Jon Sopel

Award-winning journalist Jon Sopel held the prestigious post of North America Editor, the most senior foreign posting in the BBC, from 2014-2022. Whilst based in Washington DC, he conducted an exclusive interview with President Obama, travelled on Air Force One – and famously clashed with President Trump at a White House news conference.

In February 2022, Jon announced he would be leaving the BBC after an exclusive signing with LBC to launch a new podcast and joint radio show with fellow BBC presenter Emily Maitlis; The News Agents, featuring Sopel, Maitlis and Lewis Goodall.

Jon Sopel was a freelance writer and broadcaster before joining the BBC in 1983 as a reporter and producer for BBC Radio Solent. He went on to become the chief political correspondent for BBC News 24 and later spent three years as the BBC's Paris correspondent.

Stories he covered while he was in Paris included the French ban on the importation of British beef, the millennium celebrations in Paris, the oil spill in Brittany, the French presidency of the EU in 2000 and the Concorde crash in July 2000. During the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Sopel was the BBC's correspondent in Kuwait City.

In 2005, Sopel joined The Politics Show on BBC One replacing Jeremy Vine as the programme's main presenter. It broadcast every Sunday at noon and Sopel interviewed key politicians and advisers, including Prime Minister Tony Blair, opposition leader David Cameron, Jack Straw, Gordon Brown and US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

In his 16 years with the BBC, he has appeared on PM on Radio Four, Breakfast News, BBC News at One, BBC News at Six and BBC News at Ten as well as fronting BBC Two's annual coverage of the UK political party conferences, Conference Live. He has also been an occasional stand-in presenter for Newsnight, and has made past appearances on Breakfast, HARDtalk and The Daily Politics.

Jon has written an acclaimed biography of Tony Blair, Tony Blair; The Moderniser (1995), If Only They Didn't Speak English, Notes From Trump's America (2017), A Year At The Circus: Inside Trump's White House (2019) and UnPresidented: Politics, pandemics and the race that Trumped all others. (2021).

He has received many awards for his work including being shortlisted for the National Presenter of the Year at the Royal Television Society Television Journalism Awards in 2011/12, and political Journalist of the year in 2007, as voted by the Public Affairs Industry.

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