She is also a countess, married to the Earl of Drogheda, who spent her childhood surrounded by politicians on account of her father Sir Nicholas Henderson and his career in the diplomatic service.
In less than two weeks from now, at the age of 48, she’ll become still more unusual as the first woman to edit the BBC’s election night coverage.She’s already well ensconced in the job, having overseen a radical set redesign and brought in a number of senior female journalists and broadcasters, including Fiona Bruce and Anna Ford, who will play an increased role in the evening’s live coverage.Henderson has also hired the man who created the set of Channel 4’s TFI Friday show and who more recently designed the boat used for ITV’s Big Brother rival, Survivor He has created a set that will feature two distinct areas. On the ground floor, the veteran political broadcaster David Dimbleby will chair events throughout the night, talking to senior political figures and co-ordinating the BBC’s other political presenters and its network of correspondents across 120 constituencies.But what’s new this year is the informal caf?rea that Henderson has had built. This will sit above Dimbleby and will be where Fiona Bruce, who is four months pregnant, will interview a cross section of voters including nurses, teachers and industrialists. Elsewhere, Peter Snow will analyse the results and offer projections on the evening’s outcome.Henderson has also hired a female psephologist, Alison Park, who will offer voting and polling analysis and explain the findings of a specially commissioned BBC exit poll. It’s a hiring of which she’s particularly proud, having been told that there were no female psephologists in Britain.Henderson was educated at Marlborough College before graduating from Lady Margaret Hall at Oxford University with a degree in French and Russian.

She joined ITN in 1974 as a graduate trainee, then worked as a researcher for Alistair Burnet on election programmes, by-elections and Budget coverage.Between 1989 and 1990, she worked for the BBC on special programmes and secured the first British interview with the former Russian president Mikhail Gorbachev. She later became the series editor for Question Time and four years later joined the BBC political department at Millbank, first as editor of live political programmes and then deputy head of political programmes. These included Westminster Live and Despatch Box, but she also devised newer formats such as the Andrew Neil Show.She is clearly committed to her career having once returned to work at ITN just a month after the birth of one of her three children simply because she had promised to.But perhaps now, for the first time, she is really feeling the pressure and magnitude of the task ahead.”It’s my fault if it all goes wrong,” she says. “In some ways I just want it to be what everyone wants their programmes to be ­ extremely watchable and accurate ­ to keep people watching but make sure that you tell the story, that you’re all over the country and in the right places. I hope I’ve taken the best from before and added some new elements, the next generation. I’ve been the first woman to do a lot of things, but it’s still a man’s world, I suppose. You still encounter all the negatives ­ you’re bossy if you’re a woman and you’re decisive if you’re a man.”[The BBC] hasn’t had that many senior women doing politics so maybe that’s the reason a woman hasn’t held this position before I’m not sure, but I don’t think it’ll go on that way.

I don’t think these things are as calculated as people make them out to be.”When I took over the Westminster Live programme I got a women presenter to do that [Diana Madill] and that was considered unusual. But now there are many more women in parliament and the perceptions will change.”Henderson says she’s never used her position or title to forward her career On some occasions you sense it’s been more of a burden. Last year, she worked on one of the BBC’s special programmes when the House of Lords opted to vote out its hereditary peers ­ her husband was one of them.Then there are those people who will always be more interested in her connections than her achievements.”When my father was in Washington, I remember going to a very, very grand lunch with Woodward and Bernstein [the Washington Post political journalists whose investigations spawned the film All the President's Men],” she recalls, “and I was on my best behaviour and very excited. At the end of lunch, Woodward said, ‘I have a question for you’, and I thought, great, this is my big moment. Then he turned to me and said, ‘How does it feel to be a countess?’”. Female correspondents don’t have to write about Cherie’s new clothes. Gordon Brown held Ladies Day last week at the daily Labour Party press conference.

It was not, as one wit jested, an opportunity for female MPs and journalists to dust off their favourite hats.
The Chancellor broke the mould by putting not one but two female ministers on the platform. He went on to choose a series of women journalists to ask questions ahead of their male colleagues. The move was symbolic and was designed to quell mounting criticism that Labour was excluding women politicians from the public eye and female journalists from questioning.Catherine MacLeod, political editor of The Herald, who is the only woman political editor in the daily newspaper lobby, believes the situation was not, as claimed, the fault of Mr Brown, chairman of Labour’s campaign. “It is true more men are called, but that is a reflection of the lobby, which is very male dominated,” says MacLeod, who is the second ever female chairman of the lobby.