Politics Home Article | Women in Westminster: In Conversation With Esther Webber

As a journalist specialising in foreign affairs and defence, Esther Webber understands the challenge of navigating hidden and often opaque worlds. When Women in Westminster sat down with the POLITICO journalist, she told us this was also a skill she had to draw upon when she first joined the Westminster Lobby.

“There was definitely a slight feeling of you’re either in the know, or you’re not,” Webber tells us, reflecting on her early days in Westminster. “There were a lot of unwritten rules. They felt like they were designed to keep you out rather than to help you.”

Fortunately, the POLITICO correspondent thrives on understanding complexity. Just like the worlds she reports on, she understands Westminster as coded. It runs on relationships, conventions, and knowledge that often need to be painstakingly built by each new generation of MPs and journalists.  

The ability to identify the hidden structures that often sit behind the nation’s politics also informs Webber’s journalism. National security, foreign affairs, and intelligence are fields where decisions are often shaped behind closed doors. As POLITICO’s Senior Foreign and Defence Correspondent, her reporting routinely focuses on areas where information is difficult to access.

Webber likes to peer behind those closed doors. Finding and verifying information that is hidden or obscured seems to be something she truly embraces.  

“I am definitely a nosy person,” she laughs. “I enjoy trying to get into those nooks and crannies that actually can tell you how things really work and where power really lies.”

The forensic attention that Webber pays to “where power lies” results in reporting that extends far beyond the visible facts of what happened. In everything she writes, she is relentlessly interested in not just the “what” but the “why”.

“It is not just about reporting what happened,” she explains. “But stepping back to say, ‘Here is the dynamic behind that.’”

That deep curiosity is a cornerstone of Webber’s journalistic work. In the areas she covers, the surface facts rarely tell the full story. Reporting on national security brings particular constraints, with information tightly controlled and access depending on trusted relationships built over years, not months.

These are often hugely complex issues, but Webber remains aware that the audience she is speaking to extends far beyond SW1.  

“I often try to think, ‘how would I explain this story to a friend?’” she explains. “I’ve got a lot of friends who are politically engaged and want to know what’s happening, but they’re not in the minutiae of what happens every day in Westminster. They’re always really useful to tell me whether I’m making sense or whether I’ve gone down a really tedious rabbit hole.”

That clarity of explanation is something that Webber also admires in others, citing former Newsround presenter Julie Etchingham as a childhood influence. That sense of clarity informs Webber’s own writing, which always focuses on substance and precision rather than performance.

That approach, she argues, is increasingly important in an environment where there is a growing breakdown of trust across society.

“I do think trust in politics is pretty low at the moment,” she explains. “But trust in journalism is also in a difficult place. We have to try and do everything we can to improve our relationship so that people do feel that we’re showing them stuff for a reason.”

Webber is candid in not dismissing trust as “someone else’s problem.” She recognises that journalism itself needs to work to rebuild connections to the public.

That wider sense of mission and purpose is evident in other areas, too. Webber has been actively involved in work within Parliament to address wider issues of inclusion, giving evidence to the Modernisation Committee.

“I was talking specifically about accessing Parliament as a disabled person, which is a constant learning curve,” she tells us. “It’s always a good thing when people try to think about how Parliament works and could we do things differently, but in practice, it’s very, very hard to change.”

She is also clear that while some improvements are certainly overdue, wholesale change needs to be approached with caution. She explains that some older traditions have developed for specific reasons and removing them could have negative consequences. However, one area where she does believe there has been progress is in Westminster’s working culture.

“I think it has changed partly because there’s been a bit of a reckoning among MPs about their behaviour and their conduct,” she says. “And certain things have become less acceptable even in the time I’ve been there. So, I think it is changing.”

In part, she attributes this to the growing number of female journalists and MPs. However, she notes that in other areas progress has been slower.

“I think there are other areas of representation where it’s proved more of a challenge,” she says, highlighting the very small proportion of members of the Lobby from Black and minority ethnic, working-class, or non-traditional backgrounds.

Shifting that, she believes, requires structural change combined with directness rather than deference.

“I used to worry more about annoying people or putting people off,” she recalls from her early career. “But actually, often you’re trying to get the attention of people who are just really busy. They may want to help you, but they’ve just got a lot of competing demands. Be more annoying.”

It is said lightly, but Webber’s point is a serious one. In a system where access is limited and attention is scarce, being heard requires effort and persistence. Those appear to be qualities that she herself has in abundance.