For 19 years he has held the powerful to account on a show that attracts huge audiences around the world. Now it is over. He discusses his anger with management, his pride in his team – and what he’ll do next

Stephen Sackur makes no bones about it: he is not going willingly. “I don’t want to leave the BBC, because I still think I’ve got a lot to offer,” the HARDtalk presenter tells me. “And I don’t want the programme to be closed, but that argument has been definitively lost. I’m thinking hard about other things I’m going to do. I’m fine. I’m feeling quite positive.” Maybe. But I think he’s also feeling hurt, betrayed and, though he denies it, a little angry. “It’s definitely a strange period,” he says. We’re talking in February, a month before the show finishes and he’s sent packing by the Beeb.

Sackur, 61, is a BBC lifer. He started out as a trainee in 1986, was made a foreign correspondent in 1990, and went on to some of the biggest gigs in journalism – Europe, Washington, the Middle East. For the past 19 years, he’s hosted HARDtalk, the interview show that holds global power to account. The BBC has always lauded it as a flagship programme – thrice weekly, regularly watched in more than 200 countries by up to 70 million people (and, he reckons, with the podcast and World Service radio versions that figure could rise to 170 million). Which is why he got such a shock when he was told in October that it was being pulled.