The journalist and broadcaster James Cox, who has died aged 83, was best known for presenting the popular BBC Radio 4 Sunday show The World This Weekend for more than a decade from the mid-1990s.
However, his work as BBC Scotland’s political editor and presenter in the late 1970s and early 80s, during the rise of the Scottish National party and the first great devolution debate, was possibly of more importance. He covered the split in the SNP and the breakaway “79 group” led by a young and then unknown Alex Salmond as the party moved from being the “Tartan Tories” to Scotland’s most significant political force.
The country’s first devolution referendum was dominating debate then, as later, and while in 1979 it fell short of the required majority (although achieved 51.6% of the vote) the nationalism tide was not out. James reported as the young Salmond emerged to lead the move towards a more radical and left-leaning SNP – and was the first person to interview the Liberal Democrat Charles Kennedy, when he first won his seat. Kennedy became a close personal friend.
James brought this heavyweight journalistic experience, and his honed skills as an interviewer and analyst, to his presenting role at The World This Weekend. He wore it lightly, however, never hectoring, instead listening and interpreting.
Nevertheless, he briefly caused waves in 2002 when he used the word “crap” on the programme, during an interview with the Labour politician Margaret Beckett, and for which the BBC felt obliged to apologise.
“I remember a press conference,” he told Beckett, then the rural affairs secretary, “at which … Mr Blair said: ‘Oh, I never read the Guardian. I prefer a Labour newspaper.’ Now the fact is, your media manipulation has been one which means you suck up to your sworn enemies and crap on your candid friends.”
Like many broadcasters, James began his working life with pen, notebook and shoe leather. His arrival at the tabloid Daily Record – then Scotland’s biggest-selling newspaper – in Glasgow in the 1960s involved the rite of passage of doing shifts on the “Pat Roller” column, which reported on the minutiae (usually grisly) of Glasgow life.
He moved to BBC Scotland in 1975 as part of the presenting and reporting team on the weekly political programme Public Account, in the days when such programmes played a big part in Scottish public life. His presenting colleagues were Donald MacCormick and Andrew Neil – a testing ground for future broadcasting heavyweights .
Appointed as political editor in 1978, James charted the decline of the Conservatives as a Scottish political force, the many ups and downs of nationalism and the soon-to-be usurped dominance of the Labour party. He took the lead in presenting and commenting on live coverage of the Scottish party conferences – the first time this had been done. It was a niche broadcasting development, but an exemplar of public service broadcasting, something to which James had increasingly become devoted. I was his producer then, and his political antenna and knowledge made that a straightforward and enjoyable task.
Born in Harrow, Middlesex (now part of Greater London), James was the oldest of three children of Jean (nee Dore), who was for many years leader of Daventry district council, and Edwin Cox, a Church of England vicar who was teaching at Birmingham University at the time. But the journalism came from both his great-uncle James Heddle, who in 1909 was the first editor of the Daily Sketch, and his maternal grandfather, Harold Dore, who was a political and parliamentary correspondent for the Guardian in the era of CP Scott’s editorship.
Educated at Highgate school in north London, James went to King’s College, Cambridge, to study history, and on graduation in 1963 moved to the Daily Record via a short stint at the South Shields Gazette.
While at the Daily Record, he won a World Press Institute fellowship to the US, and was able to reignite that interest years later when appointed the BBC’s New York correspondent in 1983. For three years James crossed the continent covering elections, foreign policy and the usual ephemera for which there was an appetite back home. James would cover the politics with ease and the “only in America” stories with a wry smile.
It was in New York – at City Hall – that James married his long-time partner, the journalist and broadcaster Jackie Rowley, in 1986.
On return to London later that year, he did a stint as the first political editor and occasional presenter of Newsnight, before the job which, for him, was a career highlight: presenting The World This Weekend on Radio 4 between 1994 and 2005.
James was not a performative presenter – rather he was informative. A wordsmith, but not verbose, he was delighted when he was able to sign off his final broadcast for the show using only unusual and obscure words offered up by listeners.
His retirement was affected by a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis that caused him mobility problems, but not enough to prevent his regular travel with Jackie to enjoy his love of horse racing, and even – occasionally – making a few quid in the process. He was until his death a sharp interpreter of the world around him.
Jackie survives him, along with his younger brother, Tony.