A Life in Questions by Jeremy Paxman

Author:Jeremy Paxman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2016-08-29T16:00:00+00:00

Consistently, the biggest challenge for programmes like Newsnight was just to get people to agree to sit down for interviews. There is no constitutional requirement for politicians or anyone else to submit themselves to an interrogation. Most potential interviewees make a calculated judgement – ‘Is this going to do me any good?’ To which I usually thought to myself, ‘Not if I have anything to do with it.’

There were many occasions on which it seemed to me that if I were a programme editor I would conclude that my attitude was counterproductive. Assuming you have a journalist on hand to carry it out, the essential prerequisite for an interview is a guest, and there are dozens of other places where politicians can go and have their tummies rubbed on screen. As David Cameron once told me, ‘Newsnight is trouble,’ and therefore best avoided. He was, however, happy to cooperate with an interminable ITV documentary billed as ‘a look at the Camerons as you’ve never seen them before’, in which his loving wife disclosed that he had changed their babies’ nappies, and that he still occasionally did some cooking. Show me a man who has never done at least one of those things and I will show you a weirdo. But the difference between prominent politicians and the rest of society is that most of us don’t want to make laws telling everyone else how to behave. There is no reason why voters should not know what sort of people are asking for their votes.* But what they’re like with the Sudocrem is low down on the list of qualities necessary in a Prime Minister.

More subordinate figures have less choice about what they do. We usually asked to interview the most senior responsible figure we could find, but understandably, perhaps, they tended to be cautious about putting themselves up for what might (if the programme had any luck) turn out to be a no-holds-barred cross-examination. The only lever we could pull was to suggest that in a democracy, appearing before the voters was a moral obligation.

Rather than have your evening ruined by the looming prospect of interrogation, why not give the impression of discharging your democratic duty by sending along a minion to be mauled? As time passed, this problem became worse and worse. So quite what Chloe Smith – a thirty-year-old very junior Treasury Minister – said when told she would have to appear on Newsnight to justify a last-minute policy volte-face on the tax payable on vehicle fuel in the 2012 Budget we do not know. Perhaps the Prime Minister, the Chancellor of the Exchequer or the Chief Secretary to the Treasury forced her to do it. Perhaps she thought she’d earn Brownie points for trying to explain a policy change she knew nothing about. Either way, it was a disaster, and her flailing around trying to appear competent finished her ministerial career – for several years at least.

My initial reaction on being told that the Treasury had decided

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