Andrew Marr used to be a red-bearded, drunken, chain-smoking
Leftie. Now he hosts the TV show politicians line up to appear on.

Marr is not the best-known exponent of confrontational television journalism: John Humphrys, on the Today programme, and Newsnight's Jeremy Paxman are the top dogs – Rottweilers – in this particular kennel. But since turning 50 last year Marr appears to have developed a cutting edge to a technique previously perceived as one that, while ruffling feathers, left the interviewee with both dignity and stable blood pressure. He insists that, more or less, this is still his aim: “I came into it [his show] with a very clear view, first of all, that Sunday morning was not Jeremy Paxman territory, people did not get up first thing in the morning and expect a blood-spattered slugging match. And, more creatively perhaps, I thought and think that you can get much more sometimes out of politicians by gently leading them on, asking direct questions in a friendly way.

I thought, be courteous and direct

“I suppose where I have changed – having been round the course quite a few times with most of the senior people now, I can better tell when I'm not going to get anything with that approach – is that I can hear the sort of preformed sentences and thoughts coming out and I know there's another 30 seconds of a sentence still to come. And perhaps therefore I feel more of the frustration of people watching and I'm quicker to jump in. But I would always prefer to hear the politician say something really interesting and newsworthy without my having to pummel them 17 times. The thing I'm most conscious of when I sit down is how long I've got. I need to do my best to make them say something interesting. I don't care what it is – if they say something that is considered to be a great hit for them, that's absolutely fine. It's not a contest. I've got 25 minutes, or 20 minutes, or ten minutes, say, and if after seven minutes it's been absolutely round the houses, I'm-goingto- sit-here-and-smile-and-say-the-totally-expected-all-the-way-through, then a lot of the time I will step in and try to jolt them by saying: ‘Yes, we know all that'. It's very difficult. We all get criticism for interrupting too much and criticism for ‘letting them tell lies', ‘letting them spout nonsense', and we're all caught between those viewers who hate interruption and those who want us to interrupt and shout the whole time.”

(Like some other presenters, and the BBC as an institution, Marr receives flak from all sides accusing him of political bias and sometimes worse. A random selection includes the internet complaint of a west London councillor that Conservatives need only to watch Marr's show to conclude that the BBC “really is the enemy”; the view of “Sunny H” on the Liberal Conspiracy website, that he is “a fucking Tory lackey”; and, from Wonko's World, “Andrew Marr, you're a racist, a second-rate presenter and... a twat.” Muses Marr, not unreasonably: “I don't read much of the blogging stuff.”) There is, he says, “no one style of interviewing that works” and is rarely satisfied with his Sunday morning interrogations. “I don't think I have ever got up from an interview and thought, Yes! I got that right the whole way through. I'm always thinking, you should have stopped that answer earlier on, or why didn't I let him go on a little bit further; that was getting interesting.” Most importantly, he likes to keep his guests guessing: “I don't want a politician to come on to my show and think, ‘I know what Andrew Marr is going to do'.” They obviously don't, and still they line up to occupy the hot seat.

As Steven Barnett points out elsewhere in this issue, the internet is going to be a major factor in this election and all those that follow, while newspapers, despite shrinking circulations and a less than dominating web presence, are still considered of vital importance by most senior politicians; but it's television programmes such as Marr's that remain the medium of choice for those in or seeking power. Yet they may overrate TV's influence and, says Marr, perhaps do not realise quite how revealing a camera close-up can be.

“I don't know how many votes we sway – no idea – or whether we do, but what I've always said is that there is a fundamental difference between television and newspapers: if you want to know what was in the budget, frankly, go to a newspaper, because you want to sit there and pore over the figures, you want to see the tables and so on in front of you. You don't want to be distracted. [But] If you want to know what somebody is like, then television is brilliant. You want to know what Gordon Brown is really like, you want to know what Peter Mandelson is really like, watch them during a lengthy television interview. I think television is a great truth-teller in that way. And I think politicians want to be able to feel they can handle 20 or 30 minutes of close questioning on policy matters without letting the ball drop and, sometimes, saying something interesting. I think they want to put themselves through that just to show that they can do it in front of a big audience – we get about two million now and it's a crucial two million. And if the interview is interesting they also get quite a lot of clips on the evening news and other news bulletins and the next day's papers.”

But many politicians are excellent actors, I point out. “Yes, I think they are, but it is very hard to hide your true character from people on television. The smile becomes a fake smile, an insincere grin. I think we're all biologically very well attuned to pick up tiny, tiny clues about other people's faces, tone of voice, body language and so on, even without realising what we are doing. And television allows you to do that.”

Impertinent but acceptable

So did Gordon Brown say not a word and walk off that turbulent Sunday morning last autumn after being challenged over prescription medication he might be taking? “I think he actually did say something, of an anodyne nature,” recalls Marr. It has been recorded previously that he does not regret asking the question, and now he says: “In the context of a 30-minute interview on policy, and given all the talk that had been around about his temper tantrums, I thought to ask him once was acceptable. I thought it was impertinent, or cheeky, but I thought it was acceptable. And I didn't expect the extraordinary outpouring afterwards. There was a fair amount of incoming fire and it was an uncomfortable few days. Funnily enough, what I do regret is that the final third of that interview, during which Brown said that his biggest mistake had been to fail to understand what was going on in the banking system, was completely ignored and forgotten. I thought was a sensational story, actually, and it was completely unnoticed in the press the next day.”

Born near Dundee, home of the D C Thomson press and magazine empire, Marr says: “I am basically, in my bones, a newspaperman.” After leaving Cambridge, accompanied by a first-class degree in English but possibly handicapped by his self-confessed description, “a red-bearded, Leftie, drunken, chain-smoking, unpleasant-looking sight”, he was rejected by the BBC and struggled to find employment in journalism until hired as a trainee by The Scotsman, falling into a vacancy created, he says, when Lionel Barber – now editor of the Financial Times – departed the paper. Marr became parliamentary correspondent before moving on to the launch pad of The Independent and then the political editorship of The Economist, the political editorship of the Indy and subsequently the editorship of the paper. Sacked by David Montgomery when Mirror Group controlled the title, he later returned briefly at the invitation of new owner Tony O'Reilly, but left to write columns in the Daily Express and Observer before being appointed political editor of the BBC. He now not only has his own Sunday show, but fronts Radio 4's Start the Week and makes book-accompanied documentaries, most recently The Making of Modern Britain. It is as formidable a CV as one is likely to find in the British media today, and wide ranging enough to impress even those politicians volunteering to be put through the wringer.

The media landscape has changed considerably during his career, he observes: “This is an obvious thing to say, but it is important and true - there's far less straight, factual reporting and far more vituperation and aggression. My first political job was at The Scotsman and in those days I spent six or seven hours a day at the House of Commons writing down what politicians were saying in a shorthand note and we had a full broadsheet page without adverts every single day on what was said the previous day. That kind of political reporting has gone almost completely and at the other end of the scale we have the blogosphere, which can be a wonderful thing – people at the sharp end in Iran or wherever telling us things we would never otherwise know – but at its worst is a kind of cheap, pretty ignorant ranting.” And later he adds: “Newspaper editors have constantly to remind themselves that there's more to life than celebrity. I think we have to go back to old-fashioned, hardcore reporting. And too many papers have a kind of airless feeling, as if they've been put together in the office with all the features editors across London sitting down and having the same idea. Looking back over the decade at a sort of noughties compilation album, I bang my head against the wall. That's what I thought [about ‘serious content'] when I was outsted from the Indy – I may have been wrong then and I may be wrong now, but I haven't changed my view.”

Newspapers are so rude about politicians

“As to whether they [newspapers] matter, all the parties are focusing on relatively small numbers of swing constituencies and relatively small numbers of voters inside those constituencies. A lot of the [parties'] money is going to those polling organisations that claim to be able to provide detailed information on the swing voters inside those swing seats. So we are talking about a comparatively small number of people. And although there are millions and millions and millions of people in the country who are going to vote Labour or Tory or LibDem no matter what they're told by the newspapers, those swing voters will include a high proportion of newspaper readers and they will be making their final choice on relatively marginal matters, possibly. Therefore the newspapers do matter to them.”

The endorsement of a particular party by a newspaper – The Sun's early backing of the Conservatives, for example – carries little weight, he believes: “A newspaper declaring itself one way or another has almost no influence, because people aren't stupid, they understand the games that are going on between proprietors and politicians, they know perfectly well The Sun wants to be on the winning side. I think all editors over-estimate [the influence of their] editorials. Much more important is the drip, drip, drip of popular columnists and the slant of stories over the course of a year.”

The political landscape has been besmirched over the past 15 to 20 years, he says, by the emergence of “the sort of media-trained spin doctor disciplined in political rhetoric that says nothing at all. Once upon a time, if Robin Day asked a politician a question and the politician wasn't going to answer it, they'd either say: ‘I'm not going to answer that question, Sir Robin', or at least have the grace to look slightly embarrassed if they answered a different question. Now they look you in the eye, grin broadly and answer a completely different question or say something which has been prepared for them to say before they've even walked into the studio. That has done politics no good at all. If there's one thing I can say to politicians generally, it's that an interview that finishes with you having said nothing fresh or interesting or surprising or making no headlines is not a success for you, it's a failure.

“By and large I like politicians; by and large I admire people who go into politics. It's all we've got, it's what we have, the House of Commons, and we [the media] have to be very very cautious about smashing it to bits – we've done certain things, we have perhaps been too aggressive at times and too quick to write off politics. We talk about reforming the House of Commons, of cleaning up politics and so on, but what we really need, above all, is a great new generation, a tranche of much more plain-speaking people – and rather more independent-minded – coming into politics. Another problem is the rise and rise of the full-time professional politician who's done nothing else. A lot of them don't speak human. You need a few speakers of fluent human and you need people who've had a bit of experience [outside politics].”

Marr's longstanding warm embrace of the press is not wholly reciprocated, he having decided in 2008 to take legal action in order to prevent publication of details about his private life. Other than to confirm that this was done to shield others rather than himself, discussion of the matter is off limits, but he has not changed his views on everyone's right to a degree of privacy: “Fifteen years ago I was arguing for a privacy law and that's been used against me because I said it should be Parliament that decides. And in the end I think Parliament should decide these things – I think Parliament should decide everything in public life, I am a parliamentary extremist, if you like. It's the old distinction between what the public is interested in and the public interest. I think a world in which there was absolutely no right to any kind of privacy at all would be intolerable. If anyone with any kind of public profile is obliged to give or respond to every detail of what happens in their private life, I think that's a pretty oppressive world. On the other hand, if what you are doing is hypocritical, criminal or wildly over the top, then you fall out of what interests the public into public interest.”

I quite like a fight

During the upcoming election Marr will be travelling outside the studio to report from the campaign trail for his Sunday show, and on election day itself expects to be with the David Cameron camp, although not because the Tories are expected to win, he emphasises. “Actually, in some ways I think it will be more interesting to be with Brown that night. But I go where I'm sent.” The requirement for impartiality does not sit heavily on his shoulders, partly due to his Labour Party involvement in Edinburgh during the Militant upheaval in the early 1980s: “It got so unpleasant, so nasty and people were betraying each other all over the place and I thought, that's not for me. I still have very strong views, but there is no party into which I can fit my views any more.”

As for his future, Marr is phlegmatic: “There will come a point when my face doesn't fit any more and it can happen very fast – that's one thing that everybody in television understands. You're flavour of the month and then suddenly you're not. And then you just look around for the next thing. I'm lucky in that there are so many things I want to do. I would like to carry on writing books and I would like to carry on making at least some big documentary series. And I love to paint. If I had an oil well in the garden and money was never an object again, I would probably spend the next five years seeing if I could be a proper painter.” There will no doubt be a great many bruised politicians once again getting in line, only this time to help him pack.