BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg and Sky News’ Kay Burley on how they survived the Brexit bombshell

Mainly walnuts, gin and Diet Coke...
Sky News presenter Kay Burley and BBC political editor Laura Kuenssberg
Frankie McCoy2 July 2016

Seismic changes are shaking the political scene and we’re floundering. The only thing keeping us abreast of the news tsunami is the colossal effort of two women: Sky News presenter Kay Burley and BBC political editor Laura Kuenssberg. Their alert faces are as familiar as Farage, Cameron and BoJo’s, their voices more astute than many a politician. Off-air, Burley and Kuenssberg shun sleep for tweets, with hundreds of missives a day. So, how have the two hardest-working people in London managed the Brexit bombshell and its fallout?

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Kuenssberg caught the Eurostar to Brussels on Tuesday for the EU summit, although the lack of wi-fi en route was agonising. “Just got to Brussels — what did I miss SW1?” she tweeted at 11:25am. An hour -and-a-half later, it was “Out of the Channel Tunnel — what did I miss?” Of course, Kuenssberg would never miss a thing: despite being 250 miles away, she informed her 467,000 followers of Boris Johnson and Michael Gove’s power breakfast with Lynton Crosby, before live-tweeting the summit. She was still up reporting on News at Ten later that night; 12 hours later she was live-tweeting a painful PMQs, before discussing it on Daily Politics.

Burley, meanwhile, has been pulling mammoth shifts in the Sky studio in Osterley, also finding time to fly to Nottingham to interview Johnson.

Booze and bananas

Burley tells me she has well-honed tactics for making it through the non-stop news schedule: “a 5km run when I wake up, a gin and tonic before bed”. She also has a strict snacking strategy: taking walnuts and bananas to the referendum-night parties for energy, and Diet Coke when fatigue looms.

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Go bright or go home

They have perfected the art of stealth power-dressing. Flash of cobalt caught your eye in a crowd of dark Brussels suits? That’ll be Kuenssberg, whose wardrobe is dominated by the colour. Burley is less strict — anything goes if it’s bright — but she’s also been favouring a British blue.

Who needs sleep?

By 11.34pm on June 21, Kuenssberg was “too knackered to write a blog”, which she normally does once or twice a day. The next morning she was up at 6.38am: “Blimey it’s early.... Off to cover campaigns’ last frantic day on the road.” She hasn’t stopped since.

Fatigue hit Burley at 11pm on referendum night when she accidentally mistook Sir Trevor Phillips for David Lammy at a Remain party. Undeterred, she kept going — “flitting between parties as any good party girl should”, she says — until 4am when it became clear Leave had won and she jumped in a cab to Islington, where Boris Johnson lives. “I wondered whether I should bang on his door — obviously such a coup to get that live on air. It was his aide who answered but imagine if it had been Boris in his jimjams.” A few hours later, Burley was back outside, styling out a profane interruption from a passing cyclist (“Boris Johnson is a c**t”) with a smile. Since then, she’s spent most waking hours at Sky News HQ. “I can sleep when I’m dead,” she says.

And with imminent Tory and Labour leadership elections, Burley has accepted that “I’m not going to sleep before September”.

But who needs sleep when you’re on the frontline of the biggest political story for a generation?

Follow Frankie McCoy on Twitter: @franklymccoy

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