but it’s like crawling through treacle,” she says.

But aside from balancing exhaustion with family life, which is common, Crawford’s work has graver implications. It is dangerous. She works with the same team, and they know each other so well that they “don’t even need to talk” in high-pressure situations. As soon as you travel to Libya or Syria or the Central African Republic, you’ve accepted risk. “But you can do an awful lot — an awful lot — to lock down that risk. There’s a whole string of things you do, but probably the most important thing is to keep your radar on,” she says, to make instant decisions about who to trust, where the danger is highest. “That’s our skill. You can’t put it in a box. You can’t get an ‘A’ for it, or an ‘F for fail’ for it, but you’ll soon be found out if you get it wrong all the time.”

Crawford receiving her OBE, which was presented to her by Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace in 2012

Crawford was in London to speak at St Bride’s Church in Fleet Street — the ‘media church’ — in support of the Journalists’ Charity, which is celebrating its 150th anniversary. She had a serious message to deliver: “We should be proud of what we do. There are some things that go wrong, but we’re all a big tribe, a huge extended family; newspapers, radio, television, we are all part of one big tribal family. I was faced with these rows and rows of titans of our profession, and I was trying to get them to remember why they became journalists in the first place... You want to make a difference, you want to be heard, you want to bear witness, you want to have fun, you want to have adventure... We’ve all got quite similar DNA: we’re inquisitive, we’re adventurous, we’re irritating and curious and questioning and digging and pushy and nosy, and all those things bind us together... We’re part of this incredible profession, which actually is still a massive pillar of justice, truth, honesty and democracy.”

It was also an opportunity to take a swipe at Kelvin MacKenzie, the former editor of The Sun newspaper, who criticised her during a Newsnight TV discussion in January, calling foreign news coverage “TV dross.” She got precious little help from presenter Jeremy Paxman. He asked her if she thought she was a social worker, and said that foreign coverage was “lots of bang-bang”.

Her St Bride’s speech alluded to this: “I was basically just saying ‘you’re wrong, Kelvin. You are so wrong if you think people are just interested in Big Brother or Benefits Street and who Sienna Miller has slept with. You’re just wrong. Because when we go out into the field, we’re constantly reminded about how much of a difference we do make.”

Making a difference keeps her going back; it’s why she badgered her bosses to send her to Ukraine. ! She is driven to bear witness, to show us situations that we’d rather not see. Journalists can report with an impartiality and expertise that a “citizen with a mobile phone” can’t rival. “We have exceptionally loud voices just because we’re journalists,” she says. “You have to use that.”