She wrote leaders for the FT and worked at the US Treasury, all before she was 30. Now the BBC's economics editor, Stephanie Flanders, talks to Zoe Williams

It was my original intention to interview Stephanie Flanders as part of a piece entitled Worst-Timed Maternity Leaves Ever, which never got off the ground because I couldn't find anybody else with such apparently career-endingly bad timing. Flanders became economics editor for the BBC in March 2008, having joined Newsnight in 2002. Even that first decision – and Newsnight is considered the spoddy choice for an economics broadcast journalist – was greeted with scepticism among her friends. "They were amused and maybe a little bit intellectually snobby about it when I left the Financial Times for the BBC. And that was Newsnight, where you get six or even 12 minutes to talk about quite difficult subjects." The economics editor's job is rather different, of course, because you have to cover complicated things in two minutes or one, and you have to do it from the minute John Humphrys gets up in the morning until the minute Jeremy Paxman goes to bed, making it both too easy and too hard.

But the main challenge of the job, when Flanders inherited it from Evan Davis, was to get economics stories on to the news at all. Then Flanders went on maternity leave in June. On 15 September, Lehman Brothers filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, the first astonishing casualty of the sub-prime crisis. Robert Peston was so ubiquitous across the BBC that people started talking like him for a laugh. Flanders, whom I meet in a funny glass office at the BBC, like a sort of prison-guard watchtower over the rest of the floor, describes this period with what I come to realise is a very typical, nil desperandum tone of voice: "My daughter was about two months old, and I was saying to friends, 'I've missed it, it's never going to happen again. This was the financial crisis of a lifetime.' Now, at this point, of course I didn't miss anything. That was the big explosion, but it's gone on. The week I went back to work, in January, was the week that we officially went into recession. That was the point at which it felt like this financial event had moved to the real economy, and it became clear that it was a real economic issue."

Business, Business Leadership, Political Journalism, Innovation, Corporate Responsibility, Thought Leaders, Economy Finance, Political,