MacGregor: My romance with Robin Day

BBC Radio 4 presenter Sue MacGregor today reveals details of her well-rumoured affair with the late Sir Robin Day.

Following revelations of her clandestine love affair with actor Leonard Rossiter, Miss MacGregor now tells of her relationship with the legendary broadcaster in a new extract from her autobiography.

The Today Programme presenter says she and Sir Robin, 20 years her senior, became so close there were rumours of their getting engaged.

The romance began when he invited her back for a champagne-fuelled evening after he embarrassed her in a lift at a BBC function. He had suggested that Miss MacGregor, who was in her late thirties, may have left it too late to have children.

"My anger about his rudeness was soon forgotten and we began a relationship that became the subject of much gossip," she writes.

"The fact that Robin was then in his late fifties and two decades my senior seemed an irrelevance. We saw each other regularly - for visits to the theatre, or for dinner at his club, or occasionally for weekends at a cottage he used in Dorset.

"At one point the rumour was that we were on the point of getting engaged, but there was no question of that," she says in the extract, published in today's Daily Mail.

"He became one of my closest male friends but I think he enjoyed the chase more than the conquest."

She describes the pain at seeing his health decline: "As he got older, he became increasingly frail and more than a little deaf, and had to cancel his own 75th birthday celebration in October 1999 because of ill-health.

"A few months later he was forced to miss another party thrown by one of our mutual friends. I left a message on his answering machine saying how much we had all missed him - Robin was on his way to hospital for a heart check-up. I never saw him again: three days later my dear old friend was dead."

Miss MacGregor, now 60, also reveals how she had once "fallen under the spell" of a 24-year-old editor of a Fleet Street gossip column as she was attempting to climb up the BBC ladder as a secretary to the producer of a radio show called In Town Tonight.

The ambitious young woman with no university degree had decided to return to South Africa where she had lived as a girl in the hope her career would progress more swiftly. But then she met the dandy journalist whom she names only as Peter.

She writes: "I longed for him to ask me to cancel my ticket home, but he did not. Perhaps I thought he might follow me but I was soon to realise that my romantic feelings for him were a great deal stronger than his for me."

Shortly after arriving in South Africa in 1961, and shortly after a few not-so-serious relationships, Miss MacGregor, who was in her midtwenties, began a relationship with a married naval officer posted nearby. However, she was not keen on a permanent relationship.

"Indeed, by the age of 30 I had to admit to myself that marriage might not be on the cards at all, though I kept an open mind," she says.

However, the next man with whom she began a romantic fling turned out to be the top KGB agent in London. He was eventually expelled in 1971, with another 104 Soviet officials, in what was described as "one of the biggest spy scandals of all time". Miss MacGregor writes: "I have had many other close male friends but marriage has never seemed the right decision. If women are to reach the top in the broadcasting world, they must, as in any other competitive field, display a certain dedication and single-mindedness.

"If they have the additional responsibility of a family, then 'having it all' naturally becomes more difficult ... some extraordinary women manage it successfully, and I know and admire a number of them.

"I didn't especially choose not to marry and have children, but I often wonder if I could have spared the energy for a long broadcasting career if I'd had a more conventional family life. Anyway, as I've made clear, being single is no bar to friendship or romance."