`I can't help how my face looks'

Jeremy Paxman talks to Mary Riddell about sneering journalists, war reporting, depression, loss of faith and his search for purpose, in this excerpt from an interview in the `New Statesman'

Around the time Jeremy Paxman was interrogating Tony Blair on the proximity of his opinions to the breasts of Melinda Messenger, Sun readers were considering whom they would most like to chair a debate between the party leaders. Down at the Dog and Duck, not to mention in Acacia Avenue, the verdict was clear. Paxman, according to a readers' poll, was the man for the job.

But even if the debate had gone ahead the Paxmania expressed by Sun readers was nowhere apparent in the upper echelons of politics and broadcasting. "I read that I was considered an unsuitable host because I am, quote, too independent. Fine. I'd rather be damned for that than for being too compliant."

Nor, come election night, is Paxman destined for the starring role. Packed off to the count with Neil Kinnock in 1992, he will be back at base this time. "I shall be sitting in a little pen at the side of the studio," he says without rancour, but conveying nonetheless the faint impression that "little pens" are more suitable for cloned sheep than bullish interviewers.

"David Dimbleby presents it. It is part of the constitution of this country that all major events have to be presented by Dimbleby. You can quote me on that."

With Paxman what you see is what you get. He is charming, amusing, a good raconteur but suffused by the world-weariness with which he views politicians in general and the election preamble in particular. As a wind- up I suggest his questioning of Tony Blair, in his recent Newsnight interviews with the three party leaders, might have been construed as slightly soft. Did that betoken a socialist sympathy?

"Ha!" he says, laughing most fearsomely. "You're going to have to do better than that if you think I'm going to tell you what my politics are. You're going to have to do a whole lot better than that."

And what made him invite Blair to give his views on bare-breasted women? "Well, what is it like to appear next to all these nudes? I just thought it would be fun."

But Paxman had sounded hugely disapproving of the Blair and Melinda alliance. "Nothing surprises me really about what politicians will do to get elected. But it is salutary occasionally to try to bring them up against their professed high-mindedness."

His view of the relationship of interviewer to politician has been likened to that of dog to lamp-post. His technique, predicated on the question "Why is that bastard lying to me?", evokes the languid, post-modern sceptic, in thrall to none.

Least of all to those at the BBC who have studied his tactics with occasional alarm and opprobrium. Some time ago John Birt was reported to have upbraided him, and expressed his disapproval of "sneering interviewers".

Paxman has scarcely effected a penitent metamorphosis. "I hate the word sneering. I can't help how my face looks. One has to bear in mind that people have voted for even the most humble backbencher. No one has ever bloody well voted for me. So sneering is not something I'm happy or comfortable about when people use it to describe me. Incredulity, scepticism maybe. But sneering I don't like.

"My relationship with Birt is a mystery. It's a non-relationship really. We don't really know each other."

Does Paxman see the high-profile journalist as noble truth-seeker in a grubby world?

"Messianic? No. I did have that view, and I got completely overwrought. When I was reporting in Northern Ireland in the Seventies, I remember coming back here to comfortable England and being really, really angry that people weren't paying more attention.

"Then I did a lot of wars - Nicaragua, El Salvador. People were dying for political beliefs, and that really consumed me. I got rather screwed up by it. Stressed and depressed."

A mild malaise, or something more serious? The pause is long enough to suggest the latter. "Look, I really don't want to talk about that, actually."

There is something else. Much later, I ask him about the Church of England, and though he dresses it up as an amusing anecdote - he admits to a crisis of faith. "I used to have very little time for it. I started going back to church eight or nine years ago. And then I'm afraid I just lost it. It struck me that I probably was an atheist, so I talked to my local vicar and said: `Look, I don't think I'm coming back to church. I don't think there's anyone there.'

"Do you know what he said? `This is very positive.' Only the Church of England could come up with that spectacularly worldly and undemanding approach. I love that about them."

And has he been back? "I go occasionally. About once a month. I still would like to believe. I really would."

Why? By Paxman standards, this is hardly a killer question, but he appears genuinely flummoxed. "Wow. Do you know, I've never thought: why do I want to believe this? I suppose because I would like to think there was a purpose. And the experience of depression kind of convinced me there wasn't."

The notion of purpose-seeking does rather explain Paxman. His last book, Friends in High Places - a critique of the British establishment - posed the question of where the nation should look for a new vision, but found no answer. Paxman is still searching. "The problems of this country are so profound that they can't be solved simply by changing the elected government. The British share of world trade has declined, and there are still the same prejudices against doing something productive with your life; the same unfashionability about genuine enterprise."

For all his impatience, Paxman is an odd sort of outsider. Both his background (public school, Cambridge) and his manner suggest sturdy establishment ties. He is offended when you suggest so.

"That's for others to judge. That's like saying Tony Blair can't be leader of the Labour Party. Look at Benn. Look at Attlee. I dislike class prejudice in reverse as much as I dislike it when it's expressed in the conventional way."

But to make him sound pompous is unfair. He is also self-deprecating; particularly on his unfulfilled ambition. "I would have loved to be able to write fiction. We all have our self-delusions. Bamber Gascoigne thought he was a writer who had to do a bit of television. I think to some extent Melvyn [Bragg] thinks he's a writer rather than a media person."

I never did find out exactly what Paxman's politics are, although he did say at one stage: "I think people should vote, don't you?" as if he wasn't entirely convinced.

It is in any case unlikely that he, so attuned to the ways of politicians, sees any party as offering the big answer. Who does he really admire? After we talked about religion, he mentioned the "priests and nuns working in townships in South Africa. They're so inspiring. And they're doing something so much more worthwhile than the completely superficial and temporal concerns we have in our trade."

Copyright `New Statesman'