There are various reasons for my dislike of Jeremy Paxman: the way he furrows his brow with self-importance; his pompous interjections; his tendency to mistake his own opinions for news. He is paid to hold public figures to account, however, and even if you object to him as a person, he has historically been very good at it.
His reputation as the British public’s bulldog has been built up over the past thirty years from his stronghold as presenter and part-time chief correspondent of BBC analysis programme Newsnight. From his 1997 interview with Michael Howard, where he asked the same question – “Did you threaten to overrule him?” – of the Conservative Home Secretary 14 separate times, to his scathing reception of EDL leader Tommy Robinson, Paxman is known for refusing to temper his visible dislike for individuals or disguise his disregard for authority.
But his unrelenting style of questioning, can only be said to be in the public interest if he is equally exacting towards all of his interviewees. In the past few weeks various criticisms of Paxman’s persona have emerged. The most strongly worded was printed by the Mail on Sunday, in an article which railed against Paxman’s ‘soft’ treatment of ‘Leftie’ Methodist preacher Paul Flowers, disgraced ex-chief of the Co-operative Bank. Flowers’ fall from grace was biblical: having been selected to direct the UK’s self-professed ‘ethical bank’, the minister made a series of tactical errors that would prove ruinous for the company. Around the same time, Flowers was filmed counting out twenties for cocaine in a drug dealer’s car and is alleged to have used rent boys.
His ineptitude is highlighted by a clip of Flowers before the Treasury Select committee, where he is asked the value of the Co-op Bank’s assets. Flowers’ guess is £44 billion out. “Yes, forgive me.” he replies pompously. It should be an easy one for bulldog Paxman, but Flowers is allowed to get away with it: ‘forgive me’ becomes the interview’s catchphrase, used as a conversational crutch to buy time.
‘Forgive me’ takes on a deeper meaning as Flowers paints the entire banking world as rife with corruption, underplaying his own culpability. When Paxman asks whether Flowers would compare himself to Lucifer, since he had so far to fall, Flowers replies, “And where do you find Lucifer in the Bible, Mr Paxman?” This display of wit and learning makes Paxman laugh, rather than doing his appointed job of demanding to know how a public figure could be guilty of such incompetence.
At one point, when Paxman seems about to launch into a trademark grilling, Flowers cites stress and a lack of training as reasons for his mistakes. He got the value of his bank’s assets wrong, he says, because he was “put off, a tad, by the aggression of some of the members of the committee.” This seems to subdue Paxman, who does not press Flowers on the gaping disparity between the teachings of his sermons and the reality of his actions and rather than being the aggressor fighting for the public interests he appears an apologist for financial fuck-ups.
The motivation The Mail’s attack on the interview is obvious: in the interview, Flowers called the Mail on Sunday ‘pseudo-fascist’ and said it was capable of making Putin seem like a ‘bleeding-heart liberal’. The Mail seeks to invalidate these criticisms by painting Paxman as the big bad leftie who softens the minute his adversary – also sympathetic to the Left – cries addiction (already a left-right battleground – see Peter Hitchens versus Russell Brand for more).
As a rule, Paxman is exacting and often derisive with his interviewees. When Paxman makes exceptions to this rule, his motivations for doing so should be examined. The Mail alleges he is soft on the left-leaning. Alternatively, Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland has described how Paxman’s interview style becomes less forensic when he is presented with a public figure who was not elected by popular vote. He grills MPs with visible delight but let’s bankers and CEOs off more lightly.
The Flowers interview reinforces both of these hypotheses, as does his 2010 interview with Christopher Hitchens. Many of the questions asked by Paxman in the interview are designed to flatter rather than probe: “You’re a contrarian – a polemicist. Do you have any sense of why you are like that?” Ironically and disappointing, for an interview between the two greatest British “polemicists” of the 20th century the interview itself lacks all polemic! Paxman doesn’t ask Hitchens about his patronising, misogynist views (in case you’re interested, Hitchens believes women aren’t funny, evolution having slowly suffocated the fairer sex of its capacity for wit. In Hitchens’ words, “For men, it is a tragedy that the two things they prize the most—women and humor—should be so antithetical”). He asks one softball question on his support for the invasion of Iraq, but never attempts to push him. The interview was one of the last given by Hitchens and is sadly a snapshot of two of the twentieth century’s journalistic heavyweights, united in self-congratulation.
Paxman is not a compassionate interviewer by nature. When he lets up, he may do so because of various reasons: perhaps it is due to his political persuasion, or because his interviewee has not been publicly elected, or because he sees something of himself in his interlocutor, or because he genuinely finds a comment funny, or a combination of all four. If Paxman were always ‘soft’ on left-leaning cultural figures, left-wing, un-elected Russell Brand would have had a far easier ride when he spoke about voter abstention in 2013. The ‘un-elected, left-wing’ rule holds true for Hitchens and Flowers, but not for Brand. Paxman’s rare indulgent gazes seem to be reserved for the handful of individuals whom he considers his equals; Paxman the bulldog rolls over when presented with public figures on the way out, highly-educated and established individuals whom he perceives as possessing a similar level of stature to himself. But whatever his reason, his interviews with Hitchens and Flowers render him less plausible as a disinterested arbiter of public discourse.
His strong media presence off-screen also contributes to this. His recent television series on World War One, for instance, gained him entry into the public bun fight of the moment over how best to commemorate the war’s centenary. His main adversary on the issue was Michael Gove, current Secretary for Education and prominent opponent of the view (propagated in his opinion, by ‘Blackadder and left-wing academia’) that leadership from 1914-18 was anything other than courageous or the war anything other than just. Paxman’s response to such disagreement was to brand Gove a “charlatan” guilty of trying to score “cheap political points”. Boris Johnson rushed to Gove’s defence in a Telegraph article, while subsequent talks and press statements allowed Paxman to enter into discussion on an issue which could be the basis for policy-making in future.
He is entitled to a public life separate from his career within the BBC – many other pundits have trodden the same path. However, that future appearances from Gove and Johnson on Newsnight could be skewed by their past disagreements with Paxman, just as Paxman’s interactions with George Galloway on the programme in 2005 transgressed into the personal and the downright unprofessional. A heated interview with Galloway was followed up by a video of Paxman which was broadcast into the Big Brother house, where Galloway had been filmed drinking milk out of a bowl on the floor wearing a leotard. Paxman’s video requested a “rematch, with or without the leotard”. Paxman’s public life outside the BBC is defensible only as far as it does not give him a personal agenda when interviewing on Newnight: the discussion of ‘rematches’ suggested Paxman was more concerned with his personal relationship with Galloway than the discussion of current events which sets a worrying precedent for interactions with Gove.
Paxman’s courting of celebrity and controversy coincides with a singularly unrepresentative and badly-chaired discussion on Muslim identity and leadership in Britain, which took place in March this year. The conclusion loudly extolled by Mehdi Hasan, Maajid Nawaz and Mo Ansar (with fairly sparse intervention from Paxman), was that no single voice could speak for all Muslims; this plurality needed to be represented as far as possible in public discourse. Pertinently, Myriam Francois-Cerrah, a prominent writer and journalist, was dropped from the discussion in favour of Ansar, leaving no female Muslim voice on the panel. During the interview Hasan asked why there were no females on the panel, as that would broaden the range of viewpoints represented; Paxman gave no response, and Hasan was shouted over – again – by Nawaz.
Paxman does not produce Newsnight and does not dictate who appears on panels. However, he has been frequently critical of those who do produce the show. One example is when financial reports were replaced by weather reports as the parting shot from Newsnight in 2005, Paxman mocked them, supplementing the forecasts with irreverent asides. His quips were funny but set a precedent for picking fights with decisions made by the show’s producers in a personal capacity. Why, then, did he remain silent about his show’s failure to actually enact the breadth of perspectives each of its other participants agreed was so essential? Why speak up against weather reports but not in favour of women’s representation?
It is the intermittency of these moments that jars. In picking some fights, but not every fight, his inconsistency leaves room to call bias. His desire to reinforce his own personality and aggressively macho public image, moreover, can divert attention from the matter at hand. The debate on Islam was instrumental in exposing what happens when ego is privileged over representative debate: the discussion descended into ad hominem attacks and the dredging up of previous Twitter exchanges. Paxman has the same problem. In allowing his ego to leak over into other public spheres and a handful of his interviews, he falls prey to his own vanity and in doing so, he fails the public.
