Crisis What Crisis with Andy Coulson

Sir Richard Dearlove is one of the world’s greatest living spymasters. He joined MI6 in 1966 at the age of 21, and over nearly four decades ran agents under intense Cold War surveillance in Nairobi, Prague, Paris, Geneva and Washington, before rising in 1999 to become Chief of the Service — the role known simply as C. His five years at the top were among the most turbulent in the Service’s history...

Reverend Richard Coles has lived multiple lives — pop star, priest, broadcaster, novelist. But the greatest crisis of his life came in the form of someone he loved deeply. Richard watched helplessly as his partner David grappled with an addiction that cost David his job, his licence from the bishop, and ultimately his life. In this bonus episode of Crisis What Crisis, I sit down with Richard to di...

Few people have lived as many lives as Richard Coles. In the 1980s he was the keyboard-playing half of the Communards, whose “Don’t Leave Me This Way” was the biggest-selling single of 1986 – taking him, almost overnight, from the dole queue to flying aboard Concorde and the full pop-star life. Then, the gay socialist atheist who set out, in all seriousness, to bring down the government through th...

Jo Tutchener Sharp is the founder of fashion brand Scamp & Dude. In 2015, with two young boys at home, she suffered a brain haemorrhage and was told she needed major, life-saving surgery. Faced as she saw it with the pearly gates, she felt regret that her positive impact on the world had not been significant enough — so she made herself a promise. If she survived, she would change all that......

Recorded live at BizFest in Essex, this is the story of how a near-death moment became a £16 million business. Jo Tutchener Sharp had built a successful career – running the beauty division of Purple PR, leading communications at Estée Lauder, then founding her own agency, Beauty Scene, and growing it to a turnover of around £5 million. In 2015, with two young boys at home, she decided to step awa...

Mike Soutar is an entrepreneur, publishing titan and the forensic interviewer familiar to millions from BBC’s The Apprentice. In this bonus episode of Crisis What Crisis, Mike shares the four points of personal navigation he relies on when life gets hard: a person, a habit, a comfort and a single piece of advice. If you haven’t heard our full conversation yet, go back and find it in the feed. It’s...

Millions know Mike Soutar as the forensic interviewer on The Apprentice, the Scottish voice across the boardroom table for the last 15 years. But long before the television, he built one of the most remarkable careers in British media – on a deceptively simple formula of hard work, optimism and self-belief. In this business episode, we go back to the beginning. Mike started out at 17 writing horos...

Perspective is one of the most useful tools we have in crisis – a way of taking pressure out of a difficult moment, stepping back and working out what really matters. In this special compilation episode of Crisis What Crisis, I share the story of the five most terrifying days of my own life and revisit four extraordinary guests whose lives have been shaped, and sometimes almost undone, by the purs...

In this country, one in six of us will experience significant anxiety at some point in our lives. It's an epidemic that doesn't care about class, wealth, gender, age or race – and yet, as this episode argues, anxiety isn't the enemy. It's information. A signal to be read, not a fault to be removed. In this special compilation episode, Andy Coulson draws on his own experience of anxiety attacks and...

Most guests give me their Crisis Compass looking back on a crisis they've survived. Erin Baker is different. Her partner died just 12 weeks before this recording, and she is, by her own account, exhausted by the demand to keep being strong. These four points aren't hard-won wisdom viewed from calmer shores — they're the things holding her up as we speak. That, I think, makes them rarer and more va...

This is a very unusual episode. It is rare that we would choose to have someone join us on the podcast so close to their crisis – usually our guests come to these conversations with the clarity that a few years' distance can bring. Erin Baker is just weeks on from the death of her partner, James, and still very much living in it. What she offers instead of distance is something rarer: the raw, unf...

Julian Lloyd Webber spent half a century as one of the world's great cellists — and then had to discover who he was without the instrument that had defined his existence. In this bonus episode of Crisis What Crisis, Andy sits down with Julian to discuss his Crisis Compass. The four points of navigation that he turns to in order to help survive a crisis – a person, a habit, a comfort and a piece of...

Julian Lloyd Webber is undoubtedly one of the country's greatest living musicians – the man who, perhaps more than anyone of his generation, took classical music out of the concert hall and into the mainstream. But in October 2013, ten minutes into a recital in a Suffolk seaside town, the power drained from his right arm and he found he could barely draw the bow across his cello. Within six months...

Frank Gardner has lived, by his own description, two very different lives — and found a way to carry the best of the first into the second. Twenty years on from the attack in Riyadh that nearly killed him, the BBC Security Correspondent is still reporting from the places most of us wouldn't dare go. In this bonus episode of Crisis What Crisis, Andy sits down with Frank to discuss his Crisis Compas...

On June 6th 2004, Frank Gardner was in Riyadh filming what was meant to be a routine piece of background footage when an Al-Qaeda cell opened fire. His cameraman, Simon Cumbers, was killed. Frank was shot six times and left for dead. One surgeon later told him he'd arrived at hospital the colour of a lab coat, bleeding from every wound faster than they could pour the plasma in. It was, in the true...

Shock is a fundamental part of almost any crisis. It's a state of complete operating system override which, when left unacknowledged, can turn into something far more damaging. In this special compilation episode, Andy Coulson revisits five past guests who each experienced shock in very different ways, and found very different routes through it. POWERED BY KINGSLEY NAPLEY I know what it is to have...

Jeremy King is the legendary restaurateur behind Le Caprice, The Ivy, The Wolseley and Simpson's on the Strand. His is a story of extraordinary gambles, of rooms that became London institutions, and of losing the company that carried his own name — and choosing to build all over again in his 70s. In this bonus episode of Crisis What Crisis, I sit down with Jeremy to discuss his Crisis Compass. The...

In April 2022, after a bruising auction battle with his own investors, Jeremy King lost the company that carried his name. He walked back into the Wolseley – the restaurant he had built into the highest grossing restaurant in Britain – to find his staff in tears and the new owners already arriving. His phone and laptop were taken from him, he felt, as he puts it, like a criminal – stripped of all...

Over 20 years in frontline politics, Sir Jeremy Hunt held three of the great offices of state – Health Secretary, Foreign Secretary, and Chancellor of the Exchequer. He survived some of the most bruising political battles of his generation, and grieved, throughout, the loss of his father, his mother, and his brother. In this bonus episode of Crisis What Crisis, I sit down with Jeremy to discuss hi...

In October 2022, the British economy was in freefall. Liz Truss's mini-budget had sent the pound into a nosedive, mortgage rates were climbing at a terrifying speed, and the IMF had issued a public warning to the government to reverse course. It was, by any measure, a national crisis. Into that emergency stepped Sir Jeremy Hunt who, over a single weekend, dismantled almost the entirety of the econ...

What is the single most important concept in crisis management? Andy Coulson believes it's control — a lesson he first learned sitting on a plastic mattress in a Glasgow police cell, with nothing to focus on but his own breathing. In this special compilation episode, he revisits four past guests who each arrived at the same conclusion through very different routes. POWERED BY KINGSLEY NAPLEY I kno...

Sir Richard Harpin wanted to be an entrepreneur since before he knew the word. He sold conkers in the playground, bred and sold rabbits in his garden, ran a tuck shop from his school locker, and by 15 was bunking off chemistry to cash cheques with the bank manager. In this special episode of Crisis What Crisis – recorded in front of a live audience at the Walbrook Club in the City of London – Andy...

Dame Anya Hindmarch started her global fashion business on a gap year trip to Italy aged just 18. Four decades on, she is the founder of one of Britain's most recognisable brands – worn by the Princess of Wales and a new holder of a royal warrant from Queen Camilla. In this bonus episode of Crisis What Crisis, I sit down with Anya to discuss her Crisis Compass. The four points of navigation that s...

Dame Anya Hindmarch started her global fashion business on a gap year trip to Italy aged just 18. Four decades on, she is the founder of one of Britain's most recognisable brands – worn by the Princess of Wales and a new holder of a royal warrant from Queen Camilla. Anya joins Andy for a candid conversation about courage, control and how treating fear and excitement as the same emotion has proved...

Esther Ghey's 16-year-old daughter Brianna was murdered in a park near their home in Warrington in February 2023. What followed — the campaigning, the memoir, the forgiveness, the compassion — has made her one of the most consequential reform voices in contemporary British life. In this bonus episode of Crisis What Crisis, I sit down with Esther to discuss her Crisis Compass. The four points of na...