By Glenda Cooper

Two fortysomething women, no make-up on and hair tousled, are sitting around a messy table in west London cooing over photographs and swapping motherhood tips. “But how do you crack the naps?” Kate Silverton asks fellow BBC newscaster Fiona Bruce.

Bruce (who’s popped in on the way to present the evening bulletin) shrugs and laughs. Meanwhile 41-year-old Silverton dashes back and forth to the buggy in the hall several times to check on her 10-week-old daughter, Clemency, before talking in great detail about nappies.

Hang on. Is this the woman who reported under fire from the Afghanistan front line and Iraq? The former champion swimmer and triathlete? The newsreader once described as “ruthlessly ambitious” by one of her colleagues? A woman you usually see glossed and buffed in a BBC news studio, Silverton now seems shorn of all her inhibitions along with her newsreader warpaint.

“A lot of women see difficulty getting pregnant as a failing,” she says of her very public battle to conceive. “But I chose to be open about it.” Certainly, most journalists like to ask questions about other people’s personal lives rather than answer questions about their own. But then Silverton says she never was a typical reporter. “I never knew anyone who was a journalist growing up,” she shrugs. The former Essex girl hails from a working-class background – her father Terry was originally a black cab driver. Silverton was the first in her family to go to university, and says her parents taught her the value of hard graft. When she joined a local BBC station in the North East she “earned [her] stripes making the teas for Mo Mowlam and Peter Mandelson when they came in”, before winning a coveted place on the corporation’s journalism training scheme.

Her career blossomed quickly, if unconventionally; she went from local radio and TV to presenting BBC Breakfast and major news bulletins, via daytime makeover shows. There were a few hiccups – most famously when the veteran newsreader Philip Hayton resigned from News 24 saying he found her “incompatible” to work with – but otherwise Silverton found herself in her mid-30s with a high-profile career in BBC News and documentaries. The only things missing were a partner and children.

Then, at 37, she met her husband-to-be, Mike Heron, a former Royal Marine turned security consultant, on a course that he was running for reporters operating in hostile environments. Children proved more difficult. While covering the 1999 Labour Party Conference, she had an emergency operation to remove one of her ovaries and fallopian tubes after a cyst burst. Doctors warned her it was unlikely that she would ever conceive naturally.

“One Mother’s Day I was at my sister’s house with her children and my mum, and I had to leave the house,” recalls Silverton. “I just wanted to crumble because I thought 'I’m never going to have that’.

“When I met Mike, I felt even more devastated that I couldn’t provide him with a child – I knew how much he wanted to be a father.”

Silverton’s medical history was always going to make it difficult for her to conceive; yet it also threw into sharp relief the career/children dilemma for women. “You do need to think about it – you can’t beat the biological clock,” warns Silverton, aware that it’s an unpopular thing to say. “There are so many people who think IVF is going to be an easy cure-all. They have no idea what it entails emotionally, physically, financially and statistically.”

Silverton and Heron went through four gruelling cycles of IVF. She did get pregnant once, only to miscarry at seven weeks. “In the end, I felt the clinics had given up on me.” But looking back, she also wonders whether she was really ready. “One time, I did a round of IVF and went straight on to report from Afghanistan. I was standing on the front line being fired upon – what would make my body think that was a good time to get pregnant? Then we got married [in December 2010], moved into this house and started looking into adoption. Perhaps there was an element of my body saying 'Aha, she’s ready now’.”

For, to her amazement, Silverton found herself pregnant naturally last year. She prepared for birth with the discipline of a former athlete but, even so, the reality was daunting. “Mike said he hadn’t expected it to be so brutal – like being in a field hospital with blood everywhere and people having legs amputated without anaesthetic,” she laughs. “I was dehydrated and vomiting with the pain. But there were moments I look back on with fondness.”

Since Clemency’s birth, Silverton has been huddled up at home with her daughter and husband. No Gina Fordisms here – “everything on demand – feeds, cuddles… We really wanted to immerse ourselves with her for the first few weeks. I love to see her big smile when I peep into her crib in the morning, or when Mike walks in from work in the evening. It’s just heart-melting.”

She seems to be thriving on it all, glowing in a stripy nursing top and jeans, despite claiming she still needs to “work very hard to lose two stone” of baby weight.

Now she has choices to make about returning to work – she thinks it will probably be in the summer to coincide with the Olympics and Diamond Jubilee.

“It would be lovely to go back to my regular Monday slot on the One O’Clock News,” she says. “My mum’s retiring this year, and could come up on Sunday nights to look after Clemency on the Mondays. I used to do a lot of weekend bulletins, which Mike could cover. I suppose ultimately I might have to look for more formal child care but it would break my heart to think of Clemency crying when I wasn’t there.”

She wouldn’t be able to “work at the same rate” as before. “If we have to move out of the house because we can’t afford the mortgage, so be it. We don’t need as much money now we’ve paid for the IVF and the wedding, and we like doing things that you don’t have to spend money to do, such as yomping across fields in Wales.”

Before Silverton became pregnant, she had agreed to be a mentor at the charity Kids Company as part of the route to adoption. She’s still considering it. “Clemency is so young at the moment, we can’t think beyond that. But it’s highly unlikely I’d get pregnant again, so would we look at adoption further down the line? Probably, yes.”

In any case, she’s still grappling with the reality of one baby. “Motherhood’s been the most wonderful, awe-inspiring thing for us – but the part people don’t tell you is how tough it is,” she grins. “My sisters used to ring up and say how hard motherhood was, and I’d think 'Come off it!’ when I was dashing around the newsroom. But now I’d like to salute every mother – and father – I see in the street.”